Like the young Philip Roth, David Bezmozgis, the author of “Natasha: And Other Stories” has a gift for both description and narration. A 30-year-old from Toronto who came to Canada with his family at the age of 5 from the former Soviet Union, his first book is the work of a tremendous talent. He is a writer who has the potential to be spoken with someday in the same breath as Roth, Saul Bellow and Leonard Michaels.
His character studies have the sharpness of caricature and also, at times, the depth of a fine portrait painter. In seven stories of this debut collection, he sketches the world of the Soviet Jewish emigres in 1980s and 1990s Toronto and he does so with both compassion and brutal honesty.
We meet Jewish men, like the narrator’s father, with real guts and unfeigned emotion. We also meet Jewish drug dealers and users, a young Jewish prostitute, the betrayed and betrayers — as well as kindhearted Jewish grandparents, an angry rabbi and Hebrew school bullies.
The author knows this world. It is the Toronto of his youth.
The writing is so well-achieved that one can smell the odors of Russian cooking, hear the family arguments, taste the borscht being made in small apartments, sense the feeling of longing, and understand the great expectations of hard-working immigrants.
And the immigrants do succeed, moving from crowded apartments to suburban homes. Yet in their success, the younger generation and their elders know that something is missing. Material success is not enough.
What is missing is the idealism — call it the failed idealism — that great writers like Roth, Bellow, Michaels and the great Russian Jewish writer Isaac Babel once gave voice to. The author only finds this idealism when he relaxes his sense of self to understand his connection with other Jews, a oneness with the past. And this oneness is what Bezmozgis has not quite achieved, but what the arc of his stories moves toward.
Bezmozgis is following in the footsteps of Jewish writers who were honest in depicting our people as they were and are — warts and all. But the older writers eventually made themselves part of the continuance of the Jewish people. They wrote with love as well as anger.
“Natasha” is a book still a little too detached from the people the author has observed and grown up with. His stories are brilliant but too well made. They sometimes hint, when they could openly argue or explain. But this is a quibble, for Bezmozgis already shows signs that he is a mature talent.
All his best stories veer toward sadness — the tragedy of a displaced and dignified father, the loss of his parents’ and grandparents’ country — destroyed by Hitler and Stalin and the successors to Stalin. He observes the melancholy of young tough Jews in North America who view life as a meaningless joke. Not Zionist and not religious, not Russian and not Canadian. Besides sexual acting out and drug taking, what is left?
What is left is the world all must eventually enter — a world beyond twenty-something bravado.
And this is the place Bezmozgis does penetrate in his collection’s last two short stories, which deal in part with his grandmother’s death and his grandfather’s life after her death. The whole collection and particularly the last two stories indicate we can expect great things if he continues to develop.
And development, it is clear, for Bezmozgis, will mean linking up with, not rejecting, his Jewish past.
“Natasha: And Other Stories” by David Bezmozgis (144 pages, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $18).