The author’s new collection, Immigrant City, deepens his exploration of Jewish diasporic themes of displacement and movement, memory and nostalgia ... The two longest stories, 'A Gravestone for an Old Grave' and 'The Russian Riviera' are tour de force performances that both summarize and deepen the key themes in Immigrant City ... The stories gathered in Immigrant City continue David Bezmozgis’s project of sounding the emotional depths in the immigrant encounter with a bewildering, often humiliating new world, where the past is shrouded in secrets, buried under layers of repression. 'What did I stand to gain by scavenging through the past?' Bezmozgis’s fictional grandson asks. In stories filled with compassion for both the dead and the living, Immigrant City offers moving, richly imagined answers to this cosmic question.
...[a] darkly humorous new collection ... Bezmozgis’ first return to the short story form in more than a decade, shows that his skills at creating perfect (and perfectly unsettling) worlds-within-worlds remain unparalleled ...In these tales, when the past knocks, it comes laden with baggage ... Intelligent, funny, unfailingly sympathetic, Bezmozgis portrays lives constantly teetering between past and present, between worlds remembered and those that are all too real.
Immigrant City by David Bezmozgis is a book that is both unassuming and quietly powerful ... Most of the stories focus on the ordinary, such as buying a used car door, or taking your child to a doctor. It’s the stuff of everyday life, and Bezmozgis then uses these small instances to examine deeper questions of identity and self ... Ultimately, the stories suggest that what really matters in many situations isn’t the thing we set out looking for ... The writing is simple, but deceptively so. Just like the content of each story, the reader doesn’t always realize they’re dealing with complicated emotions until they’re already fully entrenched in them. It’s only later that it’s clear something significant has happened. In this way, the book is brilliant at subtly pulling the reader in and holding attention. In a way, the stories that make up Immigrant City are very quiet. At first they don’t seem like anything spectacular, but that is precisely the revelation; that there are massive emotions often motivated by identity in even the smallest of actions. Immigrant City offers small glimpses into different people’s lives in order to understand the effect of personal history, how it sometimes dictates what we do and how we see things. It is both beautiful and illuminating.
Those in power would have us draw dividing lines between races. But the meaningful distinction between immigrants may be that between foreigners of 'storied pomp' and the 'tired, poor, and wretched.' That is the distinction drawn in Emma Lazarus’s 'The New Colossus,' the sonnet inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, which welcomes refugees to the shores of the United States. The poem is of immense meaning in our society at this moment. Immigrant City, the latest collection of short stories by the Canadian author David Bezmozgis, should be as well. Yet the book will appear only in ebook format in the United States ... No matter the path taken in immigration, all the immigrants trace their story back to the event of immigration. This rupture is impossible to seal, neither by familial love...nor by carnal passion. The rupture is impossible to seal because it is the only portal to the life left behind, to the Old World ...
... the sentences...make reading him such a joy ... This is no beginner. Stories such as these are deep, rich, sad and funny and a reminder of why this unpopular genre [of short fiction] continues to fascinate the most sophisticated of writers.
[Bezmozgis] employs his signature sharply-crafted, evocative, and oft-absurdist prose to tackle themes relevant to his own life as a veteran Soviet immigrant. At the same time, he broadens his perspective to consider the experiences of newcomers of other backgrounds ...
In his sophomore volume of short fiction, David Bezmozgis deepens his exploration of the fates and furies that beset Jewish immigrants as they struggle with the unwieldy claims of the past. Replete with the wry humour and finely hewn prose that characterized the author’s debut, Natasha and Other Stories, this new collection resonates with power and poignancy ... All the stories in Immigrant City are tragicomedies in the vein of the late, great Bernard Malamud, whose influence is evident in the need for adversaries to co-operate and in the living power of the past, which can never be laid to rest.
