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		<title>Natasha and Other Stories</title>
		<link>https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/natasha-and-other-stories/</link>
		
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		<pubDate>Sat, 01 Apr 2006 19:56:05 +0000</pubDate>
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					<description><![CDATA[<p>Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmozgis. The Jewish Short Story. Jewish American Literature. Jewish Literature</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/natasha-and-other-stories/">Natasha and Other Stories</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.myjewishlearning.com">My Jewish Learning</a>.</p>
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										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><i>Originally published in the </i><a href="http://www.jpost.com/">Jerusalem Post</a> <i>(July 1, 2004).</i><p>Some books have lines so funny or poignant or true that they inspire you to phone a friend and read them sentences, paragraphs even. <i>Natasha</i>, a collection of short stories by David Bezmozgis, is not one of those books. <i>Natasha</i> won&rsquo;t make you want to share sentences, or even paragraphs; you&rsquo;ll want to share whole stories&ndash;and not because the stories are funny or poignant or true, but because they&rsquo;re all three.</p><div align="right"> </div><p><i>Natasha</i> might also inspire you to rethink what you thought you knew about publishing. Here is a slim volume of stories by an author with no previous titles who received Farrar, Straus and Giroux&rsquo;s first ever pre-publication author tour. Here is fiction lauded and celebrated for its merit, despite its size, despite its genre. Here is a book that deserves all the praise that is sure to be heaped upon it.</p><p>Lovers of fiction: You are free to rejoice.</p>			<div id="mjl-teads-ad" class="mjl-teads-ad"></div>
			<h3>Coming to (North) America</h3><p>David Bezmozgis was born in Latvia in 1973. Seven years later, he emigrated to Toronto with his family. The linked stories in <i>Natasha</i> chronicle the Canadian acclimation of a similar family, the Bermans, and the tales are narrated by Bezmozgis&rsquo;s alter-ego, Mark Berman.</p><p>In the volume&rsquo;s first story, "Tapka," we&rsquo;re told that&ndash;like Bezmozgis&ndash;Mark arrived in Toronto in 1980, and his youth makes him the perfect narrator. He is Canadian enough to communicate the plight of his Soviet parents, and Soviet enough to discover anew the Western things we take for granted.</p><p>Indeed, Bezmozgis reminds us why immigrants make such wonderful narrators. Narrators are observers; they hover above stories. Immigrants, as outsiders, are perfectly suited for this role. This, of course, evokes thoughts of the great Jewish-American immigrant fiction. The parallels run deep, and the centrality of the child narrator is one of the most important. In fact, in the first few stories, Mark is the same age as David Schearl, the protagonist of Henry Roth&rsquo;s seminal novel <i>Call It Sleep</i>.</p><p>However, Bezmozgis&rsquo;s immigrant narrator is able to observe something Schearl couldn&rsquo;t: affluent, established North American Jewry. Bezmozgis is particularly sharp about this community&rsquo;s strange relationship with suffering, notably its preoccupation with the Holocaust.</p><h3>Wealth and Woes</h3><p>In the wonderfully titled "Roman Berman Massage Therapist," for example, Mark narrates his father&rsquo;s attempt to open a massage parlor. The Bermans set out to create a flyer advertising the opening, but disagree on what to include in the copy. Mr. Berman wants to stress his experience training Olympic athletes in Latvia; Mrs. Berman, on the other hand, "believed that his strongest selling point was his status as a Soviet refugee. The most important appeal, she said, was to guilt and empathy."</p><p>After a week of no responses, the Bermans get a call from a Dr. Kornblum, who invites them over for dinner. During dessert, Kornblum pulls out a family album and speaks of his ancestors in Poland. Mark narrates: "I had to go to the washroom and Kornblum said there was one downstairs and three upstairs, take your pick. He then turned a page in the album and pointed out everyone the Nazis had killed."</p><p>An even sharper look at the ironic relationship between four-bathroom Jews and Jewish suffering is presented in "An Animal to the Memory," which describes Mark&rsquo;s Hebrew School delinquency on Holocaust Remembrance Day ("which we called Holocaust Day for short").</p><p>The school principal berates Mark for failing to appreciate the solemnity of the day, for "choking another Jew at a memorial for the Holocaust." The principal believes this misbehavior reflects Mark&rsquo;s ambivalent Jewish identity, so he forces him to scream: "I am a Jew."</p><p>Of course, of the two characters here, only one left the Soviet Union because of anti-Semitism, but Bezmozgis doesn&rsquo;t need to state this punch line explicitly. The absurdity of the scene speaks for itself. Indeed, Bezmozgis forces us to ponder the difference between a Canadian Jewish community steeped in Judaism and defined by a fear of annihilation and a Russian Jewish community ignorant of most things Jewish, yet defined by actual anti-Semitism.</p><p>Still, <i>Natasha</i> is much more than an outsider&rsquo;s look at the culture of North American Jewry. Bezmozgis&rsquo;s prose is virtually flawless, simple and fluid.</p><p>The title story is a classic sexual coming-of-age tale, chock full of hilarity, honesty and loss. Even the final two stories, which are the weakest in the volume, have sentences to marvel at. In "Minyan," Bezmozgis writes of nursing home residents who come to pray: "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."</p><p><!-- 

