The Baggage of Exile: A Review of Maxim D. Shrayer’s “Immigrant Baggage”

In a world that grows smaller each day with the relative ease of migration and the blessing and burden of technology, it’s not particularly uncommon for a writer to see himself as inhabiting multiple identities simultaneously. We are no longer confined to one place only. In fact, it has never been easier for people to leave their home country in search of a new life. For writers and thinkers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries especially, the marks of migration and movement are hallmarks of what it means to have the fullest understanding of being in the world at this particular moment. In Maxim D. Shrayer’s new book “Immigrant Baggage: Morticians, Purloined Diaries, and Other Theatrics of Exile,” Shrayer counts himself among those who have had the blessing or curse of being forced to trade one identity for another. But the question is always whether one ever truly leaves the remnants of a past identity behind. For Shrayer, the answer seems to be: no, one does not. And for the reader, the evidence of this is clear and its imprint can be found in each of the stories in this collection.

Shrayer is no stranger to narratives of exile and migration. And while the ease of travel and movement may be a sign of our times, it was not ease that characterized the emigration of the young Shrayer and his family from Soviet Russia. They spent eight years as refuseniks before finally immigrating to the U.S. in 1987. In his 2007 literary memoir, “Waiting for America,” which was the first book written in English to explore the experiences of Soviet Jews waiting to enter America after being released from Russia, he tells the story of his own coming-of-age. It’s a transition not just into adulthood but also into an understanding of what it will mean to carry the baggage that all exiles carry with them into their new lives.

It’s not uncommon to write about the balancing of dual or hyphenated identities; nor is it unheard of to write about leaving one place for another and learning to exist there as a kind of perpetual foreigner. But Shrayer’s take is unique in that he sees his experiences—from his origins as a Russian-Jewish child in Soviet Russia to his time in the pre-immigration holding space of Italy to, finally, his life as an accomplished scholar and professor in the United States—not as the ultimate defining factor in his identity but rather as a touchstone to something more critical. For Shrayer, “writers are not only products of their origins but also creative remakers of their identities.” It’s an insight that the war in Ukraine “brought into devastatingly sharp focus,” given that three of his grandparents were born there, although it’s something he says he has always known and tried to practice in his work.

A central question to Shrayer’s book is the question of what it means to write “translingualy,” which means to exist in or operate between multiple languages. “There’s more to translingualism,” he writes, “than working not just in one language but in two or more, simultaneously or consecutively.” That Shrayer did not simply trade one identity for another is apparent throughout his stories. If it’s not the American years “tucked under his Soviet-made belt” it’s the question implicit in each of the return trips he makes to his native Russia with his daughters: How can one become something else entirely, taking on a new cultural or national identity, when one’s most formative years transpired in an altogether different place? Shrayer’s identity, then, is one of movement, of pushing and pulling. Shrayer’s mother, for instance, questions why he would return year after year to the place their family worked to escape, but for Shrayer, it’s ”a return to [his] own childhood and youth—the lost joy of pure friendship. In the wrong place yet at the right time.” One doesn’t simply abandon one’s childhood it or discard it because of its geographical context. “I was still held captive by memories of my Soviet years,” he writes.

A central question to Shrayer’s book is the question of what it means to write “translingualy,” which means to exist in or operate between multiple languages.

Translingual writing is not something static and still but a body full of movement. It is the mode by which one describes a life spent “living in transit.”

Shrayer is a fully self-aware writer. At the beginning of “Yelets Women’s High School” he writes: “Blood vessels of Russian classical literature saturate this story the way capillaries do the vermillion border of human lips. And yet the American in me is having trouble with a traditional structure,” but as it turns out, “life’s raw material dictates its own rules of storytelling.” A writer’s origins and literary language are inseparable: yet another new language created to add to the translingual roster. But a life spent “living in transit” is still a life subject to the passage of time. And yet Shrayer muses: “Only time will show whether we’re bound to lose our Russian-American and Russian-Canadian voices tinged with a Jewish accent.”

It’s this accent, along with the merging of multiple languages, that ultimately comprises the “immigrant baggage” referred to in the book’s title. But Jews are not the only ones with such baggage, as a careful reading of Shrayer’s stories reveals.

Shrayer may wax poetic about “the pleasure of writing in tongues,” but it’s no surprise given that in nearly all of his stories he betrays a fascination for detailing the languages and accents of everyone with whom he interacts. The tongue, it turns out, tells all. In one story, a woman speaks a “rich beautiful slightly old fashioned Russian,” while in another the appearance and accent of a German doctor who witnesses a snowboarding accident in which Shrayer is hit, coincidentally, by another German doctor causes Shrayer to imagine that he is an “SS man in retirement.”

This particular story, “Ribs of Eden,” is in fact my favorite in the collection, not least because I have spent a good deal of time in the Dolomites and the autonomous region of Italy called Südtirol in German and Trentino-Alto Aldige in Italian, where the main events of the story take place. In this region there are three official languages: Italian, German, and Ladin. But the sense I always get is that German is the preferred language in this part of Italy. The restaurant menus are a testament to this preference. Rather than the expected pizza and pasta tourists in Italy dream of, German and Austrian-inspired foods like spaezli and goulash are more typical here. Not to mention the apple strudel, which is truly the best in the world according to my son. The setting is all alpine Deutschland-esque, but when I speak Italian there no one bats an eye, while every now and then a restaurant server can be heard speaking a language I can’t make out at all (Ladin): a strange and unsettling place indeed.

It’s almost ironic that this is the setting for an accident in which Shrayer is hit on the slopes by a German snowboarder, a man with a “frogskin face, shaved so clean that it looked as if it had been splashed with sulfuric acid.” Shrayer notes that the German speaks English immediately: “You made the wrong turn.” When the elderly “SS man in retirement” (who it turns out is a completely decent person) skis over, he speaks in German to the offending German snowboarder: “I saw everything. Entirely your fault.” The rest of the story is about Shrayer’s longing for “universal justice” and his dealings with German insurance companies which are ultimately fruitless because of a “lack of evidence.”

But what remains clear in this story, which is just one of the several snapshots in the book, is the “hidden texture of exile,” that sense of being inside and outside of places at once. And what of the baggage? In the preface Shrayer remarks on the few material items that were taken with them when they left Soviet Russia, but other than typewriters and a few books from the Moscow library little remains of the “material baggage.” But “as to the memory of our lives before emigration, it’s taken much longer to dispose of the immaterial baggage of exile.”