Nine Lives

In a eulogy given at the funeral service, my wife Karen E. Lasser, a medical doctor and editor, tenderly referred to my father as a cat who had nine lives, implying that, as per the old English proverb Shakespeare appropriated in Romeo and Juliet, “For three he plays, for three he strays, and for the last three he stays.” Indeed, my father, David Shrayer-Petrov, who was born in Leningrad in January 1936 and died in Boston in June 2024 at the age of 88, lived a number of Jewish lives. The accidental kabbalist in me has counted exactly nine—gratifying and traumatic in its own way—each revealing its own truth.

He was a Jewish boy born in Leningrad in 1936 to a family of Ukrainian and Litvak stock. His parents and the majority of their siblings, all of them having been born in the Pale in the 1900s, had filled the ranks of the new Jewish Soviet intelligentsia by the 1930s, when an individual Jew likely felt safer in Stalin’s USSR than anywhere in the world. He was a young Jewish survivor, an evacuee from the siege to a remote Uralian village, where the peasants had never seen Jews and only imagined them as biblical Judeans—while his father, like most Soviet Jewish adult men and many Jewish women, was fighting the Nazis on the ruins of prewar happiness. And as a Jewish teen, my father experienced a full measure of his alterity during the postwar Stalinist years. It was a life of discovering Jewishness as an increasingly perilous choice and a special destiny of Judaic pride. One of my father’s strongest memories of his first Jewish life, a life of awakening and early trauma he would later recast in poetry and in fiction, was of sitting in the lap of his Litvak grandfather, a former rabbi, in the ancient town of Polotsk in 1940, and eating challah and drinking milk from his hands. This was the last time my father and his mother would see the old rabbi who stayed behind with his holy books and was murdered in his home.

He was a Jewish student who applied to medical school in the summer of 1953, after the “doctors plot” and Stalin’s death, in part out of a sense of solidarity with other Jewish doctors, in part because medicine and literature form one of the most hallowed marriages in both Russian and Jewish culture. In his second Jewish life, he was a young Jewish poet entering the literary scene during Khrushchev’s “thaw” of the late 1950s, not yet loath to coach the internationalist rhetoric in the vestments of the 1920s avant-garde yet cognizant of the dim prospects of being able to publish his overtly Jewish poems. He was a young Jewish intellectual, having already shed, and especially after the bloody suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, many of his illusions. Hungry to get news about the world outside the Soviet borders, he sought snippets of truth wherever he could find them. In one of the surviving images from 1959, he stands outside the Russian Museum, Pushkin’s monument behind his back, holding an issue of L’Unità. And yet his deepening doubts did not deter him from becoming a Jewish military doctor who still held a romantic view of duty and service to Russia and gave two years of his life to treating soldiers in a tank division stationed in Belarus. It was then, perhaps paradoxically, that my father’s Jewish activism most aligned with the values of his Jewish American peers during the late 1950s and 1960s.

He was a Jewish newlywed in love with a young Jewish woman from Moscow, a philologist and translator by the name of Emilia Polyak, my beautiful mother, who would take his last name after emigration. Their fathers had known each other as kids back in Kamianets-Podilskyi, a city in southwestern Ukraine famous for its Turkish fortress and strong Zionist organizations, which had both prepared and hadn’t prepared several of their siblings, my parents’ aunts and uncles, for the lives of halutzim. Together—and this was prior to the watershed of 1967 when Israel became a Soviet public enemy—and self-conscious Jewish behaviors were deemed “Zionist” and scorned—my parents still dreamed of successful careers while cognizant of their glass ceiling. And he was a happy Jewish father who, in the late 1960s in Moscow, taught his son the meaning of being Jewish and also gave me lifelong lessons of Jewish self-defense—less Krav Maga and more the Russian street fist fighting he had mastered while growing up in a rough working-class area of Leningrad. In this third Jewish life—the life of a young husband and father in a country now pointing the proverbial gun at her Jews—even sticking one’s Jewish neck out was a form of activism, and bringing up a child who understood Jewish history was an act of zealotry.

