Both of Shrayer-Petrov's parents, Petr (Peysakh) Shrayer and Bella Breydo, moved from the former Pale of Settlement to Leningrad (St. Petersburg) in the 1920s to attend college.

With great difficulty Shrayer-Petrov was admitted to the Union of Soviet Writers in 1976, upon the recommendation of Viktor Shklovsky, Lev Ozerov and Andrei Voznesensky.

A Jewish refusenik expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers, Shrayer-Petrov was unable to publish in the USSR; galleys of two of his books were broken in retaliation for his decision to emigrate.

In spite of bullying and arrests by the KGB, Shrayer-Petrov's last Soviet decade was productive; he wrote two novels, several plays, a memoir, and many stories and verses.

Shrayer-Petrov's best-known novel, Doctor Levitin (known in Russian as Herbert and Nelly), was the first to depict the exodus of Soviet Jews and the life of refuseniks in limbo.

[4] The works of David Shrayer-Petrov have been translated into English, Belarusian, Croatian, French, Hebrew, Japanese, Georgian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Polish, and other languages.