by Maxim D. Shrayer.

Syracuse University Press. 225 pages. $22.95.

BY SAM COALE
Special to the Journal

One summer in Poland a friend told me his grandparents were given six hours to leave the Soviet Union after World War II or remain citizens. They rushed to trains, got off at Polish stations where people held up signs advertising various occupations, and moved into houses just abandoned by the Germans. That story of emigration has stayed with me — as will Maxim Shrayer’s.

His wonderfully evocative new book is about the summer of 1987 when he was 20 and he, his parents, his grandmother, his divorced aunt and her 11-year-old daughter, after nine years of waiting, left the Soviet Union for America by way of Vienna, Rome and Ladispoli on the Italian coast.

Shrayer went to Brown and is currently at Boston College as professor of Russian and English, chair of the Department of Slavic and Eastern Languages, and co-founder of the Jewish Studies Program.

His is a tale of transition, suspension, loss, uncertainty and expectation played out on Italian beaches, in Roman markets, and, at 20 and in heat, in the back seat of a rusty mustang, perpetually parked in the lot of a train station. All is as new as his first days at a hostel in Vienna: “first cappuccino, first porno film, first taste of Nazism, first ride in a Jaguar. . . .”

The tensions between his 47-year-old translator mother and his 51-year-old writer-scientist father are viscerally absorbed as only they can be by a single child. We also get to know the brash, authoritative Alina Soloveitchik, the possible spy Umberto Umberto, the cultured but lustful Anatoly Shteynfeld, the old and opinionated Uncle Pinya from Israel, and Shrayer’s former lover in Moscow, Lana Bernshteyn.

We enter the strange, unsettling world of papers, visas, and “refugee travel documents,” of sleazy Roman hotels and Ladispolian apartments, and of emigrant cabals, gossip and tales. Each is supremely aware of one another’s ethnic and religious backgrounds, of manners and speech and dress: “To me the Roubeni men, with their dark wavy hair, opulent brown eyes, and beaked noses, looked simultaneously Georgian and Tadjik.”

Surprises abound. Exactly what is in the aunt’s huge, unwieldy Manchurian trunk? Why is Joshua Freeman at the American Center so intent on converting Soviet Jews to the ways of “Hashem Yeshua,” and why does “Reb Motorcycle,” the cool rabbi on his crotch rocket, think it’s his duty to combat such proselytizing?

The glory of this book lies in Shrayer’s sinuous, neo-Proustian prose, beautifully fluid and perceptive with its luminous shocks of recognition, landscapes, descriptions and asides. It illuminates its quarries, circles and pounces upon them in sumptuous ease. Tales and teller mesmerize and delight.