The music rips the skein of being. The ghost is proudly silent.
A triumph of difference. Discordant and defiant.
Maxim D. Shrayer’s voice speaks across generations. With a stubborn belief that poetry must be healing, Shrayer writes poems that break through boundaries and fears, accept defeat, and yearn for pleasure.
–David Biespiel, author of A Self-Portrait in the Year of the High Commission on Love
The memories [Shrayer] carries burn in carefully crafted verses as if to contain his furies and his love. … These are poems to savor and to learn.
–Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Missing Jew: Poems 1976-2022
Maxim D. Shrayer’s Zion Square is a book of unabashed loyalties, outspoken in its political commitments, at moments bitingly satiric, at others, tender.
–Natania Rosenfeld, author of The Blue Bed
These haunted poems movingly try to make sense of our current world that is, Shrayer passionately reminds us, seeped in tragedy.
–Yerra Sugarman, author of Aunt Bird
About the Author
Maxim D. Shrayer, bilingual author, scholar, and translator, was born in Moscow in 1967 to a Jewish-Russian family with Ukrainian and Lithuanian roots and spent over eight years as a refusenik. He and his parents, the writer David Shrayer-Petrov ל״ז and the translator Emilia Shrayer, left the USSR and immigrated to the United States in 1987. Shrayer received a PhD from Yale University in 1995. He is Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College, where he cofounded the Jewish Studies Program.
Shrayer has authored and edited thirty books of nonfiction, criticism, fiction, poetry, and translations. His poetry collections include the Russian-language Tabun nad lugom (Herd above the Meadow, New York, 1990), Amerikanskii romans (American Romance, Moscow, 1994), N’iukheivenskie sonety (New Haven Sonnets, Providence, 1998), Stikhi iz aipada (Poems from the iPad, Tel Aviv, 2022), and Voina (War, Tel Aviv, 2025), and the English-language Of Politics and Pandemics (Boston, 2020) and Kinship (Georgetown, KY, 2024).
Among Shrayer’s other books are the literary memoirs Waiting for America, Leaving Russia, and Immigrant Baggage and the collections Yom Kippur in Amsterdam and A Russian Immigrant: Three Novellas. He is the recipient of a number of awards and fellowships, including a 2007 National Jewish Book Award and a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship. Shrayer’s publications have been translated into thirteen languages, most recently Nabokov e o Judaísmo, published in Brazil in 2023, and Immigrato russo, published in Italy in 2024. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Dr. Karen E. Lasser, a medical editor, researcher, and physician; their daughters, Mira Isabella and Tatiana Rebecca; and their silver Jewdle, Stella.
Advance Praise
Maxim D. Shrayer’s voice speaks across generations. With a stubborn belief that poetry must be healing, Shrayer writes poems that break through boundaries and fears, accept defeat, and yearn for pleasure. As morally serious and utterly sincere as these poems are, they are also filled with abhorrence, loathing, odium, and contempt. If humankind is to survive, Shrayer argues in this new collection, then it will do so with all the complexities of humankind: love, murder, kindness, torture, propaganda, and poetry. –David Biespiel, author of A Self-Portrait in the Year of the High Commission on Love
“I have nothing to immolate/ except my memory/ but memory doesn’t burn,” so writes the Russian-born American Jew, scholar and translator, refusenik and son of refuseniks, poet and son of a poet, professor and student of life Maxim D. Shrayer. The memories he carries burn in carefully crafted verses as if to contain his furies and his love. Poems born since October 7, poems of Israel and the old Soviet Union, an imagination that can bring Nabokov to size up Putin, but can also relish the sweetness of concord grapes in Massachusetts. These are poems to savor and to learn. –Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Missing Jew: Poems 1976-2022
Maxim D. Shrayer’s Zion Square is a book of unabashed loyalties, outspoken in its political commitments, at moments bitingly satiric, at others, tender. The central question is one of home; at once diasporan and Zionist, the poems constantly seek the place where roving heart and mind can be at peace. Moving among the Eastern Europe of the poet’s heritage and early life, cosmopolitan Western Europe, Boston and Cape Cod where he has put down roots, and Israel, his soul-home, the poems circle around an unease that contains the kernel of its own cure. “An immigrant Russian Jew/eager to live off his small property,” Shrayer counts his blessings as the poems mingle hellos and goodbyes, sometimes paradoxically as what seemed past penetrates the present. An Old World melody, sweet, rueful, rises up above the ubiquitous rhetorical din of our moment. –Natania Rosenfeld, author of The Blue Bed
