About the Author
Photo by Gary Gilbert
Maxim D. Shrayer was born in Moscow, in 1967, to a Jewish-Russian family. With his parents, the writer and medical scientist David Shrayer-Petrov and the philologist and translator Emilia Shrayer (Polyak), he spent almost nine years as a refusenik. He and his parents left the USSR and immigrated to the United States in 1987, after spending a summer in Austria and Italy.
Shrayer studied at Moscow University, Brown University, Rutgers University and Yale University, where he received a Ph.D. in 1995. He is presently professor of Russian and English and chair of the Department of Slavic and Eastern Languages at Boston College, where he co-founded the Jewish Studies Program. Among Shrayer's books are the acclaimed critical studies, The World of Nabokov's Stories and Russian Poet/Soviet Jew. A bilingual author and translator, Shrayer has published three collections of Russian poetry, and has edited and cotranslated from Russian two books of fiction by his father, the writer David Shrayer-Petrov, Jonah and Sarah and Autumn in Yalta. Shrayer won a 2007 National Jewish Book Award for his two-volume Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature.
Shrayer is the author of the literary memoir Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration. His English-language prose has appeared in Agni, Kenyon Review, Massachusetts Review, Partisan Review, Southwest Review and other magazines. He has been the recipient of a number of fellowships, including those from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation. For additional information about Maxim D. Shrayer's academic work, please visit his Boston College site.
Shrayer lives in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts with his wife, Dr. Karen E. Lasser, and their daughters, Mira Isabella and Tatiana Rebecca.