Free Download Maxim D. Shrayer, "A Russian Immigrant: Three Novellas"
English | ISBN: 1644690365 | 2019 | 140 pages | PDF | 6 MB
"A quietly powerful addition to the canon of émigré literature" -The Moscow Times
No longer at home in Russia, but not quite assimilated into the American mainstream, the daily lives of Russian immigrants are fueled by a combustible mix of success and alienation. Simon Reznikov, the Boston-based immigrant protagonist of Maxim D. Shrayer’s A Russian Immigrant, is restless. Unresolved feelings about his Jewish (and American) present and his Russian (and Soviet) past prevent Reznikov from easily putting down roots in his new country.
A visit to a decaying summer resort in the Catskills, now populated by Jewish ghosts of Soviet history, which include a famous émigré writer, reveals to Reznikov that he, too, is a prisoner of his past. An expedition to Prague in search of clues for an elusive Jewish writer’s biography exposes Reznikov’s own inability to move on. A chance reunion with a former Russian lover, now also an immigrant living in an affluent part of Connecticut, unearths memories of Reznikov’s last Soviet summer while reanimating many contradictors of a mixed, Jewish-Russian marriage.
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