Overview

In this ground-breaking book, based on archival and field research and previously unknown historical evidence, Maxim D. Shrayer introduces the work of Ilya Selvinsky, the first Jewish-Russian poet to depict the Holocaust (Shoah) in the occupied Soviet territories. In January 1942, while serving as a military journalist, Selvinsky witnessed the immediate aftermath of the massacre of thousands of Jews outside the Crimean city of Kerch, and thereafter composed and published poems about it. Shrayer painstakingly reconstructs the details of the Nazi atrocities witnessed by Selvinsky, and shows that in 1943, as Stalin's regime increasingly refused to report the annihilation of Jews in the occupied territories, Selvinsky paid a high price for his writings and actions. This book features over 60 rare photographs and illustrations and includes translations of Selvinsky's principal Shoah poems.

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9781618113078

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Reviews

Shrayer presents an important Soviet poet who until recently remained virtually unknown in the west. Furthermore, his main thesis. . .is grounds for future discussion of what texts should be included in the canon of twentieth-century Russian Jewish literature and whether Selvinskii can indeed be considered a poet of the Shoah. Last but not least, the brilliant translations of Sel΄vinskii's poems will make a perfect addition to relevant course reading lists. --Marina Aptekman Slavic Review, vol. 73, no. 3 (Fall 2014)

What does it mean to bear witness to the Shoah? What does it mean to bear witness to the genocide of Jews in the Soviet Union? These two questions are at the center of Maxim Shrayer s illuminating study of the Jewish-Russian poet Ilya Selvinsky s work and biography that combines literary analysis with historical and biographical research. Shrayer excels in his response to questions that have occupied . . . scholars of Soviet-Jewish history and of the Nazi genocide in German-occupied Soviet territories. The crux for the latter achievement is a detailed reconstruction of the effects that the poet s account of the genocide had on the larger public and on his own life and career. . . . The book is valuable to broad audiences interested in the history of the Holocaust, the history of Soviet Russian-Jewish literature, and the literature of the Holocaust. As the first study of a Soviet-Jewish poet s career who publicly spoke about the Holocaust, the book is an important contribution to recent efforts to scrutinize how the Shoah was represented and perceived in the Soviet Union. Anika Walke, Washington University in St. Louis. Review published in The Russian Review, January 2014 (Vol. 73, No. 1)

Maxim D. Shrayer's impassioned, eloquent, and rich study of Ilya Selvinsky's war-time poems contributes to [the] new history of Holocaust poetry and significantly broadens it. . . . Is [Selvinsky] the case of trauma, fear, or deeply held convictions? What is the relationship between Soviet and Jewish identities? Shrayer's meticulously researched and beautifully argued book urges the reader to ponder these complicated questions, thus deepening the field of both Holocaust and Soviet literary studies. --Marat Grinberg (Reed College) Slavic and East European Journal, 58.3 (Fall 2014)

Author Information

Maxim D. Shrayer (PhD Yale University) is Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish studies at Boston College. A bilingual writer and translator, Shrayer has authored and edited a number of books, among them the path-breaking critical studies The World of Nabokov's Stories and Russian Poet/ Soviet Jew, the acclaimed literary memoir Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration, and the collection Yom Kippur in Amsterdam. Shrayer's two-volume Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature won a 2007 National Jewish Book Award, and in 2012 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. For more information, visit www.shrayer.com.

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