The Free World
By David Bezmozgis
368 pages;
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
How dreamy—summer in Rome and the nearby seaside with family and
friends. Except that the Soviet Jews thrown together there in David
Bezmozgis's electrifying debut novel The Free World
(FSG) are immigrants and refugees stranded in 1978 as they await visas
to their Promised Land, wherever that may be. Canada? The United States?
Australia? Bezmozgis, himself a transplant from Latvia to Toronto,
displays a quicksilver empathy and quiet, burning admiration for the
strong women attached to three generations of Krasnanskys, a family that
Roman exile threatens to break apart. The matriarch, Emma, is a "simple
creature" sidelined by the chaos of change. Her daughter-in-law Polina,
a Christian among Jews, contends with a wayward husband, Alec, the
handsome, slippery lover boy at the story's violent core. Both women
have lost children, a bond that unites them despite the differences in
their marriages, their ages, and their experiences of Rome. As for the
men—oy: criminal mishaps, misguided love affairs, and a stubborn refusal
to let go of a Soviet past even though it betrayed them with
anti-Semitism, famine, and war. Along with the darkness, though, there
is beauty here: "Dmitri led them out of the necropolis, past a statue of
a headless, armless man in a toga, and along a street of bleached stone
ruins, with their exposed floors mutely resigned to the whims of the
sky." These are the charms of the ancient city, but for the Krasnanskys
they can't compare to the lure of a new life.
— Celia McGee
