‘Zion Square’ Meditates On ‘War, Love, Despair And Mourning’

Author Maxim D. Shrayer, who divides his time between Chatham and Brookline, has released a new collection of poems, “Zion Square” (Ben Yehuda Press, 2025).

The 30 poems are accessible to the general reader, touching as they do upon universal themes. As Shrayer writes in his afterword, “This is a book of war, love, despair and mourning.”

Shrayer’s poems mention several wars — World War II, the war in Ukraine, and the war in Gaza, sparked by the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas surprise attack on Israel, which just marked its second anniversary.

 “I think there is room in our culture for more poetry that deals with the roots of some of today’s biggest conflicts,” Shrayer said in an email interview last week. “Among the people who can shed light on these conflicts are immigrant poets who are between worlds, who are rooted in two worlds. Poets who, like myself, came from the former Soviet empire but have made a life here in America — and also in the English language.”

Shrayer, who was born in Moscow in 1967, emigrated with his parents to Providence, R.I. in 1987. A professor in the Department of Eastern, Slavic and German Studies at Boston College, Shrayer is the author and editor of over 30 books in English and Russian.

Many of the poems in “Zion Square” were inspired by Shrayer’s 2024 visit to Jerusalem. While walking around near his small hotel, Shrayer came upon a group of Israeli teenagers performing in Zion Square to raise money for the hostages held by Hamas. The book’s cover is a photograph that Shrayer took of a baby grand piano set out in Zion Square.

 “I sat down and composed a longish poem, ‘Zion Square,’ about the experience of being in Israel during the war. The title poem is, in a way, the collection’s tuning fork: ‘Zion Square’ refers not only to a famous place in Jerusalem but also to a meeting place of Jewish ideas about the world,” Shrayer says. “I hope my collection is such a literary meeting place.”

During his trip Shrayer traveled, lectured, gave readings, visited with family and friends, and picked apricots and plums with a fellow Jewish writer. But sadly, soon after his return from Israel, on June 9, 2024, Shrayer’s father, David Shrayer-Petrov, died in Boston. Which brings us to another theme in the book — grief.

In the poem “Mourning,” Shrayer calls his father, to whose memory he dedicates “Zion Square,” “a New England poet by choice and by persuasion.” In his final lines he writes, “I know my father is alive. There’s no end to lineage/as long as there’s memory and universal language.”

 “In many ways, ‘Zion Square’ is a tribute to my late father. He was a writer, a medical doctor and a refusenik activist,” he says. “In the West, he is best known for his refusenik saga, ‘Doctor Levitin.’ Born in Leningrad in 1936, my father had a rich and eventful life. His departure created an incredible void.”

Shrayer also calls his father his teacher. When he was 8 and the family was living in Moscow, his father taught him “versification, and I got quite good at it. He was my principal teacher in poetry, and his judgment meant the world to me,” he says. When the family emigrated, “I carried with me parts of the manuscript of my first poetry collection, published in Russian, in New York, in 1990.”

Why does Shrayer feel that what he communicates in “Zion Square” can best be expressed through poetry and not through essays, or even journalism?

 “Most of the poems here were composed after Oct. 7, and one could describe ‘Zion Square’ as a meditation on writing about wars while living between languages and cultures,” he says. “And the terror attack of Oct. 7 plunged Israel, the homeland of my heart, into another war. As I worked on these poems, I went to bed with hopes of peace and justice and woke up to more news of violence and abandonment. I still do, today, and poetry rather than fiction or nonfiction allows me to express my feelings of love, despair and grief.”

Speaking of Israel, he bemoans “ignorance about things Jewish and Israeli. There are poems in ‘Zion Square’ that would explain to the readers what kind of a beautiful and complex place Israel is.”

The poem “Delmonico,” written about Shrayer’s days as a graduate student at Yale University, speaks eloquently of disillusionment. The poem’s narrator goes to buy a Delmonico steak “and the name of it sounded/so triumphantly American/auguring a new home/promising to correct/each and every mistake/a greenhorn makes.” Yet looking back from several decades, the narrator notes, “how little remains…of the American dream.”

Of that poem Shrayer says, “This is not the country to which my parents and I, former refuseniks and political refugees, had come as immigrants, and less and less the country we had grown to love. People sometimes forget that immigrants experience politics and ideology more acutely precisely because they have lives elsewhere, and because their immigrant lives in America are both choice and destiny.”