Maxim D. Shrayer was born in Moscow, in 1967, to a Jewish-Russian family. With his parents, the writer and medical scientist David Shrayer-Petrov and the philologist and translator Emilia Shrayer (Polyak), he spent almost nine years as a refusenik. He and his parents left the USSR and immigrated to the United States in 1987, after spending a summer in Austria and Italy.
