David Shrayer-Petrov – författare

The story of a doctor’s family torn apart by Soviet politics, persecution, and the Jewish struggle for freedom during the Cold War.Available now for the first time in English, Doctor Levitin is a modern classic in Jewish literature. A major work of late twentieth-century Russian and Jewish literature since its first publication in Israel in 1986, it has also seen three subsequent Russian editions. It is the first in David Shrayer-Petrov's trilogy of novels about the struggle of Soviet Jews and the destinies of refuseniks. In addition to being the first novel available in English that depicts the experience of the Jewish exodus from the former USSR, Doctor Levitin is presented in an excellent translation that has been overseen and edited by the author’s son, the bilingual scholar Maxim D. Shrayer.Doctor Levitin is a panoramic novel that portrays the Soviet Union during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the USSR invaded Afghanistan and Soviet Jews fought for their right to emigrate. Doctor Herbert Levitin, the novel’s protagonist, is a professor of medicine in Moscow whose non-Jewish wife, Tatyana, comes from the Russian peasantry. Shrayer-Petrov documents with anatomical precision the mutually unbreachable contradictions of the Levitins’ mixed marriage, which becomes an allegory of Jewish-Russian history. Doctor Levitin’s Jewishness evolves over the course of the novel, becoming a spiritual mission. The antisemitism of the Soviet regime forces the quiet intellectual and his family to seek emigration. Denied permission to leave, the family of Doctor Levitin is forced into the existence of refuseniks and outcasts, which inexorably leads to their destruction and a final act of defiance and revenge on the Soviet system.A significant contribution to the works of translated literature available in English, David Shrayer-Petrov's Doctor Levitin is ideal for any reader of fiction and literature. It will hold particular interest for those who study Jewish or Russian literature, culture, and history and Cold War politics.

The story of a doctor’s family torn apart by Soviet politics, persecution, and the Jewish struggle for freedom during the Cold War.Available now for the first time in English, Doctor Levitin is a modern classic in Jewish literature. A major work of late twentieth-century Russian and Jewish literature since its first publication in Israel in 1986, it has also seen three subsequent Russian editions. It is the first in David Shrayer-Petrov's trilogy of novels about the struggle of Soviet Jews and the destinies of refuseniks. In addition to being the first novel available in English that depicts the experience of the Jewish exodus from the former USSR, Doctor Levitin is presented in an excellent translation that has been overseen and edited by the author’s son, the bilingual scholar Maxim D. Shrayer.Doctor Levitin is a panoramic novel that portrays the Soviet Union during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the USSR invaded Afghanistan and Soviet Jews fought for their right to emigrate. Doctor Herbert Levitin, the novel’s protagonist, is a professor of medicine in Moscow whose non-Jewish wife, Tatyana, comes from the Russian peasantry. Shrayer-Petrov documents with anatomical precision the mutually unbreachable contradictions of the Levitins’ mixed marriage, which becomes an allegory of Jewish-Russian history. Doctor Levitin’s Jewishness evolves over the course of the novel, becoming a spiritual mission. The antisemitism of the Soviet regime forces the quiet intellectual and his family to seek emigration. Denied permission to leave, the family of Doctor Levitin is forced into the existence of refuseniks and outcasts, which inexorably leads to their destruction and a final act of defiance and revenge on the Soviet system.A significant contribution to the works of translated literature available in English, David Shrayer-Petrov's Doctor Levitin is ideal for any reader of fiction and literature. It will hold particular interest for those who study Jewish or Russian literature, culture, and history and Cold War politics.

The powerful voice of David Shrayer-Petrov's immigrant fiction blends Russian, Jewish, and American traditions. Collecting an autobiographical novel and three short stories, ""Autumn in Yalta"" brings together the achievements of the great Russian masters Chekhov and Nabokov and the magisterial Jewish and American storytellers Bashevis Singer and Malamud. Shrayer-Petrov's fiction examines the forces and contradictions of love through different ethnic, religious, and social lenses. Set in Stalinist Russia, the novel ""Strange Danya Rayev"" revolves around the wartime experiences of a Jewish Russian boy evacuated from his besieged native Leningrad to a remote village in the Ural Mountains. In the title story ""Autumn in Yalta"", the idealistic protagonist, Dr. Samoylovich, is sent to a Siberian prison camp because of his ill-fated love for Polechka, a tuberculosis patient. In ""The Love of Akira Watanabe"" once again unrequited love is the focus of the central character, a displaced Japanese professor at a New England university. A fishing expedition and an old Jewish recipe make for a surprise ending in Carp for the Gefilte Fish, a tale of a childless couple from Belarus and their American employers. In the tradition of other physician-writers, such as Anton Chekhov and William Carlos Williams, Shrayer-Petrov's prose is marked by analytical exactitude and passionate humanism. Love and memory, dual identity, and the experience of exile are the chief components.

These fourteen stories by the acclaimed master of Jewish-Russian fiction are set in the former USSR, Western Europe, and America. Dinner with Stalin features Soviet Jews grappling with issues of identity, acculturation, and assimilation. Shrayer-Petrov explores aspects of antisemitism and persecution, problems of mixed marriages, dilemmas of conversion, and the survival of Jewish memory. Both an author and a physician, Shrayer-Petrov examines his subjects through the double lenses of medicine and literature. He writes about Russian Jews who, having suffered in the former Soviet Union, continue to cultivate their sense of cultural Russianness, even as they—and especially their children—assimilate and increasingly resemble American Jews. Shrayer-Petrov’s stories also bear witness to the ways Jewish immigrants from the former USSR interact with Americans of other identities and creeds, notably with Catholics and Moslems. Not only lovers of Jewish and Russian writing but all discriminating readers will delight in Dinner with Stalin and Other Stories.