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Nine Lives

JL;DR SUMMARY Maxim D. Shrayer's extensive eulogy for his father, David Shrayer-Petrov, captures the multifaceted Jewish life lived across several decades from Soviet Leningrad to Boston. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude. Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.

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Tags

Jewish HistorySoviet JewryJewish IdentityDiasporaEmigrationLiteratureIntelligentsiaDavid Shrayer PetrovKhrushchev's Thaw

Places mentioned

Leningrad, Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation
"my father, David Shrayer-Petrov, who was born in Leningrad in January 1936"
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
"and died in Boston in June 2024 at the age of 88"
Polotsk, Vitebsk, Belarus
"was of sitting in the lap of his Litvak grandfather, a former rabbi, in the ancient town of Polotsk in 1940"
Kamianets-Podilskyi, Khmelnychchyna, Ukraine
"fathers had known each other as kids back in Kamianets-Podilskyi"
Molotov, Kamchatka Krai, Russian Federation
"David Shrayer-Petrov with his mother, Bella Breydo. Siva, Molotov (Perm) Province, 1942.Courtesy the author"
Israel
"poems were Zionist in a broadly cultural way, but in the 1970s Soviet context they were Jewishly activist. Its important to note that in this fourth Jewish life"
Ust-Barguzin, Sakha, Russian Federation
"late-spring east Siberian snowstorm during the mid-to-late 1970s, when a postal plane made an emergency landing in Ust-Barguzin"
Sakha, Russian Federation
"a fishing town on Lake Baikal in the Buryat Autonomous Republic"
Brookline, Massachusetts, United States
"in Brookline, Massachusetts, where my mother lives"
Estonia
"Trakaj (Troki), once the seat of Lithuanian grand dukes, my father sought out members of the small community of Lithuanian Karaites"
Azerbaijan
"depict a trip to Azerbaijan in 1967, the year I was born. In a mountain valley, my father encountered a local apparatchik"

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Cairo Item ID 75228
Cairo Source ID 10
Retrieved 2026-02-13 05:30:45 UTC
Curated 2026-02-13 08:31:15 UTC