Q&A with Maxim D. Shrayer

 

Photo by Lee Pelligrini

 

Maxim D. Shrayer is the author of the new collection Kinship. His many other books include Immigrant Baggage: Morticians, Purloined Diaries, and Other Theatrics of Exile. He grew up in Moscow and emigrated to the United States in 1987. He is Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College.

 

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

 

A: I started working on the poems collected in Kinship after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, 2022. I remember waking up to the news of the war in Ukraine and thinking: this is just so unbelievable, so unfair, so devastating. I have deep roots in Ukraine, family graves, and I, too, have a stake in this war. That outrage gave the collection its initial impetus.

 

And I was putting the finishing touches on the poems in the collection when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, 2024. I was even able to make a few changes in “Eretz Israel,” a cycle of seven poems about visiting Israel with my then nine-year old daughter Tatiana Rebecca (now herself a published poet), and my post-October 7th changes were a form of grieving through verse and in verse.

 

Q: The writer Elizabeth Poliner said of the book, “In Kinship the poet Maxim D. Shrayer takes on our troubled times—including COVID-19, January 6th, the Russian invasion of Ukraine—as well as troubled past times, gracing these events with his honesty, sorrow, and multi-cultural perspective.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: I greatly admire Elizabeth Poliner’s work, both prose and poetry, and I’m grateful for her eloquently concise description of the book.

 

I think she is correct that the book’s main themes—ancestry in Eastern Europe, the Shoah, antisemitism both old and new, the refusenik experience and the Jewish national liberation movement behind the Iron Curtain, displacement and immigration, Zionism and Israel—reflect both my personal history as an immigrant and my literary and academic interests as a student of exile.

 

As I worked on these poems, I thought of poetry’s  unique ability to possess both the urgency of a public safety announcement and the passion of the ancient Hebrew psalmists.

Q: How was the collection's title—also the title of the first poem—chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: Kinship as a collection records my changed relationship, on the one hand, with my roots in the former Soviet Union, in Ukraine, Lithuania, and Russia, and on the other hand, with my first language, still one of the two languages in which I write, Russian.

 

The title poem, “Kinship,” is in many ways about that—about my relationship with Russia and Ukraine, and various conflicted feelings that this relationship brings to the forefront. And it's about this new demarcation line separating me from Russia’s present and future. For as long as Putin is in power, I could not go back to Russia—either physically or metaphysically.

 

Q: How did you decide on the order in which the poems would appear in the book?

 

A: Back in 1989, when I was assembling my first collection of Russian-language poetry, which came out in New York, my father, the writer David Shrayer-Petrov, who is my principal literary mentor, gave me fabulous advice. His advice was not to get fixated on the deliberateness of the poems’ order in a collection. Readers will find their own way of reading the book—if they like the poetry.

 

I also appreciate what Boris Pasternak, a great Russian poet although not a very good Jew or novelist, said about the way he chose his rhymes: as the Lord disposes. So a certain reliance on randomness or on divine intervention is not a bad strategy in trying to arrange one’s poems inside a collection.

 

The only thing I did do deliberately in Kinship was the placement of the first poem and the final poem. I knew that I wanted Kinship to open with the title poem, an antiwar, anti-Putin text, which captures my combined feelings of anger, shame, and despair.

 

And I also decided that “Homecoming,” the collection’s longest poem, might be well suited as the closing text. “Homecoming” envisions an émigré Russian artist who left many, many decades ago, foreswears ever going back, and yet returns because he realizes that the only way he can punish Putin's regime is by miraculously taking all his words out of his books in Russia’s libraries.

 

The opening poem is closer to my own personal story, the second one, to a collective history of exile. Both the personal story and the collective history have to do with the impossibility of return—for as long as a dictatorial regime, a bloody regime, rules Russia.

 

Almost every dictatorship likes to lie and present itself to the world as a place where culture is valued. So if, of course, by some miracle, all writers would extract all their works from the Russian libraries, Putin’s regime would be left with empty pages.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I am putting together a new collection of poems, all of them written over the past eight months, and most of them in response to what happened on and after October 7.

 

Some of the poems have appeared over the past several months, and I’m grateful to the magazines and web portals that have responded to the current anti-Israel literary bacchanalia by opening their spaces to poems in support of Israel and in opposition to antisemitism.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: Deborah, thanks so much for your questions. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you. One of my hopes for Kinship is that it would help Anglo-American readers connect a lot of the political and cultural dots. We talk about the war in Ukraine and the war in Israel. Who is fighting with whom and for what? What is at stake?

 

There is room in our culture for more poetry that deals with the roots of some of today's biggest conflicts. Among the people who can shed light on these conflicts are translingual Jewish poets who are between worlds, who are rooted in two worlds. Poets who, like myself, came from the former Soviet empire and have made a life here in America—and also in the English language.

 

Some of the poems in Kinship have a political dimension, a historical dimension that probably would require thinking, reflecting, perhaps even additional reading. And yet I don't want this book to be thought of as primarily a political document or a pamphlet. It's a book of lyrical poems; they are confessional and self-denuding, and that's the best hope I have for any poem.

 

P.S. The photo on the cover is from Monomoy Wildlife Refuge on Cape Cod. My wife and I were walking there on a December morning, and I saw this uprooted tree lying on the shore and snapped a picture.

 

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