Natasha: And Other Stories [Hardcover]

David Bezmozgis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 9, 2004

Few readers had heard of David Bezmozgis before last May, when Harper's, Zoetrope, and The New Yorker all printed stories from his forthcoming collection. In the space of a few weeks, these magazines introduced America to the Bermans--Bella and Roman and their son, Mark--Russian Jews who have fled the Riga of Brezhnev for Toronto, the city of their dreams.

Told through Mark's eyes, and spanning the last twenty-three years, Natasha brings the Bermans and the Russian-Jewish enclaves of Toronto to life in stories full of big, desperate, utterly believable consequence. In "Tapka" six-year-old Mark's first experiments in English bring ruin and near tragedy to the neighbors upstairs. In "Roman Berman, Massage Therapist," Roman and Bella stake all their hopes for Roman's business on their first, humiliating dinner in a North American home. Later, in the title story, a stark, funny anatomy of first love, we witness Mark's sexual awakening at the hands of his fourteen-year-old cousin, a new immigrant from the New Russia. In "Minyan," Mark and his grandfather watch as the death of a tough old Odessan cabdriver sets off a religious controversy among the poor residents of a Jewish old-folks' home.

The stories in Natasha capture the immigrant experience with a serious wit as compelling as the work of Jhumpa Lahiri, Nathan Englander, or Adam Haslett. At the same time, their evocation of boyhood and youth, and the battle for selfhood in a passionately loving Jewish family, recalls the first published stories of Bernard Malamud, Harold Brodkey, Leonard Michaels, and Philip Roth.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

David Bezmozgis became an overnight star when he published stories in the holy trinity of American magazines for fiction lovers: The New Yorker, Harper's, and Zoetrope. With the publication of his first book, Natasha, he has been compared to Chekhov and Philip Roth, and the comparison is more than just promotional copy. Natasha follows the experiences of a family of Russian Jews who settle in Toronto and set about reinventing themselves. The loosely connected stories are narrated by the son, Mark, who attempts to understand not only his new world but also his parents. As the book progresses, his growth into the frustrations of adolescence mirrors his family's disappointments as they attempt to escape their old lives in the immigrant ghetto and create new identities. Bezmozgis calls the stories "autobiographical fiction," as they are largely inspired by his own family's past, but make no mistake, these are fully realized works of literature, complete with an attention to language and an eye for detail that invoke the best of minimalist writing. Bezmozgis doesn't reinvent the form here--he sticks to traditional themes such as the search for self and cultural dislocation--but he tells his stories with a grace and quiet sensitivity that's so rare these days it's practically an endangered species.

And there are a couple of literary masterpieces in Natasha. The title story, which relates Mark's sexual experimentation with a cousin by marriage during a summer spent dealing drugs, manages to be both a touching coming-of-age tale and one of the freshest inversions of the suburban dream in years. "The Second Strongest Man," a story of the reunion of Mark's family with a Russian weightlifter, manages to conflate the decline of the Russia with the emptiness of North American life in its tale of aging men whose time has passed them by. Bezmozgis divides his time between Canada and the U.S., but Natasha is international in the scope of its subjects--modern Russia, Toronto's immigrant communities, Judaism, various translations of the American dream. It's the literature of globalization, and Bezmozgis has proven himself to be a global writer. --Peter Darbyshire, Amazon.ca

From Publishers Weekly

Like the author of this remarkable debut collection of seven linked stories, the protagonist, Mark Berman, emigrated with his parents from Latvia to Toronto in 1980. Bezmozgis writes with subtlety and control, moving from Mark's boyhood arrival in Canada to his adult reckoning with his grandparents' decline, rendering the immigrant experience with powerful specificity of character, place and history. "This was 1983, and as Russian Jews, recent immigrants, and political refugees, we were still a cause. We had good PR," he writes in "Roman Berman, Massage Therapist," about the humiliations of turning to well-meaning but condescending Canadian Jews for financial help. Bezmozgis also considers North American Jewish identity, as in "An Animal to the Memory," which interrogates the centrality of the Holocaust-and victimhood-to the Jewish sense of self. His stories are as compassionate as they are critical. In "Minyan," Mark attends synagogue with his grandfather: "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." The collection's strength lies in how Bezmozgis layers the specifics of Russian-Jewish experience with universal childhood and adolescent dilemmas. The title story, about Mark's sexual escapades with his 14-year-old cousin by marriage, evokes both his stoner, suburban "subterranean life" and the numbing exigencies of Natasha's adolescence in Russia. In "Tapka," about the fate of a cosseted dog, 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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 147 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (June 9, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374281416
• ISBN-13: 978-0374281410
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #665,769 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

