David Bezmozgis became an overnight star when he published stories in the holy trinity of American magazines for fiction lovers: The New Yorker, Harper's, and Zoetrope. With the publication of his first book, Natasha, he has been compared to Chekhov and Philip Roth, and the comparison is more than just promotional copy. Natasha follows the experiences of a family of Russian Jews who settle in Toronto and set about reinventing themselves. The loosely connected stories are narrated by the son, Mark, who attempts to understand not only his new world but also his parents. As the book progresses, his growth into the frustrations of adolescence mirrors his family's disappointments as they attempt to escape their old lives in the immigrant ghetto and create new identities. Bezmozgis calls the stories "autobiographical fiction," as they are largely inspired by his own family's past, but make no mistake, these are fully realized works of literature, complete with an attention to language and an eye for detail that invoke the best of minimalist writing. Bezmozgis doesn't reinvent the form here--he sticks to traditional themes such as the search for self and cultural dislocation--but he tells his stories with a grace and quiet sensitivity that's so rare these days it's practically an endangered species.

And there are a couple of literary masterpieces in Natasha. The title story, which relates Mark's sexual experimentation with a cousin by marriage during a summer spent dealing drugs, manages to be both a touching coming-of-age tale and one of the freshest inversions of the suburban dream in years. "The Second Strongest Man," a story of the reunion of Mark's family with a Russian weightlifter, manages to conflate the decline of the Russia with the emptiness of North American life in its tale of aging men whose time has passed them by. Bezmozgis divides his time between Canada and the U.S., but Natasha is international in the scope of its subjects--modern Russia, Toronto's immigrant communities, Judaism, various translations of the American dream. It's the literature of globalization, and Bezmozgis has proven himself to be a global writer. --Peter Darbyshire, Amazon.ca


From Publishers Weekly
Like 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.


