On The Bookshelf
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THE GALLERY RESTAURANT 41
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A family of emigres struggles to carve out a new life
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Special to the Jewish News
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T
he three As in Natasha (Farrar
Straus & Giroux; $18) are
filled in by tiny stylized
Matrushka dolls, the traditional
Russian stacking dolls, on the book
jacket of David Bezmozgis' radiant
debut.
In this collection of linked stories,
the three figures at the center are a
mother, father and son who leave Riga,
Latvia, for Toronto, Canada. The sto-
ries are told from the point of view of
the son, Mark Berman, who observes
everything and helps interpret the New
World for his parents.
Like his narrator, Bezmozgis is an
immigrant from the former Soviet
Union. He left Riga in 1979 and
arrived in Toronto in 1980 at the age of
6. But, as he says in a recent interview
in New York, the stories are "not very
autobiographical — they are only
superficially based on my family. It's a
combination of incidents that hap-
pened, things I misremembered, stories
that happened to other immigrants."
Bezmozgis writes with a beautiful
economy of words, and with warmth,
wit and loyalty toward a community he
feels very much part of. The first story
opens soon after the family arrives in
Toronto, and they live "one respectable
block" from the center of the Russian
community with its "flapping clothes-
lines" and borsht-smelling hallways.
Through the stories, they struggle and
progress to better apartments and to a
suburban house "at the edge of
Toronto's sprawl."
Each story is a fully lived moment on
the Berman family's journey toward fit-
ting in. In Latvia, Roman Berman was
a massage therapist, a trainer of
Olympic athletes. Sometimes, when the
father isn't around, the young boy takes
out and studies an old photo of his
father in Riga, his face carrying the
"detached confidence of the highly
placed Soviet functionary." For the boy,
it was comforting to think that the
man in the picture and my father were
once the same person."
In the story "Roman Berman,
Massage Therapist," the father passes
difficult certification exams, sets up an
office with his name on the door and
then waits for clients. A rabbi suggests
advertising, and they pass out copies of
a flier full of newly acquired superla-
tives. When a doctor calls and invites
the family to Shabbat dinner, they
accept, full of hope.
He writes, "Before Stalin, my great-
grandmother lit the candles and made
an apple cake every Friday night. In my
grandfather's recollection of prewar
Jewish Latvia, the candles and apple
cakes feature prominently. When my
mother was a girl, Stalin was already in
charge, and although there was still
apple cake, there were no more candles.
NATosHA
xnd
glZi t t.4
David Bezmoz8is
"The stories are not very autobiographi-
cal — they are only superficially based
on my family," says "Natasha" author
David Bezmozgis.
"By the time I was born, there were
neither candles nor apple cake, though
in my mother's mind, apple cake still
meant Jewish. With this in mind, she
retrieved the apple cake recipe and
went to the expensive supermarket for
the ingredients."
They arrive at Dr. Kornblum's home
with "feigned confidence" and a warm
apple cake. The doctor means well but
is patronizing, even insulting, sending
the family home with their cold apple
cake. Fearing more bad luck and rejec-
tion, they dump the cake, expensive
ingredients and all.
With poignancy, Bezmozgis shows
how the yearnings of the immigrants