Waiting For America: A Story of Emigration

Library of Modern Jewish Literature

by Maxim D. Shrayer

In 1987 a young Jewish man, the central figure in this captivating book, leaves Moscow for good with his parents. They celebrate their freedom in opulent Vienna and spend two months in Rome and the coastal resort of Ladispoli. While waiting in Europe for a U.S. refugee visa, the book’s twenty-year-old poet quenches his thirst for sexual and cultural discovery. Through his colorful Austrian and Italian misadventures, he experiences the shock, thrill, and anonymity of encountering Western democracies, running into European roadblocks while shedding Soviet social taboos. As he anticipates entering a new life in America, he movingly describes the baggage that exiles bring with them, from the inescapable family traps and ties to the sweet cargo of memory. An emigration story, Waiting for America explores the rapid expansion of identity at the cusp of a new, American life. Told in a revelatory first-person narrative, Waiting for America is also a vibrant love story in which the romantic main character is torn between Russian and Western women. Filled with poignant humor and reinforced by hope and idealism, the author’s confessional voice carries the reader in the same way one is carried through literary memoirs like Tolstoy’s Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, or Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. Babel, Sebald, and Singer—all transcultural masters of identity writing—are the coordinates that help to locate Waiting for America on the greater map of literature.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published October 22, 2007

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Louise Silk · Rating 5 out of 5]

An important look at Soviet Jewish immigration from the refusenik point of view. Fascinating!

[Konstantin Korovyev · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just as in Beckett's famous play "Waiting for Godot," the Soviet Jewish refugees in this colorful, humorous and moving book are waiting for their visas to come to America. America represents a dream, a fulfillment. America beckons like the unknown. Shrayer was twenty when he left Moscow with his family, and I'm very impressed with the way he was able to recreate this Italian summer in an adopted language. This is one of the best books I've recently read in English by an immigrant author, and I recommend it highly.

[Stefania Corti · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love the sentimental notes and interesting to hear the details of how contemporary refugees leave their homeland behind, how they have to start new lives somewhere else. The only critique I have is that he should have at least consulted a translator before jotting down italian expressions or words, there were loads of mistakes (I am from Italy).