Emil Draitser

Emil Draitser (born 1937) is an author and professor of Russian at Hunter College in New York City. Besides twelve books of artistic and scholarly prose, his essays and short stories have been published in the Los Angeles Times, Partisan Review, North American Review, San Francisco Chronicle, Prism International, and many other American and Canadian periodicals. His fiction has also appeared in Russian, Polish, and Israeli journals. A three-time recipient of the New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellowships in writing, he has also received numerous grants for writing both fiction and non-fiction from the City University of New York. Draitser has given numerous public lectures and book talks at universities and cultural centers in the United States, Canada, UK, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, and Russia.

Draitser grew up in a Jewish family in the Soviet Union in the post-World War II years, in the anti-Semitic atmosphere of late Stalinism, at a time when Jews were forced to be silent about their religion and often tried to change their Jewish names. It was an oppressive childhood filled with suspicion and mistrust. As a young student, Draitser excelled at literature and decided that he wanted to be a journalist, despite his mother's preference that he study engineering. At that time, Jews attempting to enter the humanities encountered resistance, as Soviet system saw those areas as politically vulnerable and felt that Jews entering them would try to subvert the system. Despite this, Draitser earned degrees first in engineering, and later in journalism.

Draitser has published both fiction and nonfiction since 1965. His work has appeared in leading Russian journals (including Youth, Literary Gazette, and Crocodile) under his pen name 'Emil Abramov'. He began his writing career as a freelancer contributing satirical articles to Soviet newspapers and magazines, though he had to be careful about what he wrote. For example, while he could criticize a particular factory for the poor workmanship of goods it produced, he could not criticize the economic system as a whole, although it became increasingly clear to him that the lack of competition that would inspire innovation combined with the Soviet mandate to guarantee work for all employees, regardless of their work ethic, made it impossible to produce quality products. Eventually, Draitser wrote an article critical of an important official which led to him being blacklisted, and prompted him to leave for the United States.

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