01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, June 18, 2006

BY SAM COALE
Special to The Journal

AUTUMN IN YALTA: A Novel and Three Stories, by David Shrayer-Petrov. Syracuse University Press. 235 pages. $24.95.

David Shrayer-Petrov, who is a medical researcher at Brown University as well as an accomplished writer in his native Russia and here since 1987, writes a beautifully lyric and lucid prose, as translated by his son, that fastens on details and images as if he were using a magnifying glass.

In this novella, Strange Danya Rayev, and three stories, one of which is "Autumn in Yalta," his world emerges viscerally intact and shimmering from the siege of Leningrad in the early 1940s to the removal of Danya Rayev and his mother to a rural village in the Urals, from the strange rural life and customs Rayev finds there to the persistent anti-Semitism that often erupts and turns violent.

Shrayer-Petrov keeps his focus on the uneasy equilibrium, the queasy oxymoron of being both Jewish and Russian. Are his characters Russian Jews, or are they Jews who just happen to be Russian?

The complexities of love and loyalty are explored and tested, whether between Samoylovich and the beautiful but distraught and enigmatic actress Polechka in "Autumn in Yalta" -- Is she using him? Is his love a crazed obsession? -- or Raya and Fyodor Kuzmenko who live in Greenville, R.I., and are being seduced by her employer and the employer's daughter in "Carp for the Gefilte Fish."

Danya Rayev's forced evacuation to the Urals from Leningrad allows him to participate in and comment upon all kinds of rural rites from animals to funerals, bullies to sleeping arrangements, huts to muted hostilities, conjuring up a lost world that feels fully lived by the author himself. Fishing and visits to the local cemetery, tuberculosis and a plethora of relatives vie for the young boy's attentions, and he misses neither nuance nor negotiation.

In a clear-eyed and straightforward Afterword, Maxim D. Shrayer, chairman of the Department of Slavic and Eastern Languages and co-director of the Jewish Studies Program at Boston College, explores his father's dialogue with Chekhov and Nabokov, and his final exile from the Soviet Union in 1987 after years of persecution.

But his greatest service is to make these Russian stories available in English. They are beautifully honed fictions of foreign lands in starker times, which will haunt you both for their beauty and their brutalities.

Sam Coale teaches at Wheaton.

utalities.

Sam Coale teaches at Wheaton.