Waiting For America: A Story of Emigration
by Shrayer, Maxim D
- Used
- Condition
- See description
- ISBN 10
- 0815608934
- ISBN 13
- 9780815608936
- Seller
-
San Francisco, California, United States
Item Price
€23.32
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
Syracuse University Press, 2007. Paperback, 240 pp.
In 1987 a young Jewish man, the central figure in this captivating book, leaves Moscow for good with his parents. They celebrate their freedom in opulent Vienna and spend two months in Rome and the coastal resort of Ladispoli. While waiting in Europe for a U.S. refugee visa, the book's twenty-year-old poet quenches his thirst for sexual and cultural discovery. Through his colorful Austrian and Italian misadventures, he experiences the shock, thrill, and anonymity of encountering Western democracies, running into European roadblocks while shedding Soviet social taboos. As he anticipates entering a new life in America, he movingly describes the baggage that exiles bring with them, from the inescapable family traps and ties to the sweet cargo of memory. An emigration story, Waiting for America explores the rapid expansion of identity at the cusp of a new, American life. Told in a revelatory first-person narrative, Waiting for America is also a vibrant love story in which the romantic main character is torn between Russian and Western women. Filled with poignant humor and reinforced by hope and idealism, the author's confessional voice carries the reader in the same way one is carried through literary memoirs like Tolstoy's Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, or Nabokov's Speak, Memory. Babel, Sebald, and Singer-all transcultural masters of identity writing-are the coordinates that help to locate Waiting for America on the greater map of literature.
In 1987 a young Jewish man, the central figure in this captivating book, leaves Moscow for good with his parents. They celebrate their freedom in opulent Vienna and spend two months in Rome and the coastal resort of Ladispoli. While waiting in Europe for a U.S. refugee visa, the book's twenty-year-old poet quenches his thirst for sexual and cultural discovery. Through his colorful Austrian and Italian misadventures, he experiences the shock, thrill, and anonymity of encountering Western democracies, running into European roadblocks while shedding Soviet social taboos. As he anticipates entering a new life in America, he movingly describes the baggage that exiles bring with them, from the inescapable family traps and ties to the sweet cargo of memory. An emigration story, Waiting for America explores the rapid expansion of identity at the cusp of a new, American life. Told in a revelatory first-person narrative, Waiting for America is also a vibrant love story in which the romantic main character is torn between Russian and Western women. Filled with poignant humor and reinforced by hope and idealism, the author's confessional voice carries the reader in the same way one is carried through literary memoirs like Tolstoy's Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, or Nabokov's Speak, Memory. Babel, Sebald, and Singer-all transcultural masters of identity writing-are the coordinates that help to locate Waiting for America on the greater map of literature.
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Details
- Bookseller
- Globus Books (US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 15355
- Title
- Waiting For America: A Story of Emigration
- Author
- Shrayer, Maxim D
- Book Condition
- Used
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Binding
- Unknown
- ISBN 10
- 0815608934
- ISBN 13
- 9780815608936
- Publisher
- Syracuse University Press
- Place of Publication
- Syracuse, New York, U.s.a.
- Date Published
- 2007
Terms of Sale
Globus Books
30 day return guarantee, with full refund including original shipping costs for up to 30 days after delivery if an item arrives misdescribed or damaged.
About the Seller
Globus Books
Biblio member since 2021
San Francisco, California
About Globus Books
Globus Books, an independent bookstore serving San Francisco since 1971, offers a wide-ranging and always changing stock of books on all things Russia.
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