Immigrant City

Stories

By: David Bezmozgis

Narrated by: Murray Furrow

Length: 5 hrs and 53 mins

Publisher's summary

Finalist for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize

Award-winning author David Bezmozgis’ first story collection in more than a decade, hailed by the Toronto Star as “intelligent, funny, unfailingly sympathetic”.

In the title story, a father and his young daughter stumble into a bizarre version of his immigrant childhood. A mysterious tech conference brings a writer to Montreal, where he discovers new designs on the past in “How It Used to Be”. A grandfather’s Yiddish letters expose a love affair and a wartime secret in “Little Rooster”. In “Childhood”, Mark’s concern about his son’s phobias evokes a shameful incident from his own adolescence. In “Roman’s Song”, Roman’s desire to help a new immigrant brings him into contact with a sordid underworld. At his father’s request, Victor returns to Riga, the city of his birth, where his loyalties are tested by the man he might have been in “A New Gravestone for an Old Grave”. And, in the noir-inspired “The Russian Riviera”, Kostya leaves Russia to pursue a boxing career only to find himself working as a doorman in a garish nightclub in the Toronto suburbs.

In these deeply felt, slyly humorous stories, Bezmozgis pleads no special causes but presents immigrant characters with all their contradictions and complexities, their earnest and divided hearts.

©2019 David Bezmozgis (P)2022 Audible, Inc.

Struggling Immigrants

I read “Immigrant Stories” because I had enjoyed David Bezmozgis’ novel, “The Free World.” Like that novel, these stories deal with recent Jewish immigrants to Canada and the United States from Eastern Europe, primarily Latvia. There is a sadness around the characters, who often seem lost and ignored in their new country. Criminal elements tempt some of his characters, who are usually short on funds and anxious to find financial security. Several of the stories turn on generational issues, with characters trying to help and protect their parents, grandparents and children. The stories tend to end abruptly, without neat resolution. Overall, I felt tremendous sympathy for Bezmosgis' characters, who are trying to find a good life in a strange (for them) land. The narration was strong and clear.