Immigrant Baggage: Morticians, purloined diaries, and other theatrics of exile

by Maxim D. Shrayer

Named one of 12 of the Best Jewish Books of the Year by the Jewish Telegraph Agency, New York Jewish Week, & Jerusalem Post


2023 International Book Awards Finalist in the Humor/Comedy/Satire Category


From a bilingual master of the literary memoir comes this moving and humorous story of losing immigrant baggage and trying to reclaim it for his American future.

 In this poignant literary memoir, internationally acclaimed author and Boston College professor Maxim D. Shrayer (Waiting for America) explores both material and immaterial aspects of immigrant baggage. Through a combination of dispassionate reportage, gentle irony, and confessional remembrance, Shrayer writes about traversing the borders and boundaries of the three cultures that have nourished him—Russian, Jewish, and American. The spirit of nonconformism and the power of laughter come to the rescue of Shrayer’s autobiographical protagonist when he faces existential calamities and life’s misadventures.

 The aftermath of a dangerous ski accident in Italy reminds the memoirist of history’s black holes. A haunting, Soviet-era theatrical affair pushes the émigré protagonist to the brink of a disaster in a provincial Russian town. Attempting to collect overdue royalties from a Moscow publisher, the expatriate writer tips his hat to Kafka. The book’s six interconnected tales are held together by the memorist’s imperative to make the ordinary absurd and the absurd—ordinary. Shrayer parses a translingual literary life filled with travel, politics, and discovery—and sustained by family love and faith in art’s transcendence.

146 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 13, 2023

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

[Susan]

I love this book! Shrayer begins his book with an account of an Italian ski vacation that goes wrong when a Berlin doctor runs into him on a snowboard (Shrayer is on skis and knows what he's doing, unlike the Berliner). After returning to the US, he tries to get the doctor to pay for his medical expenses--he broke four ribs in the collision--but the German bureaucracy makes it impossible for Shrayer to collect what's due to him. The last chapter in this book pays tribute to Kafka and shows how Shrayer has come to appreciate the Czech author. The other chapters tell of his trips back to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union and how he has introduced his wife and two daughters to his previous life before he and his parents became refuseniks and eventually left Moscow.