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July 1, 2011
Putting down roots after exodus
David Bezmozgis’ novel, The Free World, takes readers on a familiar immigrant journey.
IRENA KARSHENBAUM
In the 1970s, an exodus of Soviet Jews, their suitcases stuffed with Melodiya records and Khokhloma handcrafts, began to stream through Vienna heading for Rome. They came with all sorts of assumptions about the West, including that the tchotchkes they scrounged so hard to buy to later sell would help finance their passage to the free world. Fortunately, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee workers, often American Jews barely out of their teens, were on hand to help navigate their passage to America, Canada, Australia and sometimes even New Zealand, with Israel being a rare choice.
In this migrating hoard were some children who would soon leave their mark on the world, the most prominent being Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, who was just six years old when his parents brought him out of the Soviet Union, by way of Paris, to the United States. Another is author David Bezmozgis, who was also six but whose family traveled through Rome before arriving in Canada, and who may have written one of the first fictional accounts of this heady yet difficult exodus.
In the interests of full, true and plain disclosure, I should state that everything I’m writing is absolutely, completely and fully biased. I was eight when my family traveled the exact same immigration route at exactly the same time as the events of The Free World (HarperCollins Canada, 2011). This reason alone makes me fall madly, truly, crazily, deeply in love with Bezmozgis’ first novel.
Twenty years later, my family, the Karshenbaums, found our Joint English teacher in a serendipitous way. He hailed a taxi driven by my father’s friend, Igor, in New York. It took me almost a decade to look him up, but when I finally called Daniel at his Midtown Manhattan law firm, he actually remembered my parents well. He was just 23 then. My father was 38, my mother 35. He mused how they seemed so old to him. Looking back at photos of that time, my parents were so young, so thin, so beautiful.
Bezmozgis has done for Soviet Jewry what other immigrant writers, like Rohinton Mistry, Michael Ondaandje and Anosh Irani, have done for their respective communities; he has written this chapter of time and place into literary history.
Bezmozgis’ ambitious novel has its roots in a quintessential Jewish story, the Book of Exodus, but his writing is every bit Mordecai Richler – it’s scrappy through and through.
It is 1978 and the story centres on the Krasnansky family that has left their relatively comfortable life in Riga, Soviet Latvia, behind for the golden medina of America. They are traveling through Vienna, then to Rome, where they settle in Ladispoli, instead of Ostia. “Ostia was overrun by Odessans. Ladispoli was populated more by people from Moscow, Leningrad, Latvia, Lithuania. In short, it was more civilized,” Bezmozgis explains.
The Krasnanskys, formerly Eisner, are not only on an immigrant journey, but are also in the process of assimilating. As a young man, Samuil, the patriarch, left the observant Judaism of his childhood and became a communist, as a reaction to witnessing the murder of his father and grandfather by the Whites. “Do you remember how Grandfather said the Shema when they killed him?” asks Samuil’s brother, Reuven, in a scene that takes us back to their childhood. “‘No,’ Samuil said weakly. ‘A Hebrew poem never saved a Jew from a pogrom,’” Reuven tells him. Reuven is also the one who changes the family name to Krasnansky, “because of its evocation of the communist color” (krasny meaning red in Russian). As an old man, having left the Soviet Union, Samuil is no longer certain of his place in the world without communism, or even his desire to continue living.
Karl, Samuil’s oldest son, has found temporary employment in a body shop, which serves as a front for black-market activities. In contrast to her husband’s machinations, Rosa is rediscovering Judaism by forging a relationship with the local Chabad rebbetzin and, despite her family’s cynicism towards their religion, doing her best to teach their two sons the traditions the family lost.
Alec, Samuil’s second son, seeks escape from the boredom of their immigrant predicament in a voluptuous 18-year-old named Masha. While Polina, his non-Jewish wife, may have risked the most by leaving her family in Riga for the vague promises of a new life in a new land with a new, philandering husband, Polina is not entirely blameless in her uncertain future, as she’s chosen to ricochet into a flimsy second marriage from a flimsy first marriage that ended on account of her affair with Alec.
Of course, it’s not easy to disengage from one’s roots, then one’s land, find yourself stateless and expect familial harmony, and the modern-day struggles of the Krasnansky’s four-month sojourn in Rome may not be that different from the struggles of Jewish ancestors in centuries past, wandering the Sinai Desert for 40 years. The Haggadah does explicitly state, after all, that, “In every generation, each of us should feel as though he or she personally went forth from Egypt.” Some generations just happen to be unlucky enough to actually have been part of such an experience.
The story of the Krasnanskys is brought to life against the backdrop of events in 1978. This is the year when the Vatican has a succession of three popes, Rome is paralyzed with constant train strikes and Menachem Begin, Jimmy Carter and Anwar Sadat are engaged in peace talks.
Bezmozgis gives the story life by writing about immigrant activities just as they were. One scene describes the fate of all those Melodiya vinyl records and Khokhloma crafts that would make their way to the Americana market in Rome, where, hopefully, they would be appealing to “children or imbeciles” to provide much-needed income. This scene rips the heart out. My father, Ilya, was an electrical engineer (as was my mother) before we left the Soviet Union, but when we were penniless refugees, he would get up early on Sunday mornings and leave with heavy duffel bags for the Americana market. At night, he would return with smaller and smaller duffel bags. He wanted to write about this time and, when he was about the age I am now, began working on a manuscript. No book ever materialized. He told me years later that he read back what he wrote and then destroyed it. He intended to try writing again in his retirement; only he never reached retirement. With the publication of The Free World, Bezmozgis has fulfilled not only his own literary dreams, but has provided a voice for many others.
The book ends as it begins. The Krasnanskys haven’t yet arrived in their Land of Canaan, which will end up being Canada, but they have experienced a sudden tragedy and an inkling of family cohesion appears.
The Free World can be seen as a prequel to Natasha and Other Stories, Bezmozgis’ book of short stories published in 2004. Set in suburban Toronto, that collection is about the Bermans, a Soviet Jewish family assimilating and struggling to adapt to life in a new land. Bezmozgis is also a filmmaker and has made documentaries, L.A. Mohel and Genuine Article: The First Trial, as well as two films, a short, The Diamond Nose, and his first feature film, Victoria Day, which premièred in 2009 at the Sundance Film Festival. (Victoria Day was reviewed in the Jewish Independent, June 19, 2009.)
For the past year, Bezmozgis has been living with his wife and daughter (the couple welcomed a second daughter on April 11) in New York, where he’s been a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. In a brief e-mail, he wrote that he’s been working on his next novel, writing a screen adaptation of Natasha and developing a television show about a Russian oligarch exiled in America. He also embarked on a multi-city book tour this spring, with two stops in Canada, in Toronto and Calgary.
With the publication of The Free World, Bezmozgis is on his way to entering the pantheon of the great modern Jewish writers, including Richler, Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, Joseph Roth, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer. Bezmozgis’ talent is of this calibre.
Irena Karshenbaum was born in Kharkov, Ukraine. In August of 1978, her parents brought her out of the Soviet Union. They traveled through Vienna and settled in Ostia, outside of Rome, before arriving in Calgary in March of 1979. She’s the founding president of the Little Synagogue on the Prairie Project Society. Contact her at [email protected].
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