Emil Draitser

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.

Emil Draitser dreamed of becoming a writer. Born to a working-class Jewish family in the USSR on the eve of World War II, he came of age during the Brezhnev era, often considered the nadir of Soviet culture. Bored with an engineering job, he found refuge in writing, attracting the attention of a Moscow editor who encouraged him to try his hand at satire. He spent the next decade contributing to The Crocodile, the major Party-sponsored magazine known for its sharp-tongued essays and cartoons. After he got in trouble for criticizing an important Soviet official, he began weighing the heavy decision of whether to emigrate. In this captivating memoir, Draitser explores what it means to be a satirist in a country lacking freedom of expression. His experience provides a window into the lives of a generation of artists who were allowed to poke fun and make readers laugh, as long as they toed a narrow, state-approved line. In the Jaws of the Crocodile also includes several of Draitser's wry pieces translated into English for the first time.

Set in the summer of 1979 at the height of the movement to free Soviet Jewry, Farewell, Mama Odessa is an autobiographical novel whose intertwined storylines follow a variety of people-dissidents, victims of ethnic discrimination, and black-marketers among them-as they bid farewell to their beloved home of Odessa, Ukraine, and make their way to the West. At the book's center is Boris, a young writer thwarted by state censorship and antisemitism during the twilight years of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev's sclerotic rule. With an Angora kitten for his companion and together with other émigrés, vulnerable, displaced, continually living out of a suitcase, he puts Russia in his rear-view mirror and sets out on a journey that will take him to Bratislava, Vienna, Rome, and New York on his way to Los Angeles. Will Boris be able to rekindle his creative passion and inspiration in the West? Will other Jewish émigrés fit into the new society, so much different than the one they'd left behind? With humor and compassion, Farewell, Mama Odessa describes the émigrés' attempts at adjustment to the free world.

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 migr 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.

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 Bystrolyotovin 1973 Moscow and continued through the author's subsequent research in international archives, Stalin's Romeo Spy, 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 the 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 confessedto selling out to the enemy. Sentenced to twenty years of hard labor in the Gulag, Bystrolyotov risked more severe punishment by documentingthe 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.

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 the 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.