<p><i>Natasha</i> is too good and too short; there's no excuse for avoiding it. </p>

   

<p>Read this book. If you intend to read it only once, pick up a phone before you begin. You'll probably want to share it with a friend. </p>

   

<p><i>Daniel Septimus is the Editor-in-Chief of MyJewishLearning.com. His literature column, &#34;Reading Between the Lines,&#34; appears monthly in the </i>Jerusalem Post<i>.</i></p>

 --></p></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/natasha-and-other-stories/">Natasha and Other Stories</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.myjewishlearning.com">My Jewish Learning</a>.</p>
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		<title>The Jewish Short Story Today: Marginalization, Immigration, Alie</title>
		<link>https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-jewish-short-story-today-marginalization-immigration-alie/</link>
		
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		<pubDate>Sat, 01 Apr 2006 19:55:49 +0000</pubDate>
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					<description><![CDATA[<p>The Jewish Short Story. Jewish American Literature. Jewish Literature</p>
<p>The post <a href="https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-jewish-short-story-today-marginalization-immigration-alie/">The Jewish Short Story Today: Marginalization, Immigration, Alie</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.myjewishlearning.com">My Jewish Learning</a>.</p>
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										<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>In the opening chapter of the 21st century, short fiction&ndash;Jewish and otherwise&ndash;has lost much of its stature. Conventional wisdom tells us that serious <i>literateurs</i> write novels. Indeed, in 2005, <i>The Atlantic Monthly</i>&ndash;for decades one of the premiere platforms for short stories&ndash;stopped publishing fiction regularly. Now they stick a few stories into the <i>shtetl </i>of an annual issue.  <div align="right">     </div><p>But short stories were once quite important. When Saul Bellow placed his 1952 translation of "Gimpel the Fool," in <i>The Partisan Review </i>it drastically altered not just the life and career of Isaac Bashevis Singer, but American literary history, as well. </p><p>Yet, one might argue, that swimming out of the mainstream has helped to strengthen the genre. As short-story specialist Steve Almond once wrote: "the barrier to market is much higher for story collections [than novels], because they make so little profit. You don&rsquo;t get a story collection published unless the writing is vivid enough to compel several otherwise rational minds to make what is by most standards (often <i>their</i> standards) an irrational economic decision."</p><h3>The New Immigrant&rsquo;s Tale</h3><p>Some of the most powerful works of recent Jewish short fiction concern immigrant characters who find it strange to be living in the Land of Milk and Honey and Cable TV. </p>			<div id="mjl-teads-ad" class="mjl-teads-ad"></div>
			<p>Contemporary immigrant tales return to Jewish fiction the fabled idea of otherness and a sense of displacement. This eternal anxiety of the Jew is something that I.B. Singer&rsquo;s stories were so good at depicting, something we were reminded of when his <i>Collected Stories </i>appeared in 2004 to mark the great man&rsquo;s centenary. As critic Mark Zanger once wrote: "His most particular stories, set in New York, are about the increasingly universal problem of exile and survival."</p><p> But exile doesn&rsquo;t just happen in the Big Apple. In <i>Natasha and Other Stories, </i>a 2004 collection by Latvian-born Canadian writer David Bezmozgis, a group of linked tales follow the fortunes of the Bermans, a Jewish immigrant family, in their struggle to establish themselves in the Great White North. The stories&ndash;some of which appeared in <i>The New Yorker </i>and <i>Harper&rsquo;s</i>&ndash;employ some of Bezmozgis&rsquo; own personal history (he was born in Latvia in 1973 and came to Canada in 1980) but are not to be confused with memoir.