Bøger af Emil Draitser

"Na kudykinu goru: Odesskii roman" is a novel in Russian about the hopes and pains of emigration. It is set in the late 1970s, at the time of mass emigration from the Soviet Union. A diverse set of characters--luckless simple folks, expelled dissidents, victims of ethnic discrimination, and black-marketers escaping state prosecution - bid farewell to their beloved city and head for the West via Vienna and Rome. Their attempts at en-route adjustment to the free world are often painful and amusing at the same time. The structure of the novel is highly inventive. Chapters are alternately written by the author and one of his protagonists. The stories of the characters, hilarious and wrenching, are skillfully woven into this dual narrative. Born in Odessa, Emil Draitser is Professor of Russian at Hunter College in NYC and an award-winning author of ten volumes of artistic and scholarly prose. He emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1975, gaining many memorable experiences that later would compel him to write this novel. Among his most recent books are Shush! Growing up Jewish under Stalin and Stalin's Romeo Spy: The Remarkable Rise and Fall of the KGB's Most Daring Operative, both earning high critical acclaim.

This anthology is a teaching aid for use in courses on Russian literature and culture of the 20th century for English-speaking students. It includes selected poems by Alexander Blok, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergei Esenin, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandestam, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and Iosif Brodsky. Each poet is introduced with a short biographical account. All poetical texts are supplied with stress-marks. Rare and difflcult words are translated. Cultural and historical background information is provided in footnotes. Editor and compiler of the book, Professor Emil Draitser teaches Russian language and literature at Hunter College of the City University of New York.

A sequel to the author's autobiographical trilogy--Shush! Growing up Jewish under Stalin, In the Jaws of the Crocodile, and Farewell, Mama Odessa--this book is part memoir and part cultural study about the challenges of immigration and American accculturation. With self-deprecating humor, the author, a former Soviet satirist who was punished for trespassing the boundaries of public criticism, recollects his growing pains as he overcame his indoctrinated upbringing in a totalitarian society to embrace America's defining values.

This is a facsimile of the Russian-language short story collection published by Moscow Worker Press in 1993. Prefaced by well-known critic Lev Anninsky, the book contains stories about Russia and America, which previously appeared in such Russian periodicals, as the Literary Gazette, Youth, Literary Review, Crocodile, Evening Moscow, and in Russian-language émigré publications --the New Russian Word, Literary Courier, Panorama, and others. In English translation, the stories have also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Herald Examiner, San Francisco Chronicle, Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, Prism International, Confrontation, International Quarterly, The New Renaissance, Midstream, and other American periodicals.

Published by St. Martin's Press (1999), this book shows how one pithy joke encapsulates a world of knowledge about a culture. Because humor plays with the most deeply seated cultural assumptions, it makes visible areas of unacknowledged attitudes and behaviors in private realms. In this groundbreaking study, through the content analysis of over 600 jokes, proverbs, sayings, and popular rhymes, Emil Draitser offers an insider's view on the sociological and psychological functions of Russian sexual folklore and the way it reflects male/female relationships. Draitser leaves no dirty joke untold as he examines such taboo subjects as adultery, impotence, and gender and violence. This timely study sheds light on Russian popular culture and the nature of sexual humor everywhere.

Many years after making his way to America from Odessa in Soviet Ukraine, Emil Draitser made a startling discovery: every time he uttered the word "Jewish"-even in casual conversation-he lowered his voice. This behavior was a natural by-product, he realized, of growing up in the anti-Semitic, post-Holocaust Soviet Union, when "Shush!" was the most frequent word he heard: "Don't use your Jewish name in public. Don't speak a word of Yiddish. And don't cry over your murdered relatives." This compelling memoir conveys the reader back to Draitser's childhood and provides a unique account of mid-twentieth century life in Russia as the young Draitser struggles to reconcile the harsh values of Soviet society with the values of his working-class Jewish family. Lively, evocative, and rich with humor, this unforgettable story ends with the death of Stalin and, through life stories of the author's ancestors, presents a sweeping panorama of two centuries of Jewish history in Russia.

Sailor, painter, doctor, lawyer, polyglot, and writer, Dmitri Bystrolyotov (1901-75) led a life that might seem far-fetched for a spy novel, yet here the truth is stranger than fiction. The result of a thirty-five-year journey that started with a private meeting between the author and Bystrolyotov in 1973 Moscow and continued through the author's subsequent research in international archives, Stalin's Romeo Spy: The Remarkable Rise and Fall of the KGB's Most Daring Operative pieces together a life lived in the shadows of the twentieth century's biggest events. One of the "Great Illegals," a team of outstanding Soviet spies operating in Western countries between the world wars, Bystrolyotov was mthe response to Sidney Reilly, the British prototype for James Bond. A dashing man, his modus operandi was the seduction of women-among them a French embassy employee, a German countess, the wife of a British official, and a Gestapo officer-which enabled Stalin to look into diplomatic pouches of many European countries. Risking his life, Bystrolyotov also stole military secrets from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. A man of extraordinary physical courage, he twice crossed the Sahara Desert and the jungles of Congo. But his success as a spy didn't save him from Stalin's purges, at the height of which he was arrested and tortured until he falsely confessed to selling out to the enemy. Sentenced to twenty years of hard labor in the Gulag, Bystrolyotov risked more severe punishment by documenting the regime's crimes against humanity in unpublished and suppressed memoirs that rival those of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The first full-length biography in any language, at once a real-life spy thriller, a drama of desire, and a prison memoir, Stalin's Romeo Spy is the true account of a flawed yet extraordinary man.