The bilingual author and scholar Maxim D. Shrayer (Максим Д. Шраер) was born in Moscow, in 1967, to a Jewish-Russian family, and spent over eight years as a refusenik. He and his parents, the writer and doctor David Shrayer-Petrov and the translator Emilia Shrayer, left the USSR and immigrated to the United States in 1987, after spending a summer in Austria and Italy.
Shrayer attended Moscow University, Brown University, Rutgers University and received a Ph.D. at Yale University in 1995. He is Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College, where he has been teaching since 1996. At Boston College Shrayer co-founded the Jewish Studies Program and founded the Michael B. Kreps Readings in Russian Émigré Literature. He is also an associate at Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian & Eurasian Studies, where he chairs the Seminar on Russian and Eurasian Jews. Shrayer edits the book series “Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and Their Legacy” and “Immigrant Worlds & Texts” at Academic Studies Press.
Maxim D. Shrayer has authored and edited over thirty books of criticism, biography, non-fiction, fiction, poetry, and translation, among them the critical studies The World of Nabokov’s Stories and Russian Poet/Soviet Jew. He is the author of the acclaimed literary memoirs Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration, Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story (finalist of the 2013 National Jewish Book Awards), and Immigrant Baggage, of the short story collections Yom Kippur in Amsterdam and Zalman’s Disappearance (in Russian), of four collections of Russian-language poetry and two collections of English-language poetry, most recently Kinship. He has also edited and cotranslated four books of fiction by his father, David Shrayer-Petrov, most recently the novel Doctor Levitin. Shrayer won a 2007 National Jewish Book Award for his two-volume Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature. A Hebrew translation of his book I Saw It: Ilya Selvinsky and the Legacy of Bearing Witness to the Shoah (2013) was published in Israel by Yad Vashem in 2023. Originally published in Moscow in 2014, Shrayer book Bunin and Nabokov: A History of Rivalry has gone through four editions to become a Russian national bestseller. His other books include A Russian Immigrant: Three Novellas, With or Without You: The Prospect for Jews in Today’s Russia, and Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature, an anthology. Shrayer’s works have been translated into thirteen languages. Shrayer’s new poetry collection, Zion Square, and his new bilingual book, Parallel’noe pis’mo/Parallel Letters, were published in 2025.
Shrayer is the recipient of a number of awards and fellowships, including those from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, and the Israel Institute. He lectures widely on topics ranging from the legacy of the refusenik movement and the experience of ex-Soviet Jews in America to Shoah literature, Jewish-Russian culture and translingualism. Shrayer lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Dr. Karen E. Lasser, a medical researcher and physician, and their two daughters.
For more information, visit Shrayer’s literary website at www.shrayer.com