David Bezmozgis is an award-winning writer and filmmaker. David's stories have appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, Harpers, Zoetrope All-Story, and The Walrus. His first book, Natasha and Other Stories, was published in 2004 in the US and Canada and was subsequently translated into fifteen languages. Natasha was a New York Times Notable Book, one of the New York Public Library's 25 Books to Remember for 2004, and an Amazon.com Top 10 Book for 2004. Natasha was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award (UK), the LA Times First Book Award (US), and the Governor General's Award (Canada). It won the Toronto Book Award and the Commonwealth Writer's Prize for First Book.

He has been a performer at The New Yorker Festival (2005 & 2009), The UCLA Armand Hammer Museum (2007), and the Luminato Festival (2008). His work has been broadcast on NPR, BBC, and the CBC, and his stories have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2005 & 2006.

In 2006, David was a screenwriting fellow at the Sundance Labs where he developed his first feature, Victoria Day. The film premiered in competition at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009, had a theatrical release in Canada, and received a Genie Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

In the summer of 2010, David was included in The New Yorker's 20 Under 40 issue, celebrating the twenty most promising fiction writers under the age of forty.

David has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. In the fall of 2011, he will be a fellow at the Harvard/Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

The Free World, David's first novel, was published in April 2011 in the U.S. Canada, the UK, and Holland. Subsequent translations will appear in Germany, Italy, France, Israel and Spain.

Born in Riga, Latvia, David immigrated to Toronto with his parents in 1980.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How Easily We Forget, August 8, 2004

By 

Jon Linden (Warren, N.J. United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Natasha: And Other Stories (Hardcover)

In David Bezmozgis' book "Natasha and other stories" I expected to find a well written collection of short stories on different topics. But what I found had much more impact. With a style that won't let the reader go, the author moves through the life of Mark Berman, a Russian Immigrant to Canada in 1980. The stories are extremely autobiographical in character, although the author never states that outright.

Each story, in addition to being on a different topic, follows Mark through the ages of 6 to 16, and then two adult experience based stories after the title story "Natasha." The book is extraordinary in its ability to capture immense and incisive amounts of sensitive information about the characters, and convey it in an almost irresistable style, as he ambles through the very complex integration of a 6 year old Russian immigrant to the democratic environment of Canada and North America in general.

"Natasha," the title story really does capture the reader, as it is so illustrative of what we enjoy in North America, and how truly undesirable or worse it is to live in some parts of the world, but so many live in conditions that we in North America just take for granted. We need to be reminded of what we have, rather than what we do not have all the time. This book does an acutely prestigous job of elucidating this concept.

As the author's first book, it appears to be a great one. This author shows tremendous promise, and did something unique, and yet familiar. He used his own experiences, to write his first book, but he created a piece with a new character, than almost any other book of short stories I have previously read. However he did it, this book is not to be missed. It is truly worth anyone's time to invest in reading this fast reading and intimate yet important piece of literature.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A true depiction of the immigrant experience, December 5, 2004

By 

Joanne Fisher (Thornhill, Ontario) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Natasha and Other Stories (Hardcover)

David Bezmozgis astutely describes the immigrant experience in this book of short stories linked through the same characters.

The author's personal experiences, which parallel those of his characters, enable him to descriptively write scenes which come alive and appear real. As a Toronto secondary school teacher who has worked with Russian immigrant students, I recognize realistic scenarios in his stories and feel he has accurately portrayed the lives of these immigrants.

A thoroughly enjoyable read!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant piece of work!, January 3, 2005

By 

CoffeeGurl - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Natasha: And Other Stories (Hardcover)

This is a brilliant piece of work. All of the stories in Natasha and Other Stories are connected and narrated by the son of a Russian-Jewish family from 1970s Toronto. The stories of their struggles with wanting a new life. The language is sharp and evocative -- the descriptions vivid and beautiful. And the stories are thought provoking and poignant. My favorite stories are "The Strongest Man" and "Minyan." Reading about this family gave me the impression that David Bezmozgi was writing about his own experiences. It doesn't matter, for this is a brilliant short-story collection that I read in one sitting. I wish I had taken longer to read it and savored the experience. Natasha is going to my re-read pile. I cannot recommend this book enough...