Max­im D. Shray­er is a bilin­gual writer and a pro­fes­sor at Boston Col­lege. Shrayer’s lat­est book is Leav­ing Rus­sia: A Jew­ish Sto­ry, a final­ist for the 2013 Nation­al Jew­ish Book Awards. This week he blogs for the Vis­it­ing Scribe series about the tex­ture of Jew­ish mem­o­ry — about a buried Sovi­et past which means more to Jew­ish immi­grants in Amer­i­ca than it does to today’s Rus­sians in Russia. 

I felt the first pangs of this Leningrad remem­brance when my daugh­ters and their Hebrew school class­mates, stand­ing in a semi­cir­cle next to the bimah, sang ​“Or Zarua LaTzadik….“ Then it was Mick­ey Katz, a won­der­ful Boston cel­list and the comedian’s name­sake, liv­ing through every mea­sure of Kol Nidre and remind­ing me so acute­ly of a Jew­ish musi­cian I once knew in Leningrad. And final­ly, there were wet stri­a­tions on the east­ern wall of our shul’s main sanc­tu­ary, marks of recent water dam­age or water­marks of aged Sovi­et mem­o­ry. I was in shul with my wife, daugh­ters and par­ents, our Brook­line shul with a gild­ed dome; I was also back in Rus­sia, under the tall dome of Leningrad’s autum­nal sky…

On a snowy Thurs­day in Decem­ber of 1986 my best Moscow friend Max Mus­sel and I met up at the Leningrad­sky train sta­tion. Ditch­ing Fri­day and Sat­ur­day class­es, we went to Leningrad for the week­end. It was a famil­iar rou­tine: two or three times a year dur­ing 1984 – 86, Max and I would go to Rus­si­a’s west­ern­most city, where my father had been born and raised, just to get away from our inland cap­i­tal. We would either take the cheap­est overnight train from Moscow and ride in a car with door­less sleep­er com­part­ments, or, when mon­ey was par­tic­u­lar­ly tight, we went by day train with its seats made of uncush­ioned wood. Our month­ly uni­ver­si­ty stipends were about forty to forty-five rubles, and the cheap­est roundtrip stu­dent tick­et to Leningrad cost about ten rubles, so with some help from our par­ents we could almost afford these occa­sion­al trips. 

Wax­ing poet­ic about the archi­tec­tur­al splen­dor of St. Peters­burg, this last of the great Euro­pean cities, would be like say­ing that Paris is roman­tic in the spring — equal­ly true and trite. And while Max and I loved what was left of St. Peters­burg in the Leningrad of our Sovi­et stu­dent years, it was­n’t the West­ern archi­tec­ture that so attract­ed us. Rather, going to Leningrad accord­ed the uplift­ing sen­sa­tion of being at the bound­ary, the Gulf of Fin­land sep­a­rat­ing Rus­sia from — link­ing it to — the West.

On that par­tic­u­lar Decem­ber vis­it in 1986 we took a train Thurs­day night, expect­ing to arrive in a north­ern city choked with snow and icy chill. Express overnight trains arrived ear­ly in the morn­ing, and in win­ter, imme­di­ate­ly upon get­ting off the train, Mus­covites would take com­fort in know­ing that their cli­mate was less severe. This time, as we walked up the long plat­form of Leningrad’s Moskovsky sta­tion, songs about the city of Lenin, the cra­dle of Rev­o­lu­tion, boom­ing from up on high, Max and I were sur­prised how unsea­son­ably warm it felt. But­tons were undone and win­ter hats stuffed in our week­end duf­fle bags. Our best Leningrad friend Katya Tsara­p­ki­na, who met us on the plat­form by the entrance to the sta­tion, remarked with only a bit of irony that we both looked like ​“young West­ern authors or film­mak­ers” vis­it­ing her windy Sovi­et city. 

