Profile
Professor Draitser is a scholar and author whose works have appeared extensively both in Russian and English. He is the author of several volumes of scholarly and artistic prose, such as Techniques of Satire: The Case of Saltykov-Shchedrin; Forbidden Laughter: Soviet Underground Jokes; Taking Penguins to the Movies: Ethnic Humor in Russia; Making War, Not Love: Gender and Sexuality in Russian Humor, as well as four collections of short stories.
He has also produced anthologies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian poetry. His book-length publications also include a scholarly biography, Stalin's Romeo Spy: The Remarkable Rise and Fall of the KGB's Most Daring Operative, two novels on emigration, Na kudykinu goru [From Here to Wherever] and Farewell, Mama Odessa, and his memoirs Shush! Growing up Jewish under Stalin, In the Jaws of the Crocodile, as well as the forthcoming volume Laughing All the Way to Freedom: Americanization of a Russian Emigre, as well as the forthcoming volume titled Chekhov na Brajton Bich: Istoriia odnogo pokoleniia v rasskazakh i ocherkax [Chekhov in Brighton Beach: History of One Generation in Stories and Essays].
A bilingual author, he has also published essays and short stories in the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Partisan Review, World Literature Today, Prism International, and other American, Canadian, and British periodicals, as well as in Russian, Polish, Belorussian, and Israeli journals. His areas of specialization are Russian satire and humor, contemporary Russian folk culture, and Russian and East European Cinema. Prof. Draitser is currently in charge of the film program in the Division of Russian and Slavic Studies.