From Publishers Weekly
Professor and memoirist Shrayer (
Waiting for America) delivers eight deliberate stories about educated, accomplished Russians who have uneasily settled in America. Many of these tales viscerally reveal the inability to shed one's past, as in Sonetchka, named for the upwardly mobile émigrée protagonist who has attained financial success but has left her Russian husband, Igor, to fall into drunkenness, despair and, possibly, vengeance against her. The Afterlove is a recollection of postwar first love conjured by Pavel Lidin, who encountered a mermaid at a summer lake camp when he was 13 and later married his best friend's pregnant girlfriend. In two stories, the Jewish Russian protagonist endures a breakup with a gentile woman: in The Disappearance of Zalman, Mark loses his girlfriend once she meets his yeshiva tutor and is smitten by his passionate Jewish nature, while in the title story, a businessman in Amsterdam, feeling guilty for having told his fiancée that he wants a Jewish wife, finds atonement in the city of easy morals. The stories are competently written and soundly constructed, though readers may feel they've read them before.
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Review
"This intricate, thoughtful collection explores the inexorable complexities of relationships and religion.... Shrayer's eight delicate stories trace his characters' diverse struggles against the limits of tradition and culture."- Booklist --Booklist
"The eight stories in Yom Kippur focus on characters with intricate and emotional relationships that cross traditional boundaries of ethnicity, religion and culture."- The Boston College Chronicle --The Boston College Chronicle
"A collection of stories, by Maxim Shrayer, "Yom Kippur in Amsterdam" follows the efforts of Russian Jewish immigrants to come to terms with their pasts as they try to build new lives in America....His writing has qualities of humor, soulfulness and insight." -The Jewish Week --The Jewish Week
"Throughout "Yom Kippur in Amsterdam," Maxim D. Shrayer gives a modern Jewish twist to Shakespeare's dictum, "To thine own self be true." This recently published collection of short stories depicts the romantic struggles of Jewish-American immigrants from the former Soviet Union in terms of identity and intermarriage. Yet the book avoids polemics. Instead, it beckons the reader to conversation like an open café."- The Jewish Advocate --The Jewish Advocate
"Give another cheer for immigration, which has give us the unique voice of Maxim Shrayer...a sense of longing suffuses all the stories....the exquisitely precise vocabulary manages to locate these characters in the present..." --MultiCultural Journal
"Professor and memoirist Shrayer (Waiting for America) delivers eight deliberate stories about educated, accomplished Russians who have uneasily settled in America. Many of these tales viscerally reveal the inability to shed one's past." --Publishers Weekly
"With simple prose and fascinating characters, and a positive message, Yom Kippur in Amsterdam is a fine collection of short stories which does not deserve to be ignored." --Midwest Book Review
"In Yom Kippur in Amsterdam...Shrayer explores the complex and often difficult adjustments of Russian-Jewish immigrants to American life...Throughout, the writing is soulful, evocative, and deeply detailed." --Jewish Book World
"In this debut collection of short stories, Maxim Shrayer investigates shades of Russian-Jewish identity and experience in America. His felicitous prose focuses on the lives of Russian immigrants who have made a life here, not the trials and tribulations of those just arrived. Maxim Shrayer joins a list of Russian-born authors enriching American Jewish fiction with stories and novels.... Recommended for all fiction collections."- Association of Jewish Libraries Newsletter --Association of Jewish Libraries Newsletter