Born in Moscow to a Jewish-Russian family with Ukrainian and Lithuanian roots, and a refusenik for more than eight years, Maxim D. Shrayer has lived a life containing much anguish. Still, his memorably polished verse in Zion Square gleams like the grapes in his poem “Grapes of Sukkot,” that “shine upon us/ like our ancestors’ desert stars.” With carefully-observed details, Shrayer’s poems summon up both history and its calamities as well as tender moments, as when the speaker in “Two Octaves for My Father” asks, “Remember, how the oak leaf spiraled,/ desperately, into mom’s open hand?” Many of Shrayer’s poems address, with desperation and despair, a world in painful conflict and chaos. Yet there is compassion in his poems, which tell us that the speaker has “nothing to immolate / except my memory” because “like a broken prayer/ memory won’t leave the Jew alone.” These haunted poems movingly try to make sense of our current world that is, Shrayer passionately reminds us, seeped in tragedy. –Yerra Sugarman, author of Aunt Bird
"Zion Square"
A sixty-year-old smiling public man Yeats
In the earthly city of Jerusalem I like to stay just a couple of blocks from Kikar HaMusica in Yo’el Moshe Salomon Street, a pathway named after the founder of three Israeli towns and a Hebrew newspaper, a descendant of a messenger of the venerable Vilna Gaon, who in the 1800s left Lithuania for the Holy Land, and was, perhaps, my distant relative, or rather kinsman on the side of my father’s grandfather Rabbi Chaim-Wolf, of blessed memory, who was peacefully murdered in the early days of the war.
Orchestras played outside my hotel at night and I listened to the music Jews couldn’t leave in Europe. I felt sheltered by the might of the Iron Dome but also the roof of particolored umbrellas that hang over the street—once the prey of tourist photos and travel agents’ brochures, now the sky of our small warring country. I looked up and cried for all my cousins-in-arms but also for myself. Mostly tears of joy and comfort. Music didn’t end suddenly, it flowed up toward Jaffa Street and I felt someone or something carry me, a Jewish feather, to Kikar Tsiyon.
Next morning, as I waited for my muse in uniform, I got to observe a troop of teenage boys in woven kipot, black and white Jews who danced in synch and looked like pale versions of kids from an urban ghetto, vestiges of another world, performing in support of hostages, while girls in long skirts collected donations. Jerusalemites stood and watched, tired of having to care, unfree to let their war fatigue spoil the mood of unity. It was then, weaving my way through a maze of men and women toward the imaginary proscenium that separated the dancers from the dance, I saw a vision of the past.
Or was it a vision of the future? I still don’t know. I can only tell you what it looked like: Head to toe, hat to shoes, spectacles to trousers, above and below, black kipa, black kapote, black gartel—meant to separate heart from sex organs—it was all there to reincarnate what I thought my Litvak ancestors had left behind. He was neither tall nor short, neither skinny nor rotund, both redhead and whitehead, eyes both blue and hazel, tousled hair, unevenly clipped beard, blackened fingers, hands in flight, conducting the performance of the universe. Who was he, a local shtetl fool or G-d to all his Jews?
"Last Will and Testament"
Thomas Mann has returned to the city of Lübeck. The municipal elders have gathered to welcome him home. He‘s old. He blushes. He feels like a young German lover. And he doesn’t know how to abolish his shame.
Katia Mann tells her husband: “We don’t belong in this country. How eerie this place, how sated with murderous joy. All is lost. At the Kirche the bride has been wailing since sunrise. Buxtehude’s great organ has been vandalized and destroyed.”
“Darling,” says Thomas Mann. “On the strand of my youth, Travemünde, sand is weightless like ashes and cold like unearthly embrace. All my life I’ve been faithful to Germany. Now what an ending to discover that nothing of mine remains.”
"Wine Tasting in Winter"
At a wine tasting outside San Gimignano I met a Saudi aristocrat with perfectly chiseled fingers. His noble face was stuck half the distance between Rabbi Marx’s and Rabbi Freud’s, but swarthier. Together we stood on a grassy terrace overlooking fourteen terracotta towers, a sloping vineyard, and a mound of silver olive trees. I said the world had gone mad, and he understood I didn’t mean it to be about the war but only about the summer sun of Tuscany on that February afternoon.
He was sipping Chianti with a faint peppery nose. I was wearing a dark blue kipa with a white trim. The Saudi said he and his friend were driving to Milan for a soccer game, and I said they were so lucky. Come with us, he offered, we have two extra tickets. I was tempted to say thank you, akhi, but I held back. He looked away and tugged at his smoldering beard as I retreated and returned to my table, my wife and younger daughter, and my unfinished crostata made of flour, sugar, butter, and blood orange.
Book Reviews
Visions of Past and Future: A Review of “Zion Square” by Rhonda Rosenheck
