By
With its selection for inclusion in a major new anthology of Jewish American fiction, the title story of Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies Maxim D. Shrayer’s acclaimed 2009 collection, Yom Kippur in Amsterdam, will reach a new audience.
The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction features 36 stories by some of the leading names in contemporary fiction, including Edith Pearlman, Francine Prose, Jonathan Safran Foer and Nathan Englander.
Literary critic, author and University of British Columbia Professor Ira Nadel writes that the “remarkable” collection “reflects the panoply of interests and literary forms that characterize the variety of Jewish experience today.
“In this anthology, culture, history, and identities intersect and remake themselves. Not to be missed, not to be skipped.”
The story by Shrayer, a noted author and scholar, follows Jake Glaz, a young Jewish man baffled by the prospect of intermarriage to a Catholic woman. After realizing neither he nor she will convert, Jake leaves the United States to spend Yom Kippur in Amsterdam, a “beautiful place for a Jew to atone.” His collection, in which the story is included, offers a compelling and distinctive perspective on the modern immigration experience and on Jewish-Christian relations.
“I’m thrilled to be in the anthology, especially because the editors have chosen the title story of my collection Yom Kippur in Amsterdam,” Shrayer said. “It feels good to share this new diaspora with so many talented authors, and with three other writers who are Jewish-Soviet immigrants.
“So it’s not just a Jewish boy from Moscow who founded an Internet company whose name rhymes with noodle [Google co-founder and Jewish émigré Sergei Brin], but many more girls and boys from different corners of the former Soviet Empire. We’re here to stay.”
Whether set in his native Russia or in North America and Western Europe, Shrayer’s stories explore emotionally intricate relationships that cross traditional boundaries of ethnicity, religion and culture.
His work is included in the second section of The New Diaspora, which, the publisher notes, reflects the evolving landscape of American Jewish fiction over the last 50 years.
The anthology, according to the publisher, “offers an expanded canon of Jewish writing in North America and foregrounds a vision of its variety, its uniqueness, its cosmopolitanism, and its evolving perspectives on Jewish life. It celebrates the continuing vitality and fresh visions of contemporary Jewish writing, even as it highlights its debt to history and embrace of collective memory."