He was a poet and literary translator with a distinctly non-Slavic first name and an adopted hybrid penname, David, “David Petrov,” in turn derived from his father’s first name Peysakh (which was later Russianized as Petr). And with such a “communicating name,” coupled with a record of friendships with banished writers such as Joseph Brodsky, my father struggled to gain official status as a Soviet writer. He was not well prepared to compromise with the regime, especially when it came to questions of aesthetics and to Jewish themes pulsating through his writings. He sought support from the great Jewish survivors of revolutionary art, notably Ilya Selvinsky and Viktor Shklovsky. Despite their recommendations, he was only admitted to the Union of Soviet Writers in 1976 after a long uphill battle. His second poetry collection, Winter Ship, moved up the frozen straits of the Soviet Writer Publishing House with major Jewish Soviet poets discouraging slowness and was finally never published. My father’s fourth Jewish life was one of seeking reluctant compromise after the fashion of major Jewish Soviet poets such as Ilya Ehrenburg or Boris Slutsky—ultimately, as history would demonstrate, a Jewish cul-de-sac. The notion that something Jewish was better than nothing Jewish ultimately resulted in confrontation. In 1975-76, my father composed poems where disharmonies of his Russian and Jewish selves adumbrated his conflict with the Soviet regime. In one of his best known lyrical poems of the 1970s, a poet’s “Slavic” soul escapes from his “typical,” “hollow,” “Jewish wrapping” to hide in hayloft and weep. In another, “Chagall’s Self-Portrait with Wife,” which the Jewish American poet Edwin Honig and I would later co-translate, the levitations of Chagall’s Jewish couple prefigure either a flight to freedom or a passage to assimilation. After my father read these poems in official venues in 1977-78, the party bosses at the Union of Soviet Writers summoned and chastised him for reading “Zionist” poetry. One could argue whether or not the poems were “Zionist” in a broadly cultural way, but in the 1970s Soviet context they were Jewishly activist.

It’s important to note that in this fourth Jewish life, my father was a pursuer of simultaneous paths in literature and medical research, already brooding with Jewish dissent and yet still attempting to live a semblance of a middle-class Soviet life. By Western academic standards, his success as a medical researcher would be measured by the almost 110 academic articles in the fields of microbiology, immunology, and oncology. He defended his Ph.D. in his late 20s, obtained his habilitation (doctor of medical science) in his late 30s, became a senior investigator—knocking his head against the upper barriers he faced as a Jewish professional who was not a party member. But the review of his habilitation—a required path to professorship—was laden with antisemitism of some of the pillars of Soviet medical science who sat on the adjudicating board. To borrow Chekhov’s aphorism, in the late 1970s my father had squeezed out the last drops of Soviet optimism. Once his stubborn hope to prevail in a system that was at best neutral and at average hostile had been crushed, emigration became the only viable Jewish option.

In the meantime, a parallel, fifth Jewish life of travel across the vast Soviet Union had also been pushing him toward leave-taking. On his trips, both for research (his experimental treatment of mixed bacterial infections was gaining national traction) and for literary events, especially in Siberia, Transcaucasia, and the Baltics, my father interacted with representatives of many larger and smaller ethnoreligious groups. During his travels across the vast colonial empire, he obsessed with meeting local Jews and finding remains of local Jewish life. Already in America, in the autobiographical story “White Sheep on a Green Mountain Slope,” featured in his collection Dinner with Stalin and Other Stories, he would depict a trip to Azerbaijan in 1967, the year I was born. In a mountain valley, my father encountered a local apparatchik at a wealthy collective farm, an educated man who passed himself for a Moslem but later took his Jewish guest to a secret underground chapel in a deep cellar, where a case with a Torah had been preserved along with a menorah. Those were descendants of the Mountain Jews who had been forced to convert to Islam but remained crypto-Jews. While visiting Trakaj (Troki), once the seat of Lithuanian grand dukes, my father sought out members of the small community of Lithuanian Karaites. They rebuffed him, touting the very untruth that had helped them survive during the Shoah: We are Karaims, we’re not Jews.

