I Saw It

Maxim D. Shrayer (PhD Yale University) is Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish studies at Boston College. A bilingual writer and translator, Shrayer has authored and edited a number of books, among them the path-breaking critical studies The World of Nabokovs Stories and Russian Poet/ Soviet Jew, the acclaimed literary memoir Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration, and the collection Yom Kippur in Amsterdam. Shrayer's two-volume Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature won a 2007 National Jewish Book Award, and in 2012 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

This beautifully close reading of a major Soviet poet restores for us an important vision of the Holocaust." - Timothy Snyder, Yale University "Ilya Selvinsky was a Soviet Jewish poet writer who wrote explicitly about the Holocaust at a time when most Soviet writers avoided the subject. Though Selvinsky was in and out of political trouble, his undeniable talent and Stalinas grudging admiration allowed him to survive. Maxim D. Shrayer tells his story vividly, comprehensively and convincingly. Unlike many literary studies, this deeply researched book is accessible, gripping and free of jargon. We learn not only about Selvinsky and other wartime writers, but also about Soviet policy toward the Holocaust and how it changed; the tense relations between the Party-State and writers; and the complexities of Jewish identities in the USSR." - Zvi Gitelman, University of Michigan "I Saw It is a major contribution to our knowledge and understanding of how Soviet Jewish writers and the regime in general responded to the Nazi massacres of Jews in German-occupied Soviet territory. As a soldier, poet, and journalist, Ilya Selvinsky was often on the front line, struggling to comprehend the enormity of the destruction and suffering around him. Based on painstaking and comprehensive research, Maxim D. Shrayer does a superb job of conveying the challenges of being a Soviet patriot and a Jew in the face of Hitlers onslaught." - Joshua Rubenstein, author of Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg "Soviet Jews, serving on the Eastern front, were the first to document the German war against the Jews. The most memorable response was, indeed, the first: a Russian-language poem so immediate, so personal and so graphic, that even Stalin and his henchmen could not suppress the poem, nor, try as they did, the courageous poet who authored it. This is the remarkable story, never before told, of the Jewish-Russian poet Ilya Selvinsky, who despite all odds first taught his fellow Jews and Russians how to mourn their incalculable losses." - David G. Roskies, Jewish Theological Seminary, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem "Comprehensive, meticulously researched, erudite, and up-to-date, with sober assessments and insightful interpretive comments, Maxim D. Shrayers study of Ilya Selvinsky closes gaps both in the history of Soviet Russian literature and in the history of the literature of the Holocaust." - Leona Toker, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.