THE FREE WORLD

A Russian Jewish family travels to America in decades following the Revolution that defined their patriarch’s life, in this grim first novel from the prize-winning Latvian-born author (Natasha and Other Stories, 2004).

The Krasnanskys—retired businessman Samuil, his stoical wife Emma, their married sons Karl and Alec, the latter’s spouses, and a pair of grandsons—make their way to Rome en route to Chicago. But the relative who was to have sponsored them must instead accommodate a black-sheep sibling, and the Krasnanskys decide to try their luck in Canada (“It’s more European than America, and more American than Europe”). The episodic narrative that develops from this compromise encompasses Samuil’s burden of memories, both proud and regretful (he never ceases mourning the disappearance of his brother Reuven, a more idealistic version of Samuil’s pragmatic self); the troublesome exigencies to which plodding Karl and self-absorbed, sensual Alec drive themselves; and the sorrows of Alec’s winsome, sensitive wife Polina, haunted by fallout from a lost love and an unwanted abortion. Bezmozgis creates a fascinating structure: Events occurring in the narrative present are juxtaposed with flashbacks to similar events which echo and illuminate them. But the resulting fullness gives an impression of redundancy and overemphasis, even when crucial distinctions are lucidly made. It all seems more like “the emigrant experience” than this family’s experience of emigration. And yet, the vividness of its characters and several superbly handled scenes, including a Rosh Hashanah pageant at which Polina endures painfully mixed emotions while watching other people’s children perform, and a brutally funny account of a scam involving stolen Russian ikons which climaxes in a chop shop, keep recalling the novel to vivid life. The result is a flawed, fascinating chronicle, reminiscent of another honorable failure about lives stolen, cast away and never fully recovered: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Shadows on the Hudson (2008).

By no means the book it might have been. But Bezmozgis is a potent writer who may yet astonish us all.