David Shrayer-Petrov

David Shrayer-Petrov (Давид Шраер-Петров), Jewish-Russian author, medical scientist, and refusenik activist, passed away on 9 June 2024 of complications associated with Parkinson’s disease. He was eighty-eight years old, and for the past two and a half years he had been living at Hebrew Rehabilitation Center in Boston.

Shrayer-Petrov was born to a Jewish family on 28 January 1936 and grew up in Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Descended from Lithuanian rabbis and Podolian millers, Shrayer-Petrov heard Yiddish in the traditional home of his paternal grandparents. Both of Shrayer-Petrov’s parents (father an engineer, mother a chemist) made the transition from the former Pale to Leningrad (St. Petersburg) in the 1920s. Evacuated from Leningrad in 1941, Shrayer-Petrov spent three formative years in a Russian village in the Urals.

Shrayer-Petrov entered the literary scene as a poet and translator in the mid-to-late 1950s. Upon the suggestion of the poet Boris Slutsky, he adopted the penname David Petrov, derived from Pyotr—a Russianized form of his father’s first name, Peysakh. This assimilatory gesture did not ease the publication of Shrayer-Petrov’s poetry in the USSR, and he made a name for himself largely as a translator of verse.

After graduating from Leningrad First Medical School in 1959, Shrayer-Petrov served as a military physician in Belorussia. In 1964, two years after marrying the philologist and translator Emilia Polyak, Shrayer-Petrov moved to Moscow, where his son, Maxim D. Shrayer, was born in 1967. Shrayer-Petrov received a candidate’s advanced degree from the Leningrad Institute of Tuberculosis in 1966, and he worked as a researcher at the Gamaleya Institute of Microbiology in Moscow from 1967 to 1978. In 1975 he received his second advanced degree of the doctor of science in medicine.

From his earliest verses, Shrayer-Petrov explored the nature of Jewish identity and the relations between Jews and Gentiles. Although he managed to publish a collection of poems ("Canvasses", 1967, with an introduction by poet and Shoah witness Lev Ozerov) and two books of essays in the 1970s, most of his writings were too controversial for Soviet officialdom to allow their publication. Despite recommendations by such prominent writers as Viktor Shklovsky, Shrayer-Petrov was only admitted to the Union of Soviet Writers in 1976 after a long battle. His second poetry collection, "Winter Ship", moved up the frozen straights of the Sovetskii pisatel' (Soviet Writer) publishing house with discouraging slowness and was finally never published. By the early 1970s, the relations between Jews and Gentiles became a principal concern of Shrayer-Petrov’s writing. In 1975–76, Shrayer-Petrov composed poems where disharmonies of his Russian and Jewish selves adumbrate his conflict with the Soviet regime. Read in April 1978 at the televised closing ceremony of the Spring Festival of Poetry in Vilnius, Lithuania, “My Slavic Soul” brought forth repressive measures against the author and finalized his decision to emigrate.

In January 1979, Shrayer-Petrov and his family applied for exit visas. Fired from his academic position and expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers (three of his books derailed, one of them already set in galleys and illustrated), Shrayer-Petrov became a refusenik and was ostracized. Shrayer-Petrov was unable to publish in the Soviet Union throughout the years of a refusenik’s limbo. In 1979–80, while driving an illegal cab at night and working in a hospital emergency department, Shrayer-Petrov wrote the first part of what would become a trilogy of novels about refuseniks: "Doctor Levitin", "May You Be Cursed", "Don’t Die", and "The Third Life". In documenting with anatomical precision the mutually unbreachable contradictions of a mixed Jewish-Russian marriage, Shrayer-Petrov also treats the story of Doctor Herbert Levitin as an allegory of Jewish-Russian history. Part one was completed in 1980; part two, in 1983. In 1986, an abridged version of part one appeared in Israel under the title "Being Refused"; in 1992, the first two parts came out in Moscow under the title "Herbert and Nelly", which was longlisted for the 1993 Russian Booker Prize. Two revised editions of "Herbert and Nelly" have since come out in Russia: in 2005 in St. Petersburg and in 2014 in Moscow. Written in the United States following Shrayer-Petrov’s emigration, part three of the refusenik trilogy, "The Third Life", was published in 2009. "Doctor Levitin", part one of the refusenik trilogy, appeared in the United States in English translation in 2018. In spite of persecution and arrests by the KGB, Shrayer-Petrov’s last Soviet decade was prolific; he wrote two novels, several plays, a memoir, and many stories and verses. The refuseniks’ isolation from the rest of Soviet society, coupled with the absurdity of being a Jewish writer who is both silenced by and shackled to Russia, led to Shrayer-Petrov’s discovery of the form he calls "fantella" (perhaps decipherable as “fantastic novella”). In 1982–87, Shrayer-Petrov and his wife hosted a salon for refuseniks, where a number of Jewish writers, including Yury Karabchievsky and Genrikh Sapgir, gave readings.

