RIGA - In the first piece that makes up David Bezmozgis' "Natasha and Other Stories," six-year-old Mark Berman, a recent immigrant from Latvia, is confronted with an ancient question in his first-grade classroom in Canada. The teacher asks his classmates to name their nationalities. After his fellow students answer "Russian," "Armenian" and "Ukrainian," Mark answers, "Jewish."
"'What a shame,' says the teacher, 'so young and already a Jew.'"
It's a light joke, of course, part of an old tradition of sardonic Russian humor Bezmozgis, who was born in Riga in 1973, says he grew up with. But like many epigrammatic asides in his slim book - you could read it in an evening - about the Jewish immigrant experience in 1980s Toronto, it captures a whole wilderness of displacement and isolation.
Here are some of his other provocative sentences:
"His house was covered in old fight posters and pictures of guys I recognized and would have traded lives with even though they were already dead."
"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."
Bezmozgis' book came out in 2004 and earned him considerable praise. James Wood, the noted literary critic, and Jeffrey Eugenides, the Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist, compared him favorably to Isaac Babel. He was honored by The Guardian and the Los Angeles Times and the book sold well enough to let him quit his day job working on documentaries and switch to writing full-time.
By the time I talked to him over the phone at his home in Toronto on March 30, the shock of success was over. In two years, he had done several interviews, but I had the sense that he wasn't giving canned, practiced answers, common to writers who've suffered a long book tour circuit. He spoke methodically, analyzing every question with an incisive mind.
A Jew, Riga-born
In 1980, Bezmozgis' family, like many other Russian Jews in the country at the time, left Latvia under the sponsorship of Israel, but eventually ended up emigrating to Canada. He remembers very little of his toddler years in Riga, except for leaving. "I remember how painful it was," he says. "I remember kissing the walls in the house where we lived."
He says that he doesn't consider himself Latvian in any concrete way. As a Jew, it may be hard for him to have a strong affection for his birthplace.
"Latvian Jews considered themselves Latvians and Jews," he says. "But they were killed as Jews [during World War II], not as Latvians. You can choose to hold onto certain traditions. You can stop speaking Latvian and stop speaking Russian. And within a generation or two you're no longer Latvian or Russian. But Jews, even Jews who choose to opt out, get reminded that they're Jewish, whether they like it or not."
In "An Animal to the Memory," Mark Berman, now an older misfit (a neighborhood friend tells him, "Congratulations, you're the toughest guy in Hebrew school") mortifies a rabbi when a fellow student starts a fight with him at a Holocaust memorial.
The rabbi doesn't react well. He takes him down to the memorial alone, says that he is worse than a Nazi, and demands that he shout that he is Jewish so that "my uncles hear you in Treblinka!"
Bezmozgis does use the moment for some savage if forgivable jokes. But he also contains a great capacity for sympathy.
"I believe there are evil people in the world who do horrible things that aren't justified. But I don't think that's true for most people. I think if you look at the rabbi, he views [what Mark Berman has gotten involved in] as a personal affront. He doesn't understand what's going on with him. He can only do what he can with the information that has been made available to him."
In his story "Minyan," another rabbi continues to take care of a loyal elderly parishioner at his synagogue, even though he's a widower of a gay relationship. "Homosexuals, murderers, liars and thieves 's I take them all," says the rabbi. "Without them, we would never have a minyan."
This is a reverent take on Judaism.
"When you talk to most Orthodox Jews, they'll tell you that even Jews who are apostate are still Jews. It's something about the nature of Jews."
In other words, Jews would never be able to form a minyan, the required 10 men to perform certain prayers, if they kicked out all their freaks. "I also feel that without Jews and without 'homosexuals, murderers, liars and thieves,' the world wouldn't be as interesting."
Bezmozgis is very conscious of being part of a tradition that includes Mordechai Richler, whose work looked at Jews in Depression-era Montreal, and Bernard Malamud, whose stories chronicled the Jews of Brooklyn. "I wasn't referring to these writers," he says. "But I didn't feel I was doing anything new. I just had a new community to write about."
In the cases of all three writers, studying one's Jewishness, a quality that is ineradicable, is just a way of studying one's humanity.
And then there is Babel, a Russian Jewish writer from the 20s and 30s who was killed by Stalin. Babel's stories are "deceptively simple," says Bezmozgis. "I admire his brevity, his Jewish secular sensibility, which I think we share. He does more in a sentence than most novelists do in an entire novel."
He's read Babel in English, but is trying to master Russian 's he may have been born in the Soviet Union, but the language is not natural to him 's so he can properly read him as well as the other Russian greats.
Anne Frydman, a Babel scholar, says that many American Jewish writers were influenced by Babel, but no one, including Bezmozgis, writes like him. Sometimes the influence is more a matter of coincidence. "Grace Paley said she didn't start reading Babel until well after she started publishing," she says. When Bezmozgis and others talk about Babel's secular sensibility, they may be talking about Babel's ability to take an Old Testament approach to storytelling, one of paradoxes and hidden meanings, and apply it to everyday non-religious, non-mystical life.
Bezmozgis is currently working on a novel that will "take place in a different time and a different place," he says. "Put it this way, it will have more Latvia in it." He may come back to the old country to do some research, which would be his second trip here since he first left 26 years ago.
When he visited two years ago with his parents, it was interesting for him to see a country with which he was historically, if not spiritually connected. His parents still had friends, if no family, here.
But on at least one level, it was a troubling experience.
"It was an incredibly white country, and I'm not used to it. I could tell Latvians from Russians and Jews. The lines were drawn, I felt exposed in a way that I didn't feel in North America. People could read my history on my face."
