Leaving Russia

A Jewish Story

Maxim D Shrayer author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Syracuse University Press

Published:30th Jan '17

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Leaving Russia cover

A memoir of coming of age and struggling to leave the USSR. Shrayer chronicles the triumphs and humiliations of a Soviet childhood and expresses the dreams and fears of a Jewish family that never gave up its hopes for a better life. Narrated in the tradition of Tolstoy's confessional trilogy and Nabokov's autobiography, this is a searing account of the KGB's persecution of refuseniks, a poet's rebellion against totalitarian culture, and Soviet fantasies of the West during the Cold War.

“In his eloquently written memoir . . . Shrayer takes readers on a moving journey back to his Soviet childhood behind the Iron Curtain.”—Jewish Journal

“Shrayer tarries over the landscapes he loves, the many attitudes toward Jews and being Jewish he experienced, the meaning of coming of ageas a refusenik during the waning days of the Soviet Union, and his own complex . . . emotions about being both Russian and Jewish.”—New Jersey Jewish News

“An engaging story of growing up as the son of Jewish intellectuals in Moscow who applied for emigration when he was ten to give him a futureas a Jew. . . . Leaving Russia should be assigned reading for anyone interested in the Jewish experience of the twentieth century.”—Jewish Book Council Reviews

ISBN: 9780815610885

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 535g

346 pages