Q&A with Maxim D. Shrayer

 

Photo by Lee Pellegrini

 

 

Maxim D. Shrayer is the author of the new poetry collection Zion Square. His many other books include Immigrant Baggage. He is a professor at Boston College. 

 

Q: Over how long a period did you write the poems in your new collection, Zion Square?

 

A: Thank you, Deborah. As you already know from our previous conversations, Russian rather than English used to be the principal language of my poetry until about 2019 and the onset of COVID.

 

Now, the vast majority of the poems in Zion Square were composed after October 7, 2023. The collection also features revisions of four older poems, twice-removed from the present—by time and language.

 

October 7 is the collection’s tuning fork, and it would be fair to describe Zion Square as a meditation on writing about wars while living between languages and cultures.

 

Wars, in the plural, because war continues to rage in Ukraine, the birthland of my grandfathers and maternal grandmother. And the terror attack of October 7 plunged Israel, the homeland of my heart, into another war.

 

As I worked on these poems, I went to bed with hopes of peace and justice and woke up to more news of violence and abandonment. I still do, today.

 

Zion Square took its final shape after a trip to Israel in May 2024, during which I traveled, lectured and gave readings, saw family and friends, and even picked apricots and plums in the company of a fellow Jewish writer.

 

And then, on 9 June 2024, soon after my return from Israel, my father and teacher, David Shrayer-Petrov ז״ל, died in Boston. Several in the collection speak directly about my father; two are lyrically addressed to him.

 

I should also add that of all my books, this one had the fastest turnaround. In July of 2024, I approached the wonderful Julia Knobloch, rabbi and poet, who curates the Jewish Poetry Project at Ben Yehuda Press. Two weeks later, Larry Yudelson, publisher and great enthusiast of Jewish letters, sent me a contract. Just a little over a year later… the book is out in the world. I feel tremendously grateful.

 

Q: The author David Biespiel said of the book, “With a stubborn belief that poetry must be healing, Shrayer writes poems that break through boundaries and fears, accept defeat, and yearn for pleasure.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: The last thing one would want to do is polemicize with one’s endorsers. My new book received endorsements from David Biespiel, Rodger Kamenetz, Natania Rosenfeld, and Yerra Sugarman—Jewish poetic voices I greatly admire. Each of them had a very different yet an equally thoughtful response to Zion Square.

 

What David Biespiel said about “break[ing] through boundaries and fears” strikes me as especially true to the way I live and write as a Jewish immigrant translingual poet in the age of the new antisemitism and the ongoing, frontal onslaught against Israel and Zionism.

 

I also believe that David is right to point out that my poems “yearn for pleasure”; my poems (and this is, in part, the Russian cultural heritage) are lyrical, and many of them explore love and desire—not just bodily but also verbal.

 

As far as “accept[ing] defeat” is concerned, my sense is that this is not about surrendering but about shedding, perhaps having shed, one’s last Jewish illusions and false hopes.

 

Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: The original title was Conductor from Zion Square. Very briefly: In Jerusalem I like to stay in a small hotel on Yo’el Moshe Salomon Street very close to Kikar HaMusica—Music Square.

 

This short street is famous for the umbrellas suspended over it and forming a particolored dome. Orchestras and music groups perform in the street. If you go directly north, you’ll soon end up in Kikar Tsiyon—Zion Square.

 

During a visit to Israel in 2024, already after October 7, I stayed in the same hotel and walked around. A group of Israeli teenagers were performing in Zion Square to raise money for the hostages.

 

I sat down and composed a longish poem of four stanzas, each 11 lines long, about the experience of being in Israel during the war. I don’t want to give it away through a rational summary; the poem starts on a note of sober historical reflection, goes through moments of despair and grief, and ends with a flight to war-struck metaphysics.

 

I titled the poem “Conductor from Zion Square”—as in conductor of an orchestra and conductor of the universe.

 

It was published in the wonderful journal Vita Poetica. Its mission is to explore the religious experience in and through the arts. Unlike many of today’s literary journals, Vita Poetica regularly publishes Jewish writers and writings with explicit Jewish and Judaic themes. And so the poem gave the new collection its title.