It was in the middle of the 1970s—when the majority of America’s Jewish artists and intellectuals did not decry assimilationist or apostatic scenarios—that my father became convinced of the impossibility of assimilation and the falsehood of hopes of those Soviet Jews who thought they could blend in through social mimicry. (Mimicry would remain one of my father’s favorite tropes for depicting Jews who were passing for non-Jews.) This was also the time when Jewish-centered activist thinking took center stage in my father’s creative output. In this regard his long poem Wailing Wall (Russian title Stena placha), a Jewish Soviet lamentation, was a case in point. Completed during our first, watershed refusenik year, when our whole public life had become dramatically undone, the poem circulated in Jewish and refusenik samizdat. It concluded with a reminiscence about a late-spring east Siberian snowstorm during the mid-to-late 1970s, when a postal plane made an emergency landing in Ust’-Barguzin, a fishing town on Lake Baikal in the Buryat Autonomous Republic. The autobiographical traveler, a Jew from Moscow contemplating emigration, encountered a drunk fisherman with a Jewish last name. As the lost Transbaikalian Jew stroked the face of his daughter who had the characteristic cheek bones of her Buryat mother, the poet imagined the future of his own Jewish son: “Is this the Wailing Wall, the boundary of Jewish lamentations: / To seek Exodus or to transform into little Kikes with high cheek bones? / Did I sing the songs of Russia / Only to say goodbye forever to the Jewish dream?”

I have approached the boundary of my father’s sixth Jewish life, one of his most overt political activism—a refusenik’s struggle for deliverance. The refusenik movement had no equivalents in either scale or thrust among other opposition and dissident movements inside the USSR, and the regime responded to it with merciless rancor. As I think about refusenikdom as both Jewish resistance and Jewish victimhood, I note that my late father—the same is also true of my mother—was a member of the last generation of Jewish Soviet intelligentsia, many of whom voluntarily placed their careers on the chopping block but for the vague promise of getting their children out. Instead of being allowed to emigrate, my father became an ostracized and blacklisted author, expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers with the official verdict “for going to Israel,” and an academic fired from his research position. The vast majority of his literary and academic colleagues forgot our phone number. In the course of the eight and a half years our family spent in limbo, my father preached the message that Jewish refuseniks were foreign subjects interned in the USSR. He built his social and political conduct on a vision of himself as an illegally and temporarily detained Jewish professional. From a medical researcher with advanced degrees working at a prestigious academic institution, he stepped into the life of a rank-and-file Soviet physician at a neighborhood health center: underpaid, loved by patients, and always prepared to treat fellow refuseniks. From a conflicted Jewish writer with an official Soviet status, he turned into an unsanctioned scribe of the exodus of Jews from the USSR and a poet of the refusenik ghetto with some 15,000 detainees in the 1980s. In 1979-80, my father wrote the first part of what would become a trilogy of novels about refuseniks, for which he is still best known. In documenting with anatomical precision the mutually unbreachable contradictions of a mixed Jewish Russian marriage, he treated the story of Doctor Herbert Levitin, his ethnic Russian, Orthodox Christian, peasant wife Tatyana, and their son Anatoly, as an allegory of Jewish Russian history. In spite of persecution and arrests by the KGB, my father’s life as a refusenik writer was remarkably prolific; he wrote two novels, several plays, a memoir, and scores of stories and verses. In 1982-87, my parents hosted a salon for refuseniks, where Jewish writers read their works and Jewish musicians performed. His refusenik activism reached its climax in autumn of 1985, when the office of the Moscow city prosecutor was concocting charges against him for disseminating Zionist ideas. Despite his friendships with refusenik political heroes, such as the “prisoner of Zion” Vladimir Slepak, in his public activism my father preferred the mantle of a refusenik wordsmith. On his trusty Olympia, which now lives with me, he typed up slogans for refusenik demonstrations he would also participate in and composed a Purim play for an unsanctioned Moscow Jewish troupe. And he always relished the role of a refusenik activist doctor, treating Jewish families with infertility issues and clandestinely advising Jewish parents on how to get their sons out of the military draft at the time of the Soviet-Afghan War.

