Natasha and Other Stories

Literature & Fiction

David Bezmozgis

Contemporary

Vintage Books USA

JONATHAN CAPE.

The Betrayers

Literary

Penguin??Books

Free World

Welcome to Rome. It is the summer of 1978, and the Krasnansky family, bickering, tired and confused, are supposed to be passing through. Alongside thousands of other Soviet Jewish refugees - among them criminals, dissidents and refuseniks - they await passage to their new homes in the West. But escaping Communism is not so easy, especially when some of the Krasnanskys insist on bringing it with them, and even more so when their sponsor in the USA lets them down and they find that they're no longer passing through at all. On the contrary, they're stuck. Welcome, then, to the waiting room of your life, and to a tragic yet comic tale of reckless brothers and long-suffering sisters, ailing parents and innocent children, of love affairs and criminal liaisons, of a wonderfully troubled family and a perpetually wandering people, and their epic search for a home: somewhere, anywhere - or Canada, as it turns out.

VIKING

The Mechanics' Institute Review (Issue 4)

ROSE TREMAIN

MA Creative Writing

<p>From Publishers WeeklyLike the author of this remarkable debut collection of seven linked stories, the protagonist, Mark Berman, emigrated with his parents from Latvia to Toronto in 1980. Bezmozgis writes with subtlety and control, moving from Mark's boyhood arrival in Canada to his adult reckoning with his grandparents' decline, rendering the immigrant experience with powerful specificity of character, place and history. "This was 1983, and as Russian Jews, recent immigrants, and political refugees, we were still a cause. We had good PR," he writes in "Roman Berman, Massage Therapist," about the humiliations of turning to well-meaning but condescending Canadian Jews for financial help. Bezmozgis also considers North American Jewish identity, as in "An Animal to the Memory," which interrogates the centrality of the Holocaust-and victimhood-to the Jewish sense of self. His stories are as compassionate as they are critical. In "Minyan," Mark attends synagogue with his grandfather: "Most of the old Jews came because they were drawn by the nostalgia for ancient cadences, I came because I was drawn by the nostalgia for old Jews. In each case, the motivation was not tradition but history." The collection's strength lies in how Bezmozgis layers the specifics of Russian-Jewish experience with universal childhood and adolescent dilemmas. The title story, about Mark's sexual escapades with his 14-year-old cousin by marriage, evokes both his stoner, suburban "subterranean life" and the numbing exigencies of Natasha's adolescence in Russia. In "Tapka," about the fate of a cosseted dog, Bezmozgis captures the insecurity and loneliness of recent immigrants while suggesting a child's guilty psychology with utter believability. These complex, evocative stories herald the arrival of a significant new voice. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.</p>

Short Stories & Anthologies

RB Large Print

Natasha

Guanda

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Books by David Bezmozgis