FICTION: The Free World,David Bezmozgis Viking, 356pp. £12.99
IN 2004 David Bezmozgis published a collection of short stories, Natasha and Other Stories, a series of linked tragicomic vignettes about the lives of Latvian Jews in Canada in the early 1980s. Now he has published his first novel. It's a series of linked tragicomic vignettes about the lives of Latvian Jews on their way to Canada in 1978.
Born in Riga, the Latvian capital, in 1973, Bezmozgis emigrated to Canada with his family in 1980. He is – he has become – a chronicler of a particular people at a particular time. He’s a modern Sholem Aleichem.
In The Free WorldBezmozgis focuses on the story of the Krasnanskys, a family whose conversation was "a series of digs and ambushes". We meet them first on the platform of Vienna's Western Terminal, where "the representatives of Soviet Jewry – from Tallinn to Tashkent – roiled, snarled and elbowed to deposit their belongings on to the waiting train".
The Krasnanskys are leaving the “Soviet shit heap” and heading for freedom in the West, with anything they think they can sell in the markets of Italy: “linens, toys, samovars, ballet shoes, nesting dolls, leather Latvian handicrafts, nylon stockings, lacquer boxes, pocket-knives, camera equipment, picture books, and opera glasses”. They make it as far as Rome, where they get stuck, waiting for visas. The Holy City becomes their purgatory, and the novel becomes a series of portraits of people in limbo.
Alec Krasnansky is 26, a husband, a womaniser, a chancer who gets a job interviewing the emigres for their “persecution stories”. He’s keen to get on, to make a new start. Alec’s wife, Polina, attempts to learn English and takes to writing letters back home. Alec’s father, Samuil, is a communist and anti-Zionist who starts writing his life story. Samuil’s wife, Emma, comes under the influence of a Lubavitch rabbi, the Jewish equivalent of a charismatic evangelical Christian pastor.
The Krasnanskys are, in other words, archetypal in-betweeners, lost souls, at the mercy of themselves and others, muddling through life while dreaming of other worlds and ways of living. Lyova, the family’s landlord in Rome, imagines the life of his son in Israel: “Mine is the archetypal Jewish face. Like something formed on the run and in a panic. Nose, eyes, ears, mouth: finished. He has a face for a new age, I hope. No more running, no more panic.”
The natural rhythm of the book, reflecting its themes, is a kind of low-key meandering drift, with shifts in point of view and perspective between family members, and much use of reminiscence and flashback. It is undoubtedly at its best in a series of vivid set-piece scenes where Bezmozgis accelerates the tempo and alters the tone from con sordino to con brio. During a power cut in their hotel the emigres spill on to the landings and use their pump-action Soviet torchlights: “The effect was reminiscent of the countryside at dusk. It was as if, one after another, nocturnal insects were awaking to pursue their nightly business.”
Another night the Krasnanskys go to see the film Fiddler on the Roof. Samuil is appalled: "This is what the commotion is about?" This is what they've done to Sholem Aleichem's Teyve der milkhiker? "Somewhere in America, Sholem Aleichem was spinning in his grave. The filmmakers had taken his 'goodbye' and turned it into 'hello'. What Sholem Aleichem had meant as an acceptance of a new reality and a critique of the outmoded ways had been transformed into sentimental Jewish burlesque."
The Free Worldis true to the spirit of Aleichem's original. It is not a celebration of tradition. It is a long goodbye.
Ian Sansom is a novelist. He teaches at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queens University Belfast. His most recent book is
The Bad Book Affair
(Harper Collins, 2010)
