NATASHA

Seven stories in a debut collection, Farrar, Straus’s lead title for spring (treated to an unheard-of, for FSG, prepublication tour), chronologically trace the experiences of a family of Russian Jews living in Toronto.

Thirty-year-old Latvian-born (now Canadian) author Bezmozgis introduces us to the stories’ common narrator, Mark Berman, as a six-year-old in “Tapka,” which recounts Mark’s parents’ and his own efforts to learn English, their relationship with a childless pair of fellow immigrants devoted to their pet dog, and the painful consequences of Mark’s carelessness, expressed as he brandishes his new language skills. The difficulties of assimilation into an unfamiliar culture are experienced by Mark’s father as he awkwardly attempts to establish his own business (“Roman Berman, Massage Therapist”), a cocky young weightlifter from the old country who loses his celebrity and self-assurance at an international competition (“The Second Strongest Man”), and preadolescent Mark himself, as he keeps getting into fights at Hebrew school and is admonished, on “Holocaust Day,” by a stern, sorrowful rabbi (“An Animal to the Memory”). In the wry title story, 16-year-old Mark is introduced to sex and confirmed in other bad habits by his precociously jaded younger cousin Natasha. This is the funniest, and loosest of the tales, notable also for the peripheral character of Mark’s phlegmatic criminal “contact” Rufus, a bookish drug peddler with amusingly diversified business interests. The two final stories widen Mark’s understanding—of the fact of mortality, during the summer when his “researches” into the history of an obscure Jewish heavyweight boxer (“Choynski”) coincide with his beloved babushka’s death; and of the embracing comfort of the religion he has taken for granted, when his widowed grandfather enters an old age home threatened by jealousy and prejudice (“Minyan”). Bezmogis’s spare, confrontational tales thus take many unexpected turns, but their humanity and poignancy strike the deepest notes.

Shades of Isaac Babel, Leonard Michaels, and Aleksandar Hemon in a nevertheless irresistibly original first book. (The stories originally appeared, in “slightly different form,” in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Zoetrope, etc.)