</p><p>Then there is Lara Vapnyar. In 2003, she published <i>There Are Jews in My House, </i>a book that included the beautiful tale, "Mistress," set in the Kings Highway section of Brooklyn, in which a Russian boy named Misha unwittingly learns the word "mistress" while he happens to observe his grandfather&rsquo;s interactions with his paramour. The whole story sets a tone of linguistic comedy and subtle heartbreak. When asked by <i>The New Yorker </i>how it felt to write in her second language (Vapnyar emigrated to the United States at 23), she said, "It makes me scared, because I don&rsquo;t hear my stories. I don&rsquo;t know how they sound. On the other hand, I am not as sensitive to my imperfections as I would be if I wrote in Russian. I blame them all on the fact that I&rsquo;ve only recently learned English."</p><p>Another two-language author is Naama Goldstein. Born in Boston, Goldstein moved with her parents to Israel when she was three. She&rsquo;s been back-and-forth ever since. This has left her something of an expert on geographical, if not emotional, displacement. As Caroline Leavitt wrote in her review of Goldstein&rsquo;s <i>The Place Will Comfort You </i>(2004): "Goldstein writes radiant stories about just what it means to embrace or struggle with your culture. They ask, Can you be as Jewish in an Israeli kibbutz as you are in suburban America? Or is the American dream of a two-car garage and gated home just a way-station for your true destiny in Israel? Where, indeed, can Jewish people feel most and forever at home, or is the idea of a true Jewish state simply more of an elusive state of mind?"</p><h3>Going Native</h3><p>But all-American Jews can write stories that ask similar questions. In 2005, Jay Neugeboren published a collection called <i>News from the New American Diaspora and Other Tales of Exile</i>. And there was Joan Leegant&rsquo;s "Seekers in the Holy Land," from her collection <i>An Hour in Paradise, </i>a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. This story shows a character who flees the safety and certainty of Diaspora life. Leegant&rsquo;s questing American leaves Boston for Safed and asks, "What was there in America if you were Jewish? Temples with health clubs? Fund-raisers? Rabbis&hellip;preoccupied with building campaigns, numbers, membership rolls? Or, on the other side, rules, fetishistic rules, a black and white orthodoxy. But for the soul, what was there?" Unfortunately, Leegant&rsquo;s protagonist learns that this idea of being Jewish has a way of following people, even to Israel. </p><p>Perhaps the best expression of the American strain of Jewish alienation comes from Todd Hasak-Lowy&rsquo;s superb short story, "On the Grounds of the Complex Commemorating the Nazi&rsquo;s Treatment of the Jews." Says the tale&rsquo;s protagonist, a mopey, heartbroken Jewish-American businessman paying a visit to Yad Vashem:</p><p>"As best he could tell, when one got past the American Jew&rsquo;s interest in who else in America&ndash;from celebrities to closeted coworkers&ndash;was Jewish, American Jews&rsquo; two main interests seems to be the Holocaust, as he often heard it called, and the State of Israel. He was, of course, with both entities on some superficial level. Right below the threshold of his consciousness, he sensed he should, as he explored his Jewishness, choose either the State of Israel or the Holocaust, as he often heard it called, as his main Jewish interest."</p></p>
<p>The post <a href="https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-jewish-short-story-today-marginalization-immigration-alie/">The Jewish Short Story Today: Marginalization, Immigration, Alie</a> appeared first on <a href="https://www.myjewishlearning.com">My Jewish Learning</a>.</p>
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