Somewhere between boiling wristwatches and bathing in public fountains, F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed “there are no second acts in American lives.”
Luckily, this maxim doesn’t apply to David Bezmozgis, who was born in Latvia and moved to Toronto in 1980, when he was 6. The former documentary filmmaker and author of the acclaimed 2004 book of short stories “Natasha,” is on to at least his second or third act.
The young author’s debut release won him the Reform Judaism prize for fiction and, perhaps more notably, comparisons to Philip Roth and even Anton Chekov. The critical and financial success has put him in a position to “where I really do get to do what I want,” and that’s work on his debut novel in Toronto.
Bezmozgis was recently in San Francisco for a reading sponsored by the University of San Francisco’s Swig Judaic Studies program. He always enjoys his trips to the city, as its large Russian Jewish population resonates with his own experiences in Canada, and his writing certainly seems to resonate with San Francisco’s Russian Jews.
“I wanted to write my book for probably a decade to tell the story of Soviet Jewish emigration, the one that my family experienced. My sense is this story hadn’t been told,” said Bezmozgis.
The Soviet Jews who landed in Toronto — or, for that matter, San Francisco and Los Angeles — in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s “were doctors, but now they were cleaning dentists’ offices. That certainly was not the case for Ellis Island immigrants, who were shtetl dwellers, proletarians for the most part. By and large this was an educated community.”
Being a young man watching his parents adjust to menial jobs in a new community wasn’t easy. Bezmozgis’ father had been an administrator and an Olympic-level weightlifting judge back in Riga. But in Toronto, he was relegated to work in factories and warehouses. At one point he toiled as a massage therapist in a Jewish Community Center, and then picked up extra work as a bath house masseuse.
“He thought it was a normal bathhouse, but it turned out to be a gay bathhouse and that took him a couple of days to figure out,” recalled Bezmozgis.
“I could tell my parents were getting knocked around. It is strange as a child to feel sorry for your parents, to feel protective toward them. That’s not what you expect at that age.”
Like any adolescent, Bezmozgis went through awkward stretches with his parents (which is even easier when they speak with heavy accents and inadvertently pick up jobs at gay bathhouses). But “Natasha” was a reminiscence of a generation of Soviet Jews who dropped everything to ensure better lives for their children.
“When I sat down and wrote this book, it came as a sympathetic impulse,” he said.
Bezmozgis politely declined to deliver a synopsis of his novel-in-progress, but he did note that his recent return trip to Riga with his parents was “part personal, part professional.” He admits that he hardly remembers Latvia, and wanted to soak in the sights, the smells, even the gestures people use when they talk to each other.
And while Fitzgerald’s quote doesn’t apply to Bezmozgis, Thomas Wolfe’s does: “You can’t go home again.”
“There’s a sense of melancholy when you go to a city where you were born, where your family had once been and all that has gone. And it was very odd to come to a place where very many Jews had lived and over a very short period of time, that community disappeared,” he recalled.
“It was undeniably sad. But, by the same token, life has moved on. It would be sadder still if we had ended up in a place that was worse off. And we happen to be in a place that’s much better off.”