Maxim D. Shrayer

Waiting for Nabokov

In June 1987 my parents and I left Moscow for good. We spent most of the summer in the sleepy Tyrrhenian coastal resort of Ladispoli, where we waited for our US refugee visas. Soon after arriving in Ladispoli from Rome, my parents and I discovered a Russian lending library at the local Jewish refugee centre, which wasn’t really a refugee centre but a suite of catacombic rooms outfitted with two or three file cabinets, a fax machine and a copier. Two Iranian Jews in aviator sunglasses took over the rooms and used them in the manner of a private office. Nobody knew what their business was; nobody asked questions. A slothful and contemptuous official of the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society (JIAS) visited once a week from Rome to sit in his cubicle and smoke; sometimes a lady friend on killer stiletto heels accompanied him. The refugees received their cash allowances at the local bank. Instead of serving as office clerks and cordial librarians, our Jewish Iranian brothers (who, as it later turned out, were indeed brothers) discouraged us from coming in, and it was rumoured that one of them once called a Jewish woman from the Belarusian town of Gomel ‘an unclean whore’, except how could she (a) hear it when muttered under the Iranian’s breath; and (b) understand it when spoken in Farsi. But the anti-Iranian resentment grew among the Soviet refugees. The lending library wasn’t even a room, but actually five bookcases. JIAS must have purchased a book collection from some emigre widow in New York and shipped it to Ladispoli, without even bothering to check the titles. Why else would there have been, alongside stories and novels by emigre classics Bunin and Aldanov, a reprint of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, issued in Paris in the 1920s? It was a predictably random assortment of books and incomplete runs of New-York-based magazines The New Review (Novyi zhurnal) and Aerial Ways (Vozdushnye puti). Besides fiction, non-fiction and some poetry, there were also various books of the sort the emigres of the post1917 ‘First Wave’ continued to reissue in the places of their dispersion. Among them was a copy of The New Complete Dream Reader. Daniil Vrezinsky, a former gulag inmate who had helped us find an apartment in Ladispoli, took me to the lending library on my second day in Ladispoli. There he found on the shelves and handed me a copy of Spring in Fialta, Vladimir Nabokov’s third Russian collection of stories. The brownish cardstock cover was ripped and missing two corners, but the volume was otherwise in sound shape.

Out of a maelstrom: a deferred history of Jewish‐Russian prose

Taylor and Francis FEEJ_A_361238. gm 10.1080/1 501670802610706 E st European Jewish Affairs 350-1674 (pri t)/1743-971X (online) Original Article 2 08 & Fr cis 38 0 002008 Max mD.Shrayer shrayerm@b . du In a Maelstrom: The History of Russian-Jewish Prose (1860-1940), by Zsuzsa Hetényi, translated by János Boris, Budapest/New York, Central European University Press, 2008, 332 pp., €31.95 (hardback), ISBN 978-963-7326-91-2