Years lat­er we would refer to that Decem­ber 1986 vis­it to Leningrad as our ​“sur­re­al­ist” trip. The word siur (short for the Russ­ian ​“siurreal­izm”) was con­sid­ered chic, and we used it not always cor­rect­ly or judi­cious­ly. My rec­ol­lec­tions of that vis­it are enveloped with a film of strange­ness, and not just tinged with spell­bind­ing illu­sions of loss. Such was the light, crisp and bright, with strips of azure and magen­ta around the edges of build­ings and mon­u­ments. Such was the air our lungs gulped that morn­ing; not the arrest­ing air blow­ing from the Gulf of Fin­land, but a warm, souther­ly breeze, as though waft­ing in, impos­si­bly, from the Mediter­ranean. And such was the mood that over­took us at the train sta­tion plat­form and held us, hap­py and serene, for the rest of the warm Decem­ber day. 

We dropped the bags at Katya’s apart­ment. My father and Katya’s moth­er, Inga Kogan, are the same age and grew up in adja­cent build­ings in Lesnoye, a neigh­bor­hood of Leningrad’s Vyborg work­ing-class dis­trict. And as if this con­nec­tion was­n’t enough, in Leningrad Katya and her par­ents were liv­ing in an apart­ment house erect­ed next to the site of a razed eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry build­ing where my father had grown up. When we stayed there dur­ing our vis­its to Leningrad, we would be car­ried back to the time of my father’s post­war boy­hood in the siege-rav­aged Leningrad, but also to the youth and Khrushchev’s Thaw that our par­ents had in common.

Katya, too, was blow­ing off class­es at her Chem­i­cal-Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal Insti­tute. The three of us rode the metro back to the cen­ter and walked along the embank­ment of the undu­lat­ing Gri­boe­dov Canal, head­ing for Leningrad’s The­ater Square, site of the Kirov The­ater (now, again, Mari­in­sky) and the Leningrad Con­ser­va­to­ry of Music. There, at the col­lege attached to the con­ser­va­to­ry, our friend Mari­na Evrei­son was study­ing piano. Mari­na’s last name means ​“Jew­i­son”; when she said her name in pub­lic, peo­ple turned around. This petite woman with per­cep­tive eyes of Nevan grey was some­thing of a leg­end in the cir­cles of young Leningrad musi­cians, owing both to her tal­ent and to the qui­et dig­ni­ty with which she car­ried her most Jew­ish of names. Katya, Max, and I swang by the wing of the con­ser­va­to­ry where Mari­na’s class was about to end. We ran down the con­ser­va­to­ry’s gran­ite steps cracked by wartime bom­bard­ments and pol­ished by the feet of many great musi­cians. We were feel­ing free and rebel­lious. All day, while it was still light out, we wan­dered around Leningrad, soak­ing in its beau­ty. As it turned out, this was to be my last vis­it to Leningrad pri­or to emi­gra­tion, but I could hard­ly imag­ine at the time that six months lat­er, in June 1987, I would leave Moscow for good — to become first a Jew­ish refugee in Italy, then a Sovi­et immi­grant on an East Coast uni­ver­si­ty campus.

Born in Moscow in 1967 in the fam­i­ly of the writer David Shray­er-Petrov, Max­im D. Shray­er emi­grat­ed to the Unit­ed States in 1987. He has authored over ten books in Eng­lish and Russ­ian, among them the mem­oir Wait­ing for Amer­i­ca: A Sto­ry of Emi­gra­tion, the sto­ry col­lec­tion Yom Kip­pur in Ams­ter­dam, and the Holo­caust study I SAW IT. Shrayer’s Anthol­o­gy of Jew­ish-Russ­ian Lit­er­a­ture won a 2007 Nation­al Jew­ish Book Award, and in 2012 he received a Guggen­heim Fel­low­ship. A recent review in Jew­ish Book Coun­cil’s lit­er­ary review mag­a­zine Jew­ish Book World called Leav­ing Rus­sia, his lat­est book, a ​“stun­ning mem­oir” and rec­om­mend­ed that it ​“should be assigned read­ing for any­one inter­est­ed in the Jew­ish expe­ri­ence of the twen­ti­eth century.”

Copy­right © 2014 by Max­im D. Shrayer

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