Our family was among the several hundred families of veteran refuseniks who were finally granted permission to emigrate in the perestroika spring of 1987. My father’s seventh Jewish life began on June 7, 1987. In America, he would sign his literary publications with the hyphenated Shrayer-Petrov—a dual tribute to his previous lives of Jewish activism against many historical odds. His life as a Jewish Soviet immigrant in America, which lasted 37 years, was the longest in stride and outwardly the least turbulent. It was also, and this is near speculation on my part, a Jewish Russian American version of the kind of life in medicine and literature that he would have wanted to have lived out in the country of his birth and literary language, had history not made different arrangements. And so, much to his chagrin, my father never practiced medicine but rather worked as a medical researcher at Brown University and Boston University schools of medicine, conducting experimental research at the crossroads of immunology and oncology. The research was rewarding, but a part of him, perhaps thinking against the current of historical time, missed his activism as a refusenik doctor. On the literary plane, much of the poetry he had written for the proverbial desk drawer or for limited samizdat and tamizdat circulation was published in periodicals and in the 12 collections of his Russian verse that he shepherded to print between 1989 and 2021. And yet literary fiction and nonfiction, both longer and shorter, was where he made his mark as an American writer—both in the estranged perspective on the Soviet past and in his increasing focus on the lives of Soviet and Jewish immigrants to America. Of his 11 novels, six collections of short stories, and four volumes of memoirs published since he left the USSR, at least half are set in America, mainly in New England. Since coming to America, my parents have lived exclusively in New England, first in Providence, Rhode Island, and later in Brookline, Massachusetts, where my mother lives and where my wife and I have raised our two daughters.

And it is with my father’s eighth Jewish life—one of nearly four decades as a New England writer—that I would like to turn in closing. As a Russian-Jewish American writer from New England, he made a literary return to Russia during the post-Soviet years. He became a grandfather to Boston-born grandchildren and a contributor to Boston’s and Cape Cod’s literary life. And it was in Boston that he, already ailing, saw the publication of Doctor Levitin in English almost 40 years after he had completed it in Moscow, and experienced the belated recognition beyond the Russophone literary communities. In the words of the Boston-based journalist Penny Schwartz, a “refusenik had made art of the Soviet Jewish tragedy.” In the spring of 2014, on the occasion of the publication of his collection Dinner with Stalin, my father and I sat down for a long conversation which appeared in three parts. “I’ve lived here for almost twen­ty-eight years,” my father told me. “I think that I’ve root­ed myself in New Eng­land. It has become my sec­ond—now my main—habi­tat. If asked about it, I now respond with­out hes­i­ta­tion that I’m a New Englan­der, even though I lived for fifty years in Rus­sia, in Leningrad and Moscow.” Identity hyphenations were becoming more and more complex the longer my father lived in New England. Since the early 1970s, relations between Jews and gentiles had been a principal concern of his writing. In New England, he became a chronicler of mixed marriages, and the span of his observations and admonitions kept growing wider and wider to include not only ex-Soviet Jews and their partners but also American Jews and gentiles and also immigrants from Armenia, Japan, Germany, Poland, Turkey, and the former Yugoslavia. Specifically in New England with its college towns and with the motley ethnoreligious communities of its larger cities, my father found a rich field of observation. Now religion played a much greater role in his Jewish activist thinking about the future of Jewish identity. His story “Hände Hoch!” (1999) ponders the marriage of a Jewish American woman and an expatriate German professor of psychology who specializes in trauma. Through a game, in which their halachically Jewish son plays a Nazi officer chasing a hunted Jew (actually his German father), the boy enacts what his own parents fail to acknowledge. Gently and even playfully, my father cautions that it would fall to the children of mixed marriages to breach their parents’ unresolved contradictions.

