The Free World (26 page)

I would like to thank my agent, Ira Silverberg, and my editors at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Lorin Stein and Eric Chinski.

Excerpts from the novel appeared in
The New Yorker
and
The Walrus,
and I am grateful to Deborah Treisman and Jared Bland, respectively, for their editorial contributions.

Lucia Piccinni, John Montesano, and Giorgio Bandiera helped with the Italian translation, Esther Frank with Yiddish, and Detlef Karthaus with Esperanto.

Rosalba Galata and Susan Davis provided information about HIAS and JDC, and Enid Wurtman offered her expertise on the Soviet emigration process. Any errors of fact remaining in the novel are mine.

Nell Freudenberger, Wyatt Mason, and Anna Shternshis read early drafts of the manuscript, and I am indebted to them for their insights.

I am grateful to the many people who shared their recollections of the period, particularly Sara Bezmozgis, Alexander and Musia Mozeson, Lev Milner, Michael Vilinsky, Seva and Irina Yelenbaugen, Hirsh and Stella Vivat, Lev and Elena Aleinikov, and David and Emma Tsimerman.

I offer my enduring gratitude to Simon Friedman (1935–2003) and to Zebulon Sharf (1915–2008), whose story is intimately connected with that of his brother, Mordecai Sharf (1913–1942).

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council provided financial assistance, and the MacDowell Colony offered its hospitality: this book would have been much harder to complete without their help.

DAVID BEZMOZGIS
a writer and filmmaker, was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1973. His first book, Natasha and Other Stories, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (Canada and Caribbean Region) and the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction; it was also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. Bezmozgis’ first feature film, Victoria Day, debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. In 2010, he was named one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40.” Bezmozgis lives in Toronto.

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International Acclaim for
Natasha and Other Stories

WINNER

Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book
(Canada and Caribbean region)
The Martin and Beatrice Fischer Fiction Award, Jewish Book Awards
Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction
City of Toronto Book Award

FINALIST

Governor General’s Award for Fiction
Los Angeles Times
Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction
Guardian
First Book Award
Borders Original Voices Award

A
New York Times
Notable Book
One of the 25 Best Books of the Year,
Los Angeles Times

“Dazzling, hilarious, and hugely compassionate narratives [written with] freshness and precision…. Readers will find themselves laughing out loud, then gasping as Bezmozgis brings these fictions to the searing, startling, and perfectly pitched conclusions that remind us that, as Babel said, ‘no iron can stab the heart so powerfully as a period put in exactly the right place.’“ —Francine Prose,
People

“[Possesses] an authority one usually finds only in more seasoned writers.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Exquisitely crafted stories. A first collection that reads like the work of a past master.” —T. C. Boyle

“Bezmozgis’s spare, confrontational tales take many unexpected turns, but their humanity and poignancy strike the deepest notes…. Irresistibly original.” —
Kirkus Reviews
(starred review)

“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.” —
Publishers Weekly

“A stunning first collection, characterized by a painful honesty and clarity of vision…. Like Gogol, Bezmozgis is acutely aware of his characters’ shortcomings; [he] writes with compassion, quietly reminding us of the hidden beauty within human imperfection.” —Julie Orringer,
The Believer

“Deft … humane but unblinkingly unsentimental…. Fine stories [that are] thick with memorable characters.” —
Chicago Tribune

“While the immigrant experience in the United States has been much explored, Bezmozgis’s less familiar shores are refreshing…. The voice in
Natasha
is assured, inviting, and warm.” —
The Economist

“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,
Bezmozgis renders something of the clear-sighted melancholy associated with Chekhov 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
The Virgin Suicides
and
Middlesex

“[Bezmozgis’s] highly resonant and original stories assume the shape of Russian classics but are drawn from his life growing up as a very young Latvian immigrant in Toronto.” —
The Mirror
(Montreal)

“The stories are idiosyncratic, emotionally rich, and, for all their ethnic flavour, accessible.” —
The Atlantic

“All of these spare, expertly crafted, memorably moving tales … contain truths of which it is exhilarating to be reminded.” —
ELLE

“Passionately full of life…. Ebullient and warmly comic.”
—London Review of Books

“Bezmozgis … is a skillful storyteller, packing his brief tales with plot twists, quick revelations, amusing characters, all rendered in near-flawless prose…. The collection has several moments of intuitive brilliance, particularly at the stories’ traditional epiphany-style endings. Through the music of language and the language of symbol, Bezmozgis drives home the mystery and complexity of the most mundane-seeming events.” —
Quill & Quire

“[The] dynamic between American Jews and their greenhorn Russian counterparts is portrayed in a creepy and painfully funny way by David Bezmozgis in ‘Roman Berman, Massage Therapist,’ one of the best pieces in
Natasha and Other Stories.
… In a wonderfully dry, understated, well-paced manner that evokes the style of the late New York Russian-language fiction writer Sergei Dovlatov, Bezmozgis captures [in this story] what is, believe it or not, a type-scene of the Soviet Jewish immigrant experience. Simple detail and precise timing let such scenes resonate.” —
Boston Review

“A 30-year-old Canadian writer makes a commanding debut with an openhearted book that combines melancholy and hope. Its seven stories offer a portrait of a family of Latvian Jews just after they emigrate to Toronto in 1979. Told from the perspective of the Bermans’ only child, Mark, this is a piercingly honest account of what that family gains and loses through assimilation. The title story, in which 16-year-old Mark is obliged to supervise his troubled Russian step-cousin, is a knockout.” —The Baltimore Sun

David Bezmozgis was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1973. His first book,
Natasha and Other Stories,
won a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was a 2004
New York Times
Notable Book. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. In 2010, he was named one of
The New Yorker’s
“20 Under 40.” For more information, visit his website at www.bezmozgis.com.

The Free World
Copyright © 2011 by Nada Films, Inc.

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EPub Edition © NOVEMBER 2011 ISBN: 978-1-443-40560-7

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, by arrangement with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

FIRST CANADIAN EDITION

The passages in italics on pages 76 and 169 are from
Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939
by Anna Shternshis, courtesy of Indiana University Press.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Bezmozgis, David, 1973–
The free world/David Bezmozgis.

ISBN 978-1-44340-399-3

I. Title.
PS8603.E95F74 2011 C813’.6 C2010-906979-X

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