From School Library Journal
Adult/High School–Arriving with his family from Latvia in 1980, six-year-old Mark Berman embarks on his life in Toronto. In a series of seven interrelated stories, he shares his experiences in his new land. He begins with a poignant tale of adjustment and a neighbor's dog; describes his coming of age with a 14-year-old, sadly sophisticated Russian cousin by marriage, Natasha; and, finally, relates how as an adult he moves his newly widowed grandfather into a retirement home. These stories are both universal and yet very much of a time and place. Mark is defensive about his father's status and belligerent in his Jewish school, spends his teen years stoned on pot, and watches as the members of his small, close family age and die. His family bears the physical and emotional scars of World War II and years of Soviet oppression. He is very much an immigrant, yet observes the sterility of suburbia with a jaded eye. His love and respect for his parents waxes and wanes through adolescence and young adulthood. Quietly compelling, the stories will attract teens through the commonality of feeling, yet give them a wider perspective either of a life they don't know or a way to communicate a life they might be living. This small treasure trove of characters will stay in readers' minds for a long time.–Susan H. Woodcock, Fairfax County Public Library, Chantilly, VA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
The Russian punk-ska group Leningrad, whose foul-mouthed, raggedy lead singer, Shnur ("Cord"), often appears in concert completely naked, once wrote a cycle of songs whose titles are the first names of women -- "Sveta," "Lyuba," "Lyolya," "Tanya." The songs' plots are fairly generic. "Tanya left me!" Shnur will yell, with feeling. "Now I'll hang out with the boys. . . . Tanya left me!" Shnur is not lamenting a particular Tanya, but rather all the Tanyas. And he is protesting the meager assortment of names that Russian parents have to give their daughters. Known for rousing its Russian-language crowds, Leningrad was recently denied entry to Estonia because authorities feared a post-concert riot. I bring this up because David Bezmozgis's first collection of stories is called Natasha, and Shnur, were he a student of the contemporary short story, would not approve. Bezmozgis writes about Natasha as if she were a particular Natasha, and about his fictional immigrant family, the Bermans of Toronto, formerly of Riga, as if they were the only fictional immigrant family, and he, Bezmozgis, the first Russian Jew ever to produce a collection of pointedly ironic, realist stories about his childhood -- the difficulty of getting along with other kids, the trouble with his sad-sack immigrant parents, the humiliating ritual of visiting wealthy Jews and soliciting their sympathy.This apparent authorial naiveté could be a recipe for trouble -- or just the slow doom of a "warm" reception: a series of cloying reviews, followed by Jewish book awards, followed by oblivion. But Bezmozgis pulls it off. He has an understated, just-telling-it-like-it-happened style that, if not impressive, is remarkably self-assured; it is attuned to the stories he is telling, and its understatement is a function of the narrator's doubt. In "An Animal to the Memory," young Mark Berman is having trouble at Hebrew school. "After our move into the new neighborhood I had begun to affect a hoodlum persona," he tells us. "At school, I kept to myself, glowered in the hallways, and, with the right kind of provocation, punched people in the face." Bezmozgis is sparing with his commas, and in the last part of that sentence he deploys them to great effect. This level of irony is about as much as he ever gives away with regard to his narrator's motivations or judgments. Bezmozgis is a deadpan artist. Some people in these stories are clearly pathetic, like the wealthy Kornblums who invite the Bermans over for dinner in "Roman Berman, Massage Therapist." But all the characters whom another writer might automatically despise, like the hyperbolic immigrant family who also comes to dinner that night, appear pretty impressive in their way. In that story, Dr. Harvey Kornblum, whose help the Bermans seek in launching Roman's massage business, turns the dinner into a competition, with the unspoken understanding that whoever wins his sympathy will receive his help. The other family claims to have been refuseniks; so Kornblum wants to know if the Bermans, too, were denied an exit visa by the Soviet authorities. "My mother hesitated a moment and then admitted that we had not been refuseniks. She knew some refuseniks, and we were almost refuseniks, but we were not refuseniks." At which point the father of the other immigrant family regales the table with florid tales of Soviet anti-Semitism. The Bermans are clearly outclassed.There is a fine, quiet skepticism in this voice, which leaves us to fill in the blanks (though usually we don't have to strain too hard). Because the stories in Natasha are chronological, and the last two, where Berman is grown up, are by far the least effective, we can conclude that Bezmozgisian narrative irony is a great deal less interesting in the mind of an adult. The book is therefore at its best when the narrator cannot be expected to deal with the information provided, as in "An Animal to the Memory," again on a Jewish theme. At Hebrew school, Mark's tough-guy act has caused him all sorts of problems, which finally come to a head during Holocaust Remembrance Day. As his class walks through the makeshift basement Holocaust memorial, one of his enemies pushes Mark from behind. He turns around and attacks the boy. The school's principal, Rabbi Gurvich, is out of his mind with rage. After school, he returns with Mark to the basement. "Berman," he declares, "a Nazi wouldn't do here what you did today." A ridiculous statement, and a slightly ridiculous situation: a Toronto rabbi instructing a Soviet Jew on anti-Semitism. He reduces little Berman to tears, leaving him amid the Holocaust relics donated by various grandparents. Then he pronounces the story's final line: "Now, Berman . . . now maybe you understand what it is to be a Jew." And we are left to ask: What? What is it? Bezmozgis is silent. Gurvich might mean that being "Jewish" means being terrorized; or that it means having to assert yourself; or he might be spouting empty rhetoric, as adults often do. We have no idea, but the words resonate, and one senses that at some level Bezmozgis endorses them. The skeptic emerges as a quasi-sentimentalist. Bezmozgis is a pretty hard-nosed writer, but he will never be banned from Estonia.Reviewed by Keith Gessen Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From Booklist
Bezmozgis adds his wry and nimble voice to the grand tradition of immigrant literature in his debut short-story collection. The narrator of his loosely linked tales is Mark Berman, the son of Latvian Jews who leave the Soviet Union in the early 1980s for Toronto. Resilient and scheming, Mark is six in the first story, then leapfrogs into adolescence and young manhood. But he is more witness than focus, and through his eyes Bezmozgis presents a cast of outsized and magnetic characters. There's Mark's father, a former state gym director trying to establish a massage therapy business; childless neighbors overly in love with their little dog; and 14-year-old Natasha, a hard case who teaches Mark about sex and survival. A bit hollow at the outset, more mica than marble, Bezmozgis' tales reach deeper and attain greater resonance as the collection unfolds, especially in Mark's wrenching recognitions of the legacy of the Holocaust and Soviet tyranny. Flinty and intriguing, Bezmozgis' well-made stories play well in conjunction with Aleksandar Hemon's The Question of Bruno (2000). Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Bezmozgis's spare, confrontational tales thus take many unexpected turns, but their humanity and poignancy strike the deepest notes ... Irresistably original."


