Maxim D. Shrayer, a bilingual author, scholar and translator, is Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College and Director of the Project on Russian & Eurasian Jewry at Harvard's Davis Center. He has authored and edited fifteen books in English and Russian, among them the internationally acclaimed memoirs Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story and Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration, the story and novella collections Yom Kippur in Amsterdam and A Russian Immigrant, and the Holocaust study I Saw It, and the travelogue With or Without You. Shrayer is the recipient of a 2007 National Jewish Book Award and a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship.