Emil Draitser

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Emil Draitser is an author and professor of Russian at Hunter College, New York.

Emil Draitser has been publishing both fiction and nonfiction since 1965. Under his pen name "Emile Abramov", his work appeared in leading Soviet Russian journals (Youth, Literary Gazette and Crocodile among the best known).

In 1974, blacklisted by the Soviet literary establishment for a satire on one of its members, he took advantage of the Jewish immigration and came to the United States, where his short stories and collections of humor quickly won him wide acclaim. Besides ten books of artistic and scholarly prose, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, North American Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Midstream, Prism International, International Quarterly, and elsewhere. His short stories have also been published in Russian, Canadian, Israeli, and Polish literary journals and included in several American college textbooks.

Emil Draitser is a two-time recipient of the New Jersey Council of the Arts Fellowships in Fiction and several City University of New York grants in Creative Writing. He was also awarded residencies at the Vermont Arts Studios, Byrdcliffe Woodstock Art Colony, and Banff Center for the Arts (Canada).

[edit] Publications

Forbidden Laughter (Nedozvolennyi smekh) (editor and compiler)
Los Angeles: Almanac Press, 1978, 1980. ISBN 0896260453
A compilation of Soviet-era political humor in Russian with English translation.
Peshchera neozhidannostei (The Fun House)
A short story collection in Russian. Introduction by Vassily Aksyonov.
Techniques of Satire: The Case of Saltykov-Shchedrin.
New York-Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994. ISBN 3110126249.
A study of comic devices used by satirists in general and the great 19th century satirist in particular.
Poterialsia mal'chik (The Lost Boy)

Introduction by Lev Anninsky. Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1993. :A short story collection in Russian.

Making War, Not Love: Gender and Sexuality in Russian Humor.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. ISBN 0312221290
A sociological study that sheds light on Russian popular culture and the nature of sexual humor everywhere.
Taking Penguins to the Movies: Ethnic Humor in Russia.
Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999. ISBN 0814323278
A sociological study that sheds light on Russian popular culture and ethnic humor in other countries.
Russkie poety XIX veka (Russian Poets of the Nineteenth Century) (ed. & compl.)
Tenafly, NJ: Hermitage Publishers, 1999. ISBN 1557791198
Russkie poety XX veka (Russian Poets of the Twentieth Century) (ed. & compl.)
Tenafly, NJ: Hermitage Publishers, 2000. ISBN 1557791287
The Supervisor of the Sea and Other Stories

Riverside, CA: Xenos Books, 2003. ISBN 1879378477

A short story collection in English
Kto ty takoi: Odessa Memoir 1945-53 (in Russian)
Baltimore: Seagull Press, 2003. ISBN 097149634X
Wesele w Brighton Beach i inne opowidania (in Polish)
Warsaw: Biblioteka Midrasza, 2008. ISBN 9788392651505
Shush! Growing up Jewish under Stalin: A Memoir
(Forthcoming from the University of California Press, September 2008.) ISBN 978-0-520-25446-6 (http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/11025.php)