Review
"Exquisitely crafted stories. A first collection that reads like the work of a past master."
--T. Coraghessan Boyle, author of Drop City

"Here in Europe the talk this year has been all about the new writing coming out of Russia. David Bezmozgis shows that this energy extends to the Russian Diaspora as well. In Natasha and Other Stories Bezmozgis renders something of the clear-sighted melancholy associated with Chekov or Babel into English prose and a North American context. With a maturity and control far beyond his years, Mr. Bezmozgis has produced a captivating and impressive debut. The title story itself is one I will never forget."
--Jeffrey Eugenides, author of Middlesex



Book Description
Few readers had heard of David Bezmozgis before last May, when Harper's, Zoetrope, and The New Yorker all printed stories from his forthcoming collection. In the space of a few weeks, these magazines introduced America to the Bermans--Bella and Roman and their son, Mark--Russian Jews who have fled the Riga of Brezhnev for Toronto, the city of their dreams.

Told through Mark's eyes, and spanning the last twenty-three years, Natasha brings the Bermans and the Russian-Jewish enclaves of Toronto to life in stories full of big, desperate, utterly believable consequence. In "Tapka" six-year-old Mark's first experiments in English bring ruin and near tragedy to the neighbors upstairs. In "Roman Berman, Massage Therapist," Roman and Bella stake all their hopes for Roman's business on their first, humiliating dinner in a North American home. Later, in the title story, a stark, funny anatomy of first love, we witness Mark's sexual awakening at the hands of his fourteen-year-old cousin, a new immigrant from the New Russia. In "Minyan," Mark and his grandfather watch as the death of a tough old Odessan cabdriver sets off a religious controversy among the poor residents of a Jewish old-folks' home.

The stories in Natasha capture the immigrant experience with a serious wit as compelling as the work of Jhumpa Lahiri, Nathan Englander, or Adam Haslett. At the same time, their evocation of boyhood and youth, and the battle for selfhood in a passionately loving Jewish family, recalls the first published stories of Bernard Malamud, Harold Brodkey, Leonard Michaels, and Philip Roth.



About the Author
David Bezmozgis (Bez-MOZE-ghis) was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1973. In 1980 he immigrated with his parents to Toronto, where he lives today. This is his first book.



Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from Natasha by David Bezmozgis. Copyright © 2004 by Nada Films, Inc. To be published in June, 2004 Farrar Straus & Giroux. All rights reserved.


GOLDFINCH WAS FLAPPING CLOTHESLINES, a tenement delirious with striving. 6030 Bathurst: insomniac scheming Odessa. Cedarcroft: reeking borscht in the hallways. My parents, Baltic aristocrats, took an apartment at 715 Finch fronting a ravine and across from an elementary school-one respectable block away from the Russian swarm. We lived on the fifth floor, my cousin, aunt, and uncle directly below us on the fourth. Except for the Nahumovskys, a couple in their fifties, there were no other Russians in the building. For this privilege, my parents paid twenty extra dollars a month in rent.

In March of 1980, near the end of the school year but only three weeks after our arrival in Toronto, I was enrolled in Charles H. Best elementary. Each morning, with our house key hanging from a brown shoelace around my neck, I kissed my parents goodbye and, along with my cousin Jana, tramped across the ravine—I to the first grade, she to the second. At three o'clock, bearing the germs of a new vocabulary, we tramped back home. Together, we then waited until six for our parents to return from George Brown City College, where they were taking their obligatory classes in English.

In the evenings we assembled and compiled our linguistic bounty.

Hello, havaryew?

Red, yellow, green, blue.

May I Please go to the washroom?

Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenny.

Joining us most nights were the Nahumovskys. They attended the same English classes and traveled with my parents on the same bus. Rita Nahurnovsky was a beautician, her face spackled with makeup, and Misha Nahumovsky was a tool and die maker. They came from Minsk and didn't know a soul in Canada. With abounding enthusiasm, they incorporated themselves into our family. My parents were glad to have them. Our life was tough, we had it hard—but the Nahumovskys had it harder. They were alone, they were older, they were stupefied by the demands of language. Being essentially helpless themselves, my parents found it gratifying to help the more helpless Nahumovskys.