Shrayer-Petrov was finally granted permission to emigrate in April 1987. Leaving the Soviet Union on 7 June 1987, Shrayer-Petrov and his wife, Emilia Shrayer, settled in Providence, Rhode Island, after a summer in Austria and Italy. Arriving on the tail end of the Third Wave of Soviet Emigration, the writer began to sign his literary publications with the hyphenated Shrayer-Petrov—a dual name that betokens his literary career. Since emigrating, Shrayer-Petrov has published twelve books of poetry (among them "Petersburg Doge", St. Petersburg, 1999) and "Drums of Fortune", Moscow, 2002), eleven novels, six collections of short stories, and four volumes of memoirs. In several of his works, notably the novel "French Cottage" (Providence, RI, 1999), scientific interests dovetail with those of a fiction writer, not surprising since for twenty years Shrayer-Petrov divided his time between writing and cancer research. Published in Moscow in 2004, his book "Those Strange Russian Jews" was composed of two novels, "Savely Ronkin" and the autobiographical "Strange Danya Rayev". In 2015, the Moscow-based publisher of Jewish books Knizhniki, which had previously reprinted Herbert and Nelly, published a volume of Shrayer-Petrov’s selected short stories, "Around-the-Globe Happiness". His collection of selected long poems, "Village Orchestra", came out in 2016 in St. Petersburg. In addition to the novel "Doctor Levitin", Three volumes of Shrayer-Petrov’s shorter fiction have appeared in English translation: "Jonah and Sarah: Jewish Stories of Russia and America" (2003), "Autumn in Yalta: A Novel and Three Stories" (2006), and "Dinner with Stalin and Other Stories" (2014; finalist of the Wallant Prize), all edited by Maxim D. Shrayer.

In 1987-2005 Dr. Shrayer worked as a medical researcher at Brown University and Boston University schools of medicine. He published 105 academic medical articles in the fields of microbiology, immunology, and cancer research, and a scholarly monograph, "Staphylococcal Infection" in the USSR (1989). After retiring from research, Shrayer-Petrov settled in Brookline, Massachusetts with Emilia Shrayer, his wife and one of his literary translators, and devoted himself to full-time writing.

In 2021, on the occasion of the writer’s eighty-fifth birthday, the volume "The Parallel Worlds of David Shrayer-Petrov" was published in English and Russian, edited by Roman Katsman, and Maxim D. Shrayer, and Klavdia Smola.

Jews and Russians are the “two peoples [who] are the closest to me in flesh (genes) and spirit (language),” Shrayer-Petrov wrote in 1985, less than two years before emigrating from Russia. In a 2014 interview, Shrayer-Petrov commented on his experience as an immigrant writer: “Most of [my recent] stories fashion Russian—Jewish-Russian—characters living in America. In this sense, I’ve become an American writer. . . . I think that I’ve rooted myself in New England. It has become my second—now my main—habitat.” Marriages between Jews and non-Jews continued to fascinate Shrayer-Petrov in his outwardly unturbulent life as a Jewish-Russian-American writer in New England. Rooting into his adopted land and its culture, Shrayer-Petrov featured a greater variety of American characters in his fiction as he continued to inscribe (autobiographical) émigré writers into the landscapes and culturescapes of his adopted America.

David Shrayer-Petrov is survived by his wife of sixty-two years Emilia Shrayer, translator and medical interpreter at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, his son Maxim D. Shrayer, author and Boston College professor, his daughter-in-law Karen E. Lasser, professor at the Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and senior editor at JAMA, and his granddaughters Mira Isabella Shrayer, a freshman at Boston College planning to study medicine, and Tatiana Rebecca Shrayer, a junior at the Brookline High School and the family’s fourth-generation poet.

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A memorial service for David Shrayer-Petrov will take place on Tuesday, June 11th @ 2pm at Stanetsky Memorial Chapel at 1668 Beacon Street in Brookline MA, followed by the burial at American Friendship Cemetery (part of Baker Street Jewish Cemeteries at 776 Baker Street in Boston). Rabbi Sonia Saltzman will officiate.

The shiva will be observed following the burial @ 4-8 pm at the community room in the home of Emilia and David at 1265 Beacon Street in Brookline. Friends are also welcome to visit with the family on Thursday, June 13th 6:30-8:30 pm at their home.

A Zoom link for friends and family unable to attend the memorial service:

https://client.tribucast.com/tcid/c24061364267394

[Prepared by Maxim D. Shrayer]

Photo by Maxim D. Shrayer.