 

Here, uncannily, the poet David Biespiel returns to our conversation. When he read the manuscript, he suggested that I drop “Conductor” and keep “Zion Square.” This was a great recommendation, and I really like the way Zion Square refers not only to a famous place in Jerusalem but also to a meeting place of Jewish ideas about the world. I hope my collection is such a literary meeting place.

 

Q: You dedicated the book to your late father, David Shrayer-Petrov, also a writer, and in the book's afterword, you say that he “is in many verses of this book.” I'm so sorry for your loss, and can you tell us more about him?

 

A: In many ways, Zion Square is a tribute to my late father. He was a writer, a medical doctor and a refusenik activist. In the West, he is best known for his refusenik saga, Doctor Levitin.

 

Born in Leningrad in 1936, my father had a rich and eventful life. After 1987, when we emigrated, my parents lived in New England, and toward the end of his life my father felt he had become a New England poet.

 

He was my principal teacher in poetry, and his judgment meant the world to me. When I was a kid, my father taught me the discipline of committing to poetic form; he subsequently helped me understand the freedom of breaking poetic form—deliberately, self-consciously.

 

His departure created an incredible void, and writing poems, both in Russian and in English, was one of the few things I could meaningfully do as a writer for the entire summer after his death.

 

The new book ends with the poem “Mourning,” in which I expressed my sense of loss and my hope that memory is stronger than death. With your permission, I will read it in its entirety:

 

Mourning

 

My generous father, a myopic Jewish boxer,

lies buried in a suburb west of Boston.

 

His parents sleep in what was once called Leningrad.

I used to visit them before the outbreak of COVID.

 

Two years later Putin’s troops were sent to kill Ukraine;

I gave up hope of going back to Russia—once again.

 

Which in a way could be an immigrant’s blessing:

to bury one’s dead where one’s children will go on living.

 

The irony is sweet: his cemetery’s called American Friendship.

Some of my father’s neighbors came to Ellis Island on a ship.

 

I’ve walked around his block, I’ve stood under a giant oak,

and I have yet to find a single Russian Jew or a refusenik.

 

My father, a New England poet by choice and by persuasion,

rests in the neighborhood of Jewish trades for all occasions.

 

I bring him round pebbles, place them on the sagging loam.

There’s no gravestone yet. We’ll give his body time to settle in.

 

We’ll give it time because I, too, will need more time to finish

the curve of grief. It’s taken me a while to say in English

 

or to whisper it in Russian: He’s gone. He’s physically gone.

My father won’t go fishing with me or read my poems. Alone

 

I’m bound to fail where the two of us used to be so eloquent.

Yet I still wake up every day attempting an experiment.

 

And is it any consolation to know that time is lenient

with those who refuse to give up hope of a reunion?

 

I know my father is alive. There’s no end to lineage,

as long as there’s memory and universal language.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: My wife, younger daughter, and I recently returned from a wonderful sabbatical in Florence. The adjustment to American life—and to what this country is becoming—has not been easy.

 

I’m continuing to work on a book about the great Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov (of Lolita’s and Pnin’s fame) and his relationship with Jewishness, both in his marriage to an unconverted Jewish woman and in his numerous investigations of Jewish culture and history.

 

I’m also working on several smaller projects, some academic and others literary, based on recent my time and research in Italy.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Thank you, Deborah, for these questions. Perhaps, in closing, both an observation and a wish.

 

A year and a half ago, in a long essay on poetry after October 7, I recalled a time from my Soviet past when every Russian-speaking kid in the vast Soviet empire had to memorize Pushkin’s “The Prophet” without being told that it was in fact a rendition of Isaiah 6, and that Pushkin’s poet, who is called upon to “sear the people’s hearts with word,” is a Jewish prophet.

 

In today’s American literary environment, one observes something of a reversal of the old Soviet mode: many poets would probably recognize Isaiah’s language, but not the prophet’s poetic mission.

 

This is not to downplay the significance of the political mode and the lyrical mode, but to express hope that the Isaianic mode will make a comeback in American poetry.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Maxim D. Shrayer.