‘The Free World’ by David Bezmozgis

Reviewed by Alison Gillmor

In 2004, Toronto-based David Bezmozgis released Natasha and Other Stories, a debut story collection written with the kind of fully formed assurance that made other writers nervous. He won a passle of awards and made The New Yorker’s 20 under 40 list. Meanwhile, there was an almost seven-year publishing silence.

Well, there’s no sophomore curse here. As with Natasha, the writing in The Free World feels both completely contemporary and already canonized. Bezmozgis adapts to the novel form not with ambition but with suppleness. Serious without being ponderous and funny without being flippant, his long-form prose retains much of Natasha’s Chekovian conciseness and precision.

In some ways, The Free World can be viewed as a prologue to Natasha, which was about former Soviet Jews attempting to assimilate to life in Canada in the 1980s.  This is the story before the immigrant story, as three generations of a Latvian-Jewish family spend five strangely suspended months in Italy in 1978. Having slipped through the crack in the Iron Curtain that allowed Jews to leave the Eastern Bloc, they are hoping for sponsorship to the New World. (At one point, we are told about “Jewish ladies in Winnipeg” working tirelessly on one character’s behalf). Riga is glimpsed only in flashbacks, Canada is some barely imagined future, and Israel is an abstraction. Rome, seen through the eyes of this distracted, unsettled group, is not so much the Eternal City as a perpetual waiting room.

Samuil Krasnansky is the family’s obstreperous and embittered patriarch, a hard-line, lifelong Communist only recently ousted from the Party. For him the West holds no promise of freedom but only a decline into moral laxness and religious superstition. “Perfect little yeshiva bochers,” Samuil mutters when he sees his young grandsons reciting newly learned Hebrew prayers. In one comic scene, he is taken to watch the Hollywood version of Fiddler on the Roof. To the shtetl-born Samuil, the movie is almost incomprehensible. He sees only American actors dressed in shawls.

Karl, the older adult son, is married with two young boys (one is about the same age that the 37-year-old Bezmozgis would have been when his own family travelled from Latvia to Canada). A slightly shady pragmatist, Karl is a born capitalist who’s already working the system at a Mafia-run automotive chop shop in Rome. Alec, the younger son, is a cheerful, charming philanderer, who finds capitalism and communism equally oppressive to his interest in pleasure. Alec is married to the non-Jewish Polina, a clear-eyed, self-contained woman who has cast her lot in with this family for reasons that become clear only later. Polina is searching not for happiness but for “a happier miserable,” as she says.

The novel opens with a stunning set-piece of epigrammatic, economical writing, which introduces us to the Krasnanskys as they are stopped in a Vienna train station. Bezmozgis sets out the family dynamics with sharp, short descriptions and sideways dialogue. (Bezmozgis writes his dialogue in Russian and then translates, giving it a weighted, faintly exotic cadence.) For a family story, The Free World is astringently unsentimental, the Krasnanskys being held together mostly by old grievances and present necessities. But held together they are, and Bezmozgis views them with bemused generosity. From this one brief scene, the book’s central personalities — Samuil, Alec and Polina – are gradually unwrapped, so we begin to see the reasons for Samuil’s bottomless anger and Alec’s careless womanizing. Bezmozgis doesn’t present these characters to be liked, necessarily, but he wants them to be understood.

Most of that understanding is grounded in European history, which Bezmozgis chronicles with black, bleakly funny absurdity. Parts of the book feel like anekdoti, those bitterly funny stories that circulated in the former Soviet Union, as when Bezmozgis writes about the almost insurmountable difficulty of daily life under communism. Trying to renovate a new apartment in Riga, for example, Karl finds that it’s as if “Leonid Illyich was himself personally opposed to the tiling of a bathroom.”

Bezmozgis also finds strange, dark comedy in the relentless socio-political roiling of the Baltics. Samuil has an uncle who fought with the tsar against the Germans, with the Germans against the Bolsheviks and then with the Latvians against the Germans again. “I fought with the tsar because I was young and foolish,” the uncle explains. “I fought with the Germans because the Bolsheviks tried to close the shops and the synagogues. And I fought with the Latvians because the Germans wouldn’t leave.” We read about the ultra-nationalists and the internationalists, the Esperanto-speaking idealists, the Yiddish-speaking socialists, the Zionists, the Orthodox Jews, all of them forming strange alliances and enmities, and most of them caught at some point by the grinding gears of totalitarian power. Through all this history runs a line of anti-Semitism, which changes tack (tsarist suspicion of revolutionaries, Stalinist suspicion of counter-revolutionaries) but never disappears.

History and politics press in on these characters in a way that’s unusual in modern writing. It’s easy to understand the attitude of Alec and Polina’s temporary roommate Lyova, who has left both the Soviet Union and Israel, exhausted by life in these supposed utopias. “Basically, I want the country with the fewest parades,” he tells Samuil.

In the end, the Krasnanskys’ experiences in 1970s Rome feel very contemporary, being literally and metaphorically about that “in-between-ness” that seems to be the core of our current cultural condition. At the same time, there’s a nineteenth century heft here. Bezmozgis is not a moralizer – not at all – but he does have an urgent moral sense that actions unspool into consequences and that individual choices matter, even as they’re being flattened by the steamroller of twentieth century European history.