"The Free World": David Bezmogis's Shining Emigre Story

Review by BRETT WARNKE

The Free World by David Bezmogis

“It’s difficult to travel with a large Jewish family,” one character says in The Free World. “Too many opinions. Like the joke about the couple that has sex on the street in Israel. Everyone who passes by tells them they’re doing it wrong.” Bezmogis's book is an equivalently ironic journey; a trip where much went wrong but is impressively told in every way in every way. Cleanly written and humorous, the book is filled with nuanced characters saddled with the political pressures of their day and the human strains of our lifetime. Bezmogis, a 37-year old Latvian immigrant, takes the reader on a journey through the latter half of what historian Tony Judt called “the forgotten 20th century.” If “uncertainty” is the defining term for this epoch, The Free World begins at its dawn, the 1970s.

The book highlights four months in Rome with the Krasnanskys, emigre Russian-Jews and their loved ones who left the gray and doomed tedium of Soviet stagnation for the so-called “free world.” What the reader experiences is a history of an age and the tale of a immigrants discovering a new world. And while historical it isn't a slog; most of the politics are anecdotal--pursue what you will--but for most 20th century Soviet Jews, if you survived, life itself was made political and historical. As the family negotiates their place in the crowded immigrant neighborhood two popes die, Menachim Begin negotiates with his greatest enemy, and the dizzying pursuit of stability and cash animates every nearby window.

The late 1970s were both an age of detente and a deep freeze. It was an age where the the long-bankrupt national Communism persisted but was not longer living, even in the consciousness of its last devotees. If by the 1930s "god had failed" than by 1968 no one who was intelligent or idealistic or uncorrupted could support the system any longer. If Stalin was the gravedigger of Communism and Khrushchev the ideology’s last passionate priest, then Brezhnev was the funeral attendant for an 18-year burial. Who wouldn't want to leave a country ruled by such a cynical dullard? Brezhnev's rule was like Clive James' review of the formers' memoirs: “Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead." Gorbachev’s “openness” and “restructuring” campaigns came too late and the fictional Krasnanskys missed these reforms by a decade.

The family patriarch, Samuil, is heart-broken but proud. An undying Communist, his father was killed by the reactionary Whites and his brother was murdered in a squalid episode during the German invasion. He befriends Roidman, also an emigre and also a former fighter who remembers the horrors before the Revolution as well as after. (Roidman turns out to be related to Fanny Kaplan, a leftist who tried to assassinate Lenin after he dissolved the Constituent Assembly. Roidman's story is told with the novel's beautiful blend of wit, care, and realism. When he discusses the changing allegiances in the one-party state he says, "If I settle on an allegiance it is guaranteed that new and compromising information will emerge. I revere Lenin, I learn he's a German agent. I venerate Stalin, Khrushchev tells me he killed Mandelstam and a few million others. I tell you, if I worshipped the sun, we'd all end up in the dark." But Samuil's true life is in the pages, the stories he tells, and the memoir he escapes into writing. Story-telling is a refuge from the world's chaos. He comforts himself with the “pleasure of denial" and only the people of his past seem real while the people in his present, including his own children, “seemed to him evanescent, so nearly figments that he could imagine passing his hand through them.”

Samuil's sons, meanwhile, fleeing with their wives and children, could not be more different: “Alec would see a circus and want to join; Karl, meanwhile, would estimate the cost of feeding the elephants and conjecture that the acrobats suffered from venereal disease.” Their domestic dramas intensify and their wives endure the fear of transition and a future that appears only a “happier miserable.” Are their feelings the same in this new world? How does one remake a life?

Polina who leaves her beloved sister in Russia for the hope of the west; of Samuil cannot abandon communism and his wife who cannot abandon Samuil. The Krasnanskys are unable to escape the day’s international debates as the past’s weight seems to narrow the future. Lyova, from Kishinev, rooms with Alec and his wife Polina. He is nailed to three challenges: An endless bureaucracy, his own conscience, and History itself. Several years earlier, finding himself atop a Soviet tank breaking up the Prague Spring of 1968 Lyova escaped to Israel, the shining hope. There, he raised a family and found himself the instrument of Israeli oppression--roughing up Palestinians while wearing a blue star on his sleeve.

The story is expertly tied together by letters and a tidy style of dialogue unmarked by quotations and the endless "he/she said." Italy itself is the perfect setting for these immigrants, with its layers of crumbled and revived civilization. It is a multicultural society, soldered onto Europe's base between east and west. The personages all appear in the mind's eye, as the author writes, "with that special look of Russian fatigue." The women have a quiet despair; the men respond hungrily (and often irresponsibly) to their changed lives. The Free World is was an energizing trip with a family wandering among the ruins, eager and hopeful, searching for a place in world that has and will change utterly.