Immigrant Baggage

Maxim D. Shrayer, bilingual author and scholar, was born inMoscow in 1967 to a Jewish-Russian family with Ukrainian and Lithuanian rootsand spent over eight years as a refusenik. He and his parents, the writer DavidShrayer-Petrov and the translator Emilia Shrayer, left the USSR and immigratedto the United States in 1987. Shrayer received a PhD from Yale University in1995. He is Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College.Shrayer has authored and edited over twenty books of nonfiction, criticism, fiction,poetry, and translations. Among his books are the literary memoirs Waiting for America and Leaving Russia and the collection A Russian Immigrant: Three Novellas. He is the recipient of a number of awards andfellowships, including a 2007 National Jewish Book Award and a 2012 GuggenheimFellowship. Shrayer’s publications have been translated into ten languages. Helives in Massachusetts with his wife, Dr. Karen E. Lasser, a medical researcherand physician, and their daughters Mira and Tatiana.

• Preface: Translingual AdventuresRibs of EdenIn the Net of Composer N.Romance with a MorticianOnly One Day in VeniceYelets Women’s High SchoolA Return to KafkaIndex of Names and PlacesAbout the Author

“Soviet émigré Maxim D. Shrayer knows who he is, and he is proud of it right from the start. … In Immigrant Baggage… six interconnected ordinary anecdotes of Shrayer’s travels narrate ‘adventures and misadventures’ from previous years and are given surprise endings. Each tale is a gem, filled with the author’s political, ideological and literary sensibility. … In an era when many are searching to understand how to overcome historical trauma, these stories argue for… choosing to connect with one’s roots, to follow one’s passion, to belong to a community and to discover a meaningful channel to integrate the past and present.”— Eva Fogelman, Moment Magazine“A Semiotician’s Dream… Immigrant Baggage, which combines the ‘realism’ of autobiography and travelogue with deft touches of scholarly inquiry, is therefore a portmanteau in more ways than one. The book functions as memoir and serves—concomitantly—to map part of 20th century’s literary history. … Immigrant Baggage is not merely a pleasure to read; it is an important work. It counts, to draw on Réda Bensmaïa’s description, among the works that serve as a ‘rallying point…for certain texts and “bi-lingual” writing practices’ that are finally emerging from the peripheries of American and Canadian literatures.”— Olga Stein, Great Lakes Review“In Maxim D. Shrayer’s extraordinary Immigrant Baggage: Morticians, Purloined Diaries, and Other Theatrics of Exile, he claims place through movement, expression through translingualism, all while inscribing history onto our collective present consciousness. Incorporating photographs into the stories of his travels and adventures, Shrayer offers eyewitness evidence of the past, even as his writing invites readers to marvel at improbable connections, surreal coincidences, and occasional forays into imagined endings that bring together past and present. An elegant and compelling narrator, Shrayer invites readers to visualize, understand, hear, and experience the richness of multiple languages, cities, and characters. He does this by inviting us not only to experience specific moments in time and place, but also to reflect on the spaces in between—indeed, it is in these moments that Shrayer seems most at home.”— Jessica Lang, Dean, Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, Baruch College, CUNY and author of Textual Silence: Unreadability and the Holocaust