Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story is 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. Shrayer’s remembrances are set against a rich backdrop of politics and ethnic conflict on the brink of the Soviet empire’s collapse. His moving story offers generous doses of humor and tenderness, counterbalanced with longing and violence. Leaving Russia is a love story in which a young Jew’s love is unrequited and his heart is forever broken by his homeland.

Born in Moscow in 1967, Maxim D. Shrayer is a professor at Boston College and a bilingual writer and translator. Shrayer has authored ten books, among them the memoir Waiting for America, the collection Yom Kippur in Amsterdam, and the Holocaust study I Saw It: Ilya Selvinsky and the Legacy of Bearing Witness to the Shoah. Shrayer’s Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature won a 2007 National Jewish Book Award, and in 2012 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Visit www.shrayer.com .