14
The following morning, they bade farewell to Lyova for the third and final time. They descended with him to the street to await the taxi that would take him to the airport. Their farewell was muted, colored by everything that had just passed. When the taxi arrived, Lyova embraced each of them in turn—first Alec, then Polina. With a vagabond smile, Lyova uttered the old Red Army creed: No one and nobody is forgotten! He then ducked his head inside the taxi and was gone.
The night Lyova left, Alec slept on an eiderdown on the floor in Lyova’s half of the apartment. Once Lyova was gone, he assumed his bed.
Before the week of mourning was over, they received word about their papers. Without Samuil, there were no longer any constraints to their application. After such a long period of waiting, they were once again obliged to rush. They packed up their things quickly. The majority of what they’d brought to Rome they had sold, and they’d purchased very little in exchange. Polina did most of the packing, maintaining a barrier of activity between them.
Days before their departure, Alec and Polina traveled to Ladispoli to allow Polina to finally pay her respects and to help with the preparations. The house, when they arrived, was in a state of upheaval. Objects and clothes were piled up in the corners. In the kitchen, Alec saw his mother displaying one of his father’s shirts for Josef Roidman, who stood before her and examined the garment. On the table before her, neatly folded, were other of his father’s clothes—his shirts, his trousers, his blazer. Also on the table were a pair of tailor’s shears and a knitting kit with needles, thimbles, and multicolored spools of thread. When his mother saw them enter, she beckoned them into the kitchen. Seeing Polina, her face flushed and she wiped her eyes with the backs of her wrists, overcome again as if for the first time.
—He is gone, Polinachka, Emma said.
Polina went to embrace her, and everyone observed a solemn moment, until Emma collected herself and remembered what she’d been doing.
—I don’t want them to go to strangers or to waste, Emma said. Josef was his friend. Your father would have been happy for him to have them. Unless, of course, you want anything.
—It’s probably better that Josef take them, Alec said.
—I consider it an honor, Roidman replied.
—They just require some alterations, Emma said.
Polina offered to help, and joined her at the table.
—There are more of your father’s things in the other room, Emma said. It breaks my heart to touch them. But if you feel you can do it, you should do it. And look to see if there is anything you want for yourself.
As he started away for the living room, Alec heard Roidman say, God willing, I will come to Canada soon and visit you wearing this shirt.
In the living room were several cardboard boxes of his father’s things. Alec sat down to sort through them. From the bedroom, he could hear Yury and Zhenya chirping some song in what may have been English. Rosa opened the door and the boys’ voices spilled out louder. Seeing Alec amid Samuil’s effects, she came over.
—Karl took your father’s wedding ring and left you his watch, Rosa said. He’s the firstborn son, so I hope you don’t have any objections.
—No objections, Alec said.
Alec saw Rosa glance at the kitchen, where Josef Roidman was wearing his father’s blazer, with Polina folding and pinning one of the sleeves.
—So she took you back after all.
—She says she will leave me once we get to Canada.
Rosa kept her eyes on Polina as she went about her task.
—She would be right to, Rosa said. But I suspect she won’t. That’s the way we women are.
She looked away and returned to the bedroom, leaving Alec alone with the boxes. They consisted almost exclusively of papers, notebooks, and documents. There were very few personal items. He saw his father’s razor, an unopened bottle of cologne, two pairs of pewter cuff links, and the inexpensive watch, of Soviet manufacture, that Rosa had bequeathed to him. He found that he was able to handle these objects without feeling too much distress. His father’s papers and notebooks he felt far less equipped to handle. To look at his handwriting felt exceedingly personal and painful. He glanced quickly through the documents and packed them away for some future day.
Among the papers, at the bottom of a box, he came upon the stack of letters that his uncle had sent from the front. They were yellowed, brittle with age, and carried the scent of loss and the past. For that reason they seemed hallowed, but also because Alec knew that these were his father’s dearest possessions. Alec leafed through them carefully, unfolded them, and regretted that he would never understand what they said. The only thing he could decipher were the dates, which his uncle had written in Roman numerals at the top of each letter. His father had filed them chronologically, beginning with the first correspondence from the summer of 1941. Alec counted more than sixty letters in total, ending in late December of 1942. This final letter was composed in Russian and in another hand.
29 December 1942
Dear Comrade Krasnansky,
I am still entirely under the influence of the great tragedy which today befell you and your loved ones. I am here undertaking the sad task to tell you that your brother Reuven was killed by a German bomb near the zemlyanka where we live. Just by chance he went out and at that very instant a Messerschmitt flew past. It dropped two bombs and one bomb exploded near your brother. In the time we tried to help him and carry him away from there, he died. We buried him in the same place where the bomb hit.
It is a terrible task to tell you this, but I see it as my duty to him and to you. I know what it is like when one sits and waits for a letter from the front. Together with this letter I am also sending 336 rubles and some photographs we found in your brother’s pocket. You will be surprised that I am writing to you since we do not know each other well. My name is Chaim Obadya and I was a student in Riga at the 2nd Grunt School.
This is all I can tell you about this sad end. Take hope, my friend. You, too, are a soldier and understand that this is war and many of our friends, brothers, and loved ones have already fallen. We don’t know what any moment will bring us. It is possible that many more will meet the same fate as your beloved brother. But we will go forward and find our compensation in the struggle against dark reactionary fascism.
Acknowledgments
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.
About the Author
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.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
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
A Note About the Author
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.
Copyright
The Free World
Copyright © 2011 by Nada Films, Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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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