This is not a book review, but a reflection upon themes raised in Natasha and Other Stories, by David Bezmozgis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004).
When I was a kid, my family attended a nice liberal church on the south side of Finch Ave. east of Bathurst St. in the north end of Toronto. In one sense, it was an odd place for a church. Across the road was a Hebrew school and both north and south on Bathurst St. were synagogues — Adath Israel to the south, Pride of Israel to the north, and a scattering of smaller congregations in between. And north of Finch on the west side of Bathurst St. was a Jewish cemetery. But in another respect, it wasn’t such an odd place for a church. We were part of something larger in that place. I don’t know what you’d call it—an understanding maybe—an unwritten commitment to getting along. So, for example, the Hebrew school let our church use their parking lot for overflow on Sundays, and some of my friends from Sunday school worked in the Jewish cemetery during the summer. There were other ways in which we found ourselves woven into life there too. For example, until I was born, my mother taught at Cedar Grove elementary school (now Charles H. Best) where a lot of these kids attended.
The Bathurst St. corridor has always been a destination for new Canadians. When I was a kid, they were mostly Jewish and came from Eastern European countries—Latvia, Romania, the Ukraine, Poland. Later, there was an influx of Koreans, and so our church leased the building to two congregations, Seventh Day Adventists and the Hanmaum Korean Presbyterian church. On the south side of Finch and west of Bathurst is Branson Hospital which gets a couple mentions by Bezmozgis and happens to be where I was born. While most of the doctors (like the one who delivered me) were Jewish, virtually all the support staff were Korean Seventh Day Adventists. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, the neighbourhood has attracted people from Kazakhstan and Georgia. As 1997 approached, the north end of Toronto saw a huge influx of people from Hong Kong, and while they tended to settle further east along Finch Ave., they still built a couple churches just down the road from us. Most recently, the area has become home to a growing population from the Philippines. Meanwhile, the well-established Jewish immigrants moved from their apartments and duplexes, and formed upscale neighbourhoods like the suburban pocket just south of Branson Hospital where characters like Percy Saltzman lived.
This is the neighbourhood David Bezmozgis writes about. I call it home. Born in Riga, Latvia, in 1973, Bezmozgis came to Toronto with his parents when he was six. His collection of seven stories is, according to one reviewer, loosely autobiographical and presents us with a series of vignettes from the point of view of his fictional alter-ego, Mark Berman. In each of the vignettes, Mark is a little older. In the first story, he’s six and lives in the claustrophobic world of new arrivals who haven’t the language yet and feel uncertain of their place. By the last story, he’s a man attending the small synagogue at his grandfather’s apartment building to ensure that a minyan is established on each Sabbath.
I don’t wish to offer a review, here, at least not in any formal sense. Instead, I want to reflect on the importance of place—the importance, at least in psychic terms, of ensuring that the places we inhabit become storied places—and how delightful it is to discover that a place which has been the site of many of my private personal stories—friendships, dating, marriage, births, deaths — has accumulated public expressions of story too.
Take the opening paragraph of “Tapka,” the first story in the collection. It identifies location with enough specificity that you can pinpoint it with google streetview:
Goldfinch was flapping clotheslines, a tenement delirious with striving. 6030 Bathurst: insomniac scheming Odessa. Cedarcroft: reeking borscht in the hallways. My parents, Baltic aristocrats, took an apartment at 715 Finch fronting a ravine and across from an elementary school – one respectable block away from the Russian swarm. We lived on the fifth floor, my cousin, aunt, and uncle directly below us on the fourth.
The ravine is G. Ross Lord Park. In the next paragraph, he names the elementary school—Charles H. Best—the school where my mother and her colleagues taught kids like David Bezmozgis and, before him, Howie Mandel.
Here’s a little something from my own experience which I can add to the lore of the place:
Fifteen years ago, a man came to me—second generation, like David Bezmozgis—for some advice on something or other—I can’t remember what — but he was a talker, and lonely, and unloaded all his life’s troubles on me. He lived with his elderly father in one of those apartment buildings on the south side of Finch Ave. like the one where Mark Berman lived when he first arrived in Canada. The father was a Holocaust survivor who didn’t speak any English and his health was failing. Every day, he would ride down on the elevator and go for a walk—more a hobble than a walk—and when he was out of breath, he would sit on a park bench facing his building. One day the building superintendent confronted the son. There had been a complaint. They might have to be evicted. A young woman had been standing on her balcony when she looked down at the old man sitting on the park bench. She smiled at him. He smiled back. Then he exposed himself. The son insisted it was all a misunderstanding. His father suffered a severe rash and was extraordinarily itchy. He never meant to shock the young woman. He only meant to relieve this itching that was driving him crazy. The problem resolved itself a few weeks later when the father died and the son, like the old man in “Minyan,” was forced to give up his lease because he couldn’t afford it without his father’s monthly cheques from the government.
In my view, the finest story in the collection is “An Animal To The Memory,” which also happens to be the shortest piece. With an economy of words, and without succumbing to the sin of explaining things, Bezmozgis offers a portrait of humiliation or—if you want to get technical about it—an examination of what liberation theologians call lateral oppression. Humiliation from above starts to ooze out sideways as men beat their wives, wives beat their children, children beat their dogs, etc. The story focuses upon Holocaust Remembrance Day at Mark Berman’s Hebrew school when he is a willful twelve- or thirteen-year-old. He gets caught retaliating against the school bully, and so the principal labels him the bully rather than victim. When the scenario repeats itself and Mark is caught once again, the principal makes him wait alone in the makeshift Holocaust shrine that has been established in the school basement. After Mark has stewed long enough in his guilt, the principal engages him in a way that proves humiliating. At the end of Mark’s humiliation, the principal says: “now maybe you understand what it is to be a Jew.” Victimhood, it seems, is essential to the Jewish identity, even if that victimhood has to be imposed by stronger Jews upon weaker Jews.
And yet humiliation is universal. Let me share with you another personal story of that place—a humiliation I experienced which was particular to the place Bezmozgis describes and which occurred when I was roughly the same age as the character in “An Animal To The Memory.” I still cringe when I think of it. I have no idea what the powers-that-be at our church were thinking when they decided to turn proselytic and distribute pamphlets throughout the surrounding neighbourhoods. I have even less idea what the powers-that-be were thinking when they decided that the church’s young people should do their dirty work for them. The whole project was a betrayal of the place. It violated that unwritten commitment to getting along.
There I was—along with maybe eight or ten other thirteen-year-olds—fanning out through a new development on the north side of Finch Ave. on a Saturday morning. For most people living there, it was the Sabbath. We were supposed to ring doorbells and deliver the pamphlets in person. I remember one door in particular. When the door opened, a girl my age was standing there in her pajamas. Already I felt like a doofus, but I made things worse by opening my mouth. I delivered my set speech about being from a church nearby, introducing people to its programs by dropping off a pamphlet they could read at their leisure. The girl didn’t say a word but looked at me like I was from Mars. Then she looked up at the mezuzah on the door post like I should have known better. I said “Oh” and she shut the door in my face. She was gentle about it, but I still felt humiliated. To be clear, the feeling of humiliation didn’t come from the girl or from the neighbourhood; it came from the grown-ups at my church. It made me angry that I was put in a position which would inevitably make me feel ignorant and condescending. No one wants to feel ignorant and condescending, yet there I was, oblivious to the obvious signs that my pamphleteering didn’t belong in that place. As with “An Animal To The Memory,” there could well have been a grown-up whispering in my ear: “now maybe you understand what it is to be a Christian.”
It’s important for each one of us to learn his place.