David Bezmozgis has returned, after a fairly substantial gap, with another slim volume of short stories. Immigrant City is a bit more diffuse than Natasha, in the sense that several different immigrant families are featured in these stories, rather than Natasha's focus on a single family, the Bermans, from the former Soviet Union (primarily from Latvia). That said, nearly all the families featured in these stories are Latvian and Jewish, though they don't seem to know each other and interact. However, in the title story, a Jewish father ends up taking his daughter on an extended trip (to buy a car door of all things) into the wilds of northern Etobicoke. Bezmozgis notes how the neighbourhoods have changed but are still predominantly a sort of landing pad for immigrants (in this case Somalis). There is a fair bit of this literature linking previous waves of immigration to the new immigration. In this case, Bezmozgis's narrator is trying to make a link, remembering back to when his family was so fresh-of-the-boat, so unwelcomed and struggling so hard. This is the more generous outlook, but it can also manifest itself as, look we started from nothing but we made it, and thus so should you. It's very hard to say how things will turn out twenty or thirty years from now, but I don't think it would be a big surprise if the different racial (and religious) characteristics of the new immigration will make it harder for the new immigrants to fully integrate into Canadian society. In the end, it will probably be somewhat easier for Syrians to feel part of Canadian society than Somalians or Ethiopians.
At any rate, I don't think that is Bezmozgis's point (that immigrants should integrate faster). This time around, several of the stories feature people stuck on the lower rungs, rather than the Bermans, who slowly and painfully made their way up. "The Russian Riviera" is the most developed along these lines. The main character is a washed up boxer from Siberia who comes to Canada and is granted asylum (so prior to the fall of Communism) but has few skills and very poor English. He becomes a bouncer at the Riviera and has to deal with low-level gangsters that want to muscle in on the action. What's somewhat interesting and a bit frustrating is that these stories rarely have clear endings. They are truly just a few pages out of the book of someone's life and we can't really tell what happens next. Is the boxer going to break up with his dancer girlfriend (likely) because she feels humiliated that he wouldn't ditch work on the day her mother and grandparents were coming to visit the club (and thus avoid humiliating her)? While it is certain he won't be calling the cops on the gangsters, it isn't even clear if he will call an ambulance to help sort things out after a fight breaks out.
For most of Bezmozgis's characters, they sort of stumble/bumble through life and things slowly get better. This is sort of summed up by a psychologist talking about children in "Childhood": "'Most of us turn out all right,' she said with calm finality." Of course, there are exceptions. At any rate, this means skipping over quite a few difficulties along the way. One still has to avoid major pitfalls and generally one has to have a fair bit of luck as well.
Minor SPOILERS ahead...
It turns out that there is one story about the Bermans after all in Immigrant City. "Roman's Song" is a story written from Roman's perspective, not his son Mark's. This story most likely takes place between "The Second Strongest Man" and "An Animal to the Memory" in Natasha. Roman is still struggling a bit economically and Mark is still in school. At any rate, a couple of Russian pimps want to open up a "massage parlor" on the strength of Roman's massage therapist licence. While this would definitely lead to better cash-flow, it is also one of those turning points that might well have gotten Roman entangled in the Canadian legal system had he gone down that road. He turns them down, and the story turns its attention to whether Roman will sell his old car to a struggling relative (one who just doesn't seem likely to cope in Canada). Roman doesn't focus on the man's struggles nearly as much as he envies the fact that his family is still so young and the children rely so much on the parents. He misses the days when Mark was close to him, not a somewhat estranged and even surly teenager.
In "Little Rooster" we see one family on the upward trajectory, but the narrator learns that his grandfather has a secret connection to another Latvian family in Toronto. He goes over and encounters a daughter, somewhat younger than himself, who lost almost everything in a wildfire in Alberta. This story is particularly open-ended in the sense that it is completely unclear whether the narrator will follow up on the news that he has a relative living in Latvia (a love child of his grandfather's abandoned when the other family left the Soviet Union). I found the ending of this story and "A New Gravestone for an Old Grave" to be fairly unsatisfying. I don't necessarily need a bow tied on every story, but I do like to have some idea where things are headed.
At any rate, I had trouble getting into "A New Gravestone for an Old Grave" in the first place, in the sense that I would never give in to accommodate such a fairly silly request from a parent -- to completely change his vacation plans to Europe to fly to Riga to oversee a new gravestone for his father's father (who had already been dead for 35 years). I have zero sentimentality about grave markers and cemeteries. I doubt very strongly I could be emotionally blackmailed into doing such a thing in the first place. Now perhaps it would have been different had I been from an immigrant family, always told about the many sacrifices my parents had made to bring me to a better, richer country. But I doubt it.
These are all fine stories, but most of them didn't resonate with me that much, particularly "Little Rooster" and "A New Gravestone for an Old Grave." I would have liked stronger or at least clearer endings to the stories. I'd say the ones I liked the most were "Roman's Song" where we get to see inside the Berman family from Roman's perspective and "Childhood" where the narrator is struggling to figure out how to cope with a son who seems to have some issues and to find a way for him to have a happy and successful childhood and early adulthood.
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