What, then, of my father’s ninth Jewish life, a life that had started back in the Soviet Union, reached its first crescendo with his refusenik years, and mostly unfolded during his American decades? This was his life as an Israeli he never became and as an advocate for the State of Israel. Even before the formation of the Jewish state, Israel (people still called it “Palestine” during my father’s Stalinist childhood) was on his radar screen not only as a biblical homeland but a contemporary place where he had close family whom he openly acknowledged. During the refusenik years, Israel was the source of activist hopes and dreams. The protagonist of the narrative poem “Yuri Dolgorukiy,” which my father read at refusenik gatherings in 1985-87, is a martyr, part Samson, part socialist-revolutionary partisan. “We won’t be Russia’s enemies, / You all-powerful prince of purgatory,” he says in the finale. “In Egypt we were slaves, / Now let us go to Israel.” In 1986, Israel’s Aliyah Library published an early draft of the first part of his refusenik trilogy. And ultimately not making aliyah and choosing America was something of a personal drama for my father. He was a tired 51-year-old refusenik when he left the USSR. Wyatt Andrews, a senior CBS correspondent who assisted Dan Rather with interviewing my parents for The Soviet Union: Seven Days in May, a documentary about the USSR on the brink of change, subsequently told me that my father looked younger as a 61-year-old American than a 51-year-old Soviet. During the visits to Israel—including a trip we took together in 2012 on the invitation of Bar-Ilan University—my father would become alive in some incomparable way. Being able to speak Russian, his literary language, everywhere in the streets and squares of Israel, was only one part of his joy of being there. The other was the large and vibrant mishpocha of the Israeli Shrayers, Hebraized to Sharir (שרייר Hebraized to שריר), including his father’s older brother and first cousins his age, a whole world he never fully discovered but loved with his heart. His lobbying on Israel’s behalf could certainly be contextualized as the activism of an ex-Soviet Jew in America, where ex-Soviet Jews and their descendants count themselves among Israel’s staunchest supporters and defenders. And while my father attended rallies and flew Israeli flags, the thrust of his pro-Israel Jewish activism was that of a literary polemicist. I’m proud to say that as a Jewish writer in America, David Shrayer-Petrov was ahead of the curve. Already in the late 2000s and early 2010s, he clearly recognized the seeds of both the new American antisemitism and of the revived Soviet anti-Zionism, whose poisonous vines would choke Jewish life and chase Jews into a new underground after Oct. 7. In late 2011 and early 2012, right in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street movement, my father composed one of his last great stories, “Mansion over the Town Fields,” which was published in Russian during his lifetime and posthumously in English.

It’s a Boston-based story about the broken love of a Jewish young woman and a non-Jewish young man. A piano student at Boston Conservatory, Margaret is the daughter of a Jewish financier. “Theirs was a Jewish nontraditional home,” my father’s narrator explains, “where everything was allowed, except you couldn’t forget your origins and you had to know the main tenets of Jewish history.” A talented rebel marked with the nickname “the Skald,” her boyfriend Chris wears a jacket with Leonard Cohen’s lines printed on the back: “First we take Manhattan, / Then we take Berlin.” About Chris, the reader learns that

for many years his father, whose parents immigrated from Ireland and from Norway, and his mother, who as a child was brought to America from postwar Poland, had been breaking their backs—literally, in keeping with this staid metaphor of hard physical labor … Finally, by the time they had reached their forties, Chris’s parents had saved enough to … purchase of a Shell gas station in their neighborhood … Chris’s father sent his son to Emmanuel College, hoping that his ancestors would look gladly at the first lawyer in their lineage.

Initially, the couple’s tensions might be dismissed as resulting from a disparity of class and financial status. Then an encampment of protesters sprouts overnight at the town fields of Brookline (a near-suburb of Boston with a sizable Jewish population), thus extending the radical slogan “Occupy Wall Street” to occupy (Boston’s Jewish) neighborhoods. Some fatidic premonition brings Margaret to Boston’s Dewey Square, where protesters are getting ready to march:

“Let’s go to Park Plaza … Israeli Consulate,” she heard one of the protesters shout. Two new banners soared above the crowd: “Israel Must Go” and “Free Palestine.” Scanning the crowd with his eyes, Chris the Skald walked ahead of a group of protesters. He spotted his girlfriend but didn’t stop. He was leading the protesters in the direction of a police cordon, holding one side of a large banner with the words “Occupy Boston” painted on it.

This is a moment of both heartbreak and clarity for Margaret, and the finale of the story tests her loyalty to family and to Israel. Such a commitment strikes me, my father’s son and a student of Russian letters, as both Jewishly activist and stubbornly Dostoevskian in its spiritual imperative of not making a choice based on either “mathematical” proof or arguments constructed on behalf of Jews. “I’ll never go with you,” says my father’s last Jewish heroine, and I believe my father imagined his own granddaughters once facing, once making a similar choice of Jewish activism:

Overpowering the voices of his comrades, he waved with his free hand and called out.

“Margo, over here. Come with us.”

“Israel Must Go,” echoed the crowd. “Israel Must Go. Israel Must Go.”

“Chris, no. I can’t!” Margaret shouted, speaking more to herself than to the man she loved. “I’ll never go with you. Israel will stand forever.”