After dinner, as we gathered on cheap stools around our table, my mother repeated the day's lessons for the benefit of the Nahumovskys and, to a slightly lesser degree, for the benefit of my father. My mother had always been a dedicated student and she extended this dedication to George Brown City College. My father and the Nahumovskys came to rely on her detailed notes and her understanding of the curriculum. For as long as they could, they listened attentively and gropled toward comprehension. When this became too frustrating, my father put on the kettle, Rita painted my mother's nails, and Misha told Soviet jokes.

In a first-grade classroom a teacher calls on her students and inquires after their nationality. "Sasha," she says. Sasha says, "Russian." "Very good," says the teacher. "Arnan," she says. Arnan says, "Armenian," "Very good," says the teacher. "Lubka," she says. Lubka says, "Ukraininan," "Very good," says the teacher. And then she asks Dima. Dima says, "Jewish." "What a shame," says the teacher, "so young and already a Jew."

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Natasha is the chronicle of the Bermans, told in stories. In "Tapka," six-year-old Mark's first experiments in English bring ruin and near tragedy to the neighbors upstairs. In "Roman Berman, Massage Therapist," Roman and Bella stake all their hopes for Roman's business on their first dinner with a North American family. In the title story, we witness Mark's sexual awakening at the hands of his fourteen-year-old cousin, a new immigrant from the New Russia. In "Minyan," Mark and his grandfather watch as the death of an Odessan cabdriver sets off a religious controversy among the residents of a Jewish old-people's home." The stories in Natasha capture the immigrant experience.

FROM THE CRITICS

Meghan O'Rourke - The New York Times

What is most impressive about this book is Bezmozgis' sense of story; at his best, he has an authority one usually finds only in more seasoned writers. Each story circles around a transaction that is a vehicle for broad irony (the traditional kind). In ''An Animal to the Memory,'' a young Mark is packed off to Hebrew school, where his mother sunnily hopes he will learn ''what it was to be a Jew'' -- the kind of thing that's impossible back in his hometown in Latvia. Mark, who presciently senses that an attenuated national and ethnic identity may be what serves him best, does in some sense learn ''what it was to be a Jew'' when his teacher humiliates and terrifies him on Holocaust Remembrance Day by forcing him to shout ''I'm a Jew'' until, his will broken, he weeps. In Bezmozgis' vision, to be a Jewish immigrant is to be at the mercy of the totalizing preconceptions not only of anti-Semites but of those who live in the shadow of the authenticity of their Old World ancestors.

Keith Gessen - The Washington Post

[Bezmozgis] has an understated, just-telling-it-like-it-happened style that, if not impressive, is remarkably self-assured; it is attuned to the stories he is telling, and its understatement is a function of the narrator's doubt.

Publishers Weekly

Like 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. Agent, Ira Silverberg. (June) Forecast: Jeffrey Eugenides compares Bezmozgis to Chekhov and Babel, while T.C. Boyle says his prose "reads like the work of a past master." FSG is pushing this lead spring title with an author tour of at least seven cities (they've already sponsored a pre-publication tour dubbed "Bezmozgispalooza") and national advertising, almost guaranteeing that Natasha will be one of the rare collections that hits big. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Bezmozgis's stunning debut collection centers on the Berman family, Latvian Jews who have immigrated to Toronto to escape stagnant Brezhnev-era Soviet life. Stoic father Roman, anxious mother Bella, and hapless but endearing son Mark each confront the sadness of exile and the strange promise of a "better life." In "The Second Strongest Man," friends visiting Roman commend him on his success and his decision to leave (in a later story, another visiting Russian confirms "Russia is shit"), even as he confides to one "I often think of going back." In "Tapka," young Mark unwittingly causes the death of the neighbor's dog when an experiment in English goes awry. When Roman offers to help her find a new one, the old woman, also a recent Russian migr , can only lament, "A new one? What do you mean, a new one? New, everything we have now is new." The title story finds Mark fumbling toward something like love with the bold, intense daughter of his uncle's new wife. Taken alone, these stories are charming and pitch-perfect; together, they add up to something like life itself: funny, heartbreaking, terrible, true. Last year, a few pieces were published in Harper's, Zoetrope, and The New Yorker. Essential for fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/04.]-Tania Barnes, "Library Journal" Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal