Soviet Refuseniks

Alan Shatter’s belief that there can be “humour in the midst of strife” resonates throughout Life is a Funny Business, even as his personal story details a number of very sad life experiences.

The book's abrupt conclusion leaves the impression that this is but his first autobiographical installment. I’m told that Shatter has already completed a sequel, which will be published following some pending legal decisions.

It will no doubt offer further insight into Irish politics and Shatter’s Jewish identity.

This volume celebrates the literary oeuvres of David Shrayer-Petrov—poet, fiction writer, memoirist, essayist, and literary translator (and medical doctor and researcher in his parallel career). Author of the refusenik novel Doctor Levitin, Shrayer-Petrov is one of the most important representatives of Jewish-Russian literature. Published in the year of Shrayer-Petrov’s eighty-fifth birthday, thirty-five years after the writer’s emigration from the former USSR, this is the first volume to gather materials and investigations that examine his writings from various literary-historical and theoretical perspectives. By focusing on many different aspects of Shrayer-Petrov’s multifaceted and eventful literary career, the volume brings together some of the leading American, European, Israeli and Russian scholars of Jewish poetics, exilic literature, and Russian and Soviet culture and history. In addition to fifteen essays and an extensive interview with Shrayer-Petrov, the volume features a detailed bibliography and a pictorial biography.
Praise for The Parallel Universes of David Shrayer-Petrov:

“This fascinating collection provides many insights into one of the finest
poets and an outstanding writer, David Shrayer-Petrov, who made a
significant contribution to Russian and Jewish cultures. This multi-facing
study explores many topics—from Shrayer-Petrov’s life, his variety of
themes, genres, and styles to textual and cultural sources of his poems,
short stories, and novels. Many essays illuminate the brilliant mind and the innovations of David Shrayer-Petrov. The bibliography compiled by his son Maxim D. Shrayer is a vital contribution to this book and helps to appreciate the outstanding achievements this poet, writer and translator. The Parallel Universes of David Shrayer-Petrov the best thing written about the writer and an essential reading for all who are not indifferent to literature and culture.”
- Valentina Polukhina, University of Keele; author of Joseph Brodsky:
A Poet for Our Time and Brodsky Through the Eyes of His Contemporaries

“The book contextualizes, analyzes, and celebrates the work of a
nonconformist writer who for several decades explored the thought,
the feel, and the fantasy of Russian-Soviet-Jewish, Jewish-refusenik, and
Jewish-immigrant-American experience. The studies collected in this
volume discuss the ways in which the hyphenated literary identity of
David Shrayer-Petrov enters an interface with a variety of intellectual
communities without catering to their biases or expectations.”
- Leona Toker, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; author of Gulag
Literature and the Literature of Nazi Camps: An Intertextual Reading and
Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures

“This book, devoted to the prose and poetry of the brilliant Jewish-Russian writer David Shrayer-Petrov, both from his Soviet and his American periods, is more than a collection of essays. The first book devoted to the works of Shrayer-Petrov, it is a thoroughly conceived and impressively structured fulllength study of Shrayer-Petrov’s literary exploration of Russian and Soviet Jewry. The nuanced psychological reflection, sharp socio-historical vision and high aesthetic qualities of Shrayer-Petrov’s literary works make them of significant interest both to those who self-identify with the refuseniks’ worldview and to those who oppose it on political or ethical grounds. The same is true of The Parallel Worlds of David Shrayer-Petrov. Bringing together a powerful group of scholars, among them some of the leading students of Russian-Jewish culture, this is an outstanding study which is bound to attract the attention of different audiences, with diverse personal experiences, worldviews, and convictions.”
- Dennis Sobolev, University of Haifa; author of the novel Jerusalem
and The Split World of Gerard Manley Hopkins: An Essay in Semiotic
Phenomenology

The article is a firsthand report of a participant and a leader of a number of underground initiatives, primarily among the "refuseniks'" community, to encourage Jewish studies, to conduct such seminars (scholarly as well as public), to guide excursions through Jewish historical sites of the city, and to publish a samizdat journal with the results of these studies – in short – to recover and disseminate knowledge on Jewish history and culture.