A poet writes in his father's words
One spring day in 1978, at a poetry festival in Vilnius, Lithuania, a 42-year-old Moscow physician and author, David Shrayer-Petrov, gave a reading of a poem that transformed both his own life and that of his young son Maxim Shrayer, now a professor of Russian and English at Boston College. The poem, "My Slavic Soul," dealt with the tensions of being both a Jew and a Russian artist--a dangerous topic in the old Soviet Union, where Jews were never first-class citizens and artists were viewed with proprietary interest by the state. Maxim Shrayer, a boy of 10 at the time, recalls a shiver passing through the audience "that I felt physically."
The reading set off a chain of events
that culminated in the family's departure from their
native country nine years later. And ultimately, it led to
a father-son literary collaboration: This year, a short-story
collection has been issued by Syracuse University Press, written
by the father, edited and co-translated into English by the
son. Entitled Jonah and Sarah: Jewish Stories of Russia
and America, it's the first volume of the father's
work to be published in his new country's tongue.
Sitting now at the dining room table in Maxim's comfortable house in Chestnut Hill, Shrayer-Petrov recalls that official Soviet reaction to his poem came fast. Returning to Moscow, he was called to appear before the Moscow city prosecutor on charges of being a Zionist, which in 1970s Russia was tantamount to being branded an enemy of the state. Russian newspapers and magazines attacked his writing and his character, accusing him of stirring up dissent. In his strongly accented English, Shrayer-Petrov says, "We were surrounded by enemies."
In 1979 Shrayer-Petrov applied to emigrate, along with his wife, Emilia, and Maxim. The request made them refuseniks, a term denoting Soviet Jews refused permission to leave the country. The Soviet state used refuseniks as "bargaining chips," Maxim Shrayer says, letting a few out of the country when relations with the West were good and stopping emigration when relations cooled. As a refusenik, Shrayer-Petrov was fired from his research job at the Academy of Medical Sciences and expelled from the Soviet writers' union. "It was the end of a compromise," the son says. "Before that, my father was allowed to publish, just nothing very Jewish, and he'd had to adopt a Slavic pen name." To support the family, Shrayer-Petrov drove an illegal cab. In Maxim's eyes the state's actions "changed my life, in the sense that the idealism a lot of Jewish youth are raised with--it wasn't shattered, but it was corrected by real experience."
Official ostracism was "a tragedy
for my family," says Shrayer-Petrov. "But for
me it was a great relief because I started to write whatever
I wanted." That included a two-part novel, Herbert
and Nelly, about a refusenik medical doctor. The first
part was published, in the original Russian, in Israel in
1986, and the complete two-volume text was nominated for Britain's
Booker Russian Novel Prize.
For some eight years, Shrayer-Petrov wrote and agitated, gathering a refusenik literary group, giving readings, attending demonstrations, and talking to western media; and the harassment continued. Then, says the father, came the disaster at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl in April 1986 and a growing acknowledgment in the USSR of the Soviet state's failures. "After Chernobyl, Mikhail Gorbachev [the Communist Party's general secretary] understood the country was in big trouble and Jews were not the cause," says Shrayer-Petrov. In 1987, he received a phone call from an official of the Communist Party Central Committee: "‘David Petrovich, do you still want to go? If you don't, we will publish your books again, restore you to the writers' union, give you back everything you lost.'"
But by then Shrayer-Petrov and his family had had enough of Soviet life. Two days after the phone call they obtained their visas. In 1987, they came to live in Providence, Rhode Island--Shrayer-Petrov to do cancer research at Brown University and to write, Maxim to earn a BA from Brown in comparative literature and a Ph.D. from Yale, and to become a poet, literary critic, and educator.
Shrayer-Petrov's new collection,
Jonah and Sarah, contains fiction set in Russia before
and during refusenik times, as well as stories that plumb
the difficulties of learning a new way of life and a new language
in America. As a translator, Maxim Shrayer says he worked
hard to retain his father's Russian-Jewish voice. Asked
what it's like to translate one's father, he speaks
of a heightened, personal responsibility to avoid "any
imprecision, imperfection, infelicity." But he could
freely consult the writer, he says, and "at times I've
been a pain in the neck."
To which Shrayer-Petrov smiles and lowers his eyes, and says in a throaty voice, "It's been good, a pleasure."
"A pleasure 95 percent of the
time," adds the son, who says, "I'm more
excited about this book than anything I've done."
Maxim Shrayer is the author of six books of his own: three
critical volumes (including The World of Nabokov's
Stories, 2000) and three poetry collections. Jonah
and Sarah, he says, is "the perfect juncture of
my family past, my aesthetic predilections, and my life in
my new language. A family is something you're put in
by destiny, and part of my destiny is this book."
David Reich
David Reich is a writer based in the Boston area.
Photos: David Shrayer-Petrov and his son, Maxim Shrayer. By Gary Wayne Gilbert
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