The Challenge of Freedom

The Canadian author David Bezmozgis’ first novel The Free World takes place in Rome of 1978. This book received much attention in the USA last year and was also recently published in German. Rome had become the stopover for Soviet Jews on their way to North America in the late 1970s. These refugees had very little in common with the Holocaust survivors who were looking for a home in the New World after World War II. In the decades under Communist rule, many had perceived their roots as a political burden and only rediscovered them when their Jewish heritage unexpectedly opened a path to freedom due to American pressure on the Soviets. After their arrival in Rome, these refugees were taken under the wings of the Jewish organizations. However, these helpers confronted their charges with expectations that hardly corresponded with the identity of the latter. This inevitably resulted in conflicts.
As the son of Latvian immigrants – he emigrated with his parents from Riga to Canada in 1980 – Bezmozgis examines the irony inherent in these tensions and other consequences of emigration based on the fictional Krasnanskys. Stuck in Italy for months, the family tries to comprehend the journey that is intended to bring them from a well-organized life in Riga to an insecure future overseas.

Fragmentation
Three generations of the Krasnansky family arrive in Rome. These include the seniors Samuil and Emma, their son
Karl and his wife Rosa plus their two toddlers, and Karl's younger brother Alec with his non-Jewish bride Polina. At the beginning of the book, we encounter the travel party at Vienna’s South Railway Station where they are squeezing their twenty suitcases through the window of the train compartment. Their luggage is stuffed with items of all kinds that they intend to sell in Rome. But once they have arrived at their destination, the cohesion of the Krasnanskys dissolves and they transform into a fragmented group of damaged individuals stumbling into the “free world.” A fellow immigrant travelling with them finds the right words for their condition: “Too many opinions. Like the joke about the couple that had sex in broad daylight in Israel. Every passerby tells them what they are doing wrong.”
Bezmozgis also works as a filmmaker and gives the book a cinematic flow when he creates wide-arching scenic connections back to the time of the Russian Civil War. In the process, he focuses on meaningful details that bring the residences and city landscapes to life in front of the reader: “A brocade drapery with green leaves on a black background” divides an overcrowded apartment in Trastevere into separate living areas; hopeful stacks of canned Russian coffee wait on a flea market table in Rome and holes in a rusting tin roof provide sparse light in an illegal body repair shop.

Missteps and Tragedy
The author actually tells two stories against this flowing background. The missteps of the young generation in their “hasty embrace of Western freedom” serve as the source of dark humor running throughout the entire book. Alec is a playboy who only found the life in Riga bearable as long as the women succumbed to his charm. He only had a reason to leave the country once he impregnated the unhappily married Polina. He promises to marry her in order to convince her to have an abortion, thereby giving her the unexpected hope of a future in a distant place. Alec is initially happy with this deal, but neither marriage nor the new environment turn him into a man with a greater sense of responsibility. After being hired by one of the Jewish agencies, he is surprised as he discovers that it was not necessary to seduce his superior to get the job.
However, the initiative to emigrate came from Karl. He had never doubted the necessity of this step. As a bully, gambler, and born businessman who saw himself hindered in his ambitions by the Soviet system, he found the possibility of leaving the country to be irresistible. Once in Rome, he immediately sees commercial opportunities everywhere. He skillfully finds his way into the underworld of the black market in the immigrant scene.
On the other hand, the fate of the 65-year-old Samuil Krasnansky is rather tragic. Initially, his son's wishes to emigrate trigger thoughts of suicide within him. He has been strongly affected by the hardships and cruelties from the first half of the century. As a six-year old, he was forced to witness the killing of his father by anti-Semitic Belorussians. He was a young man when the Germans massacred his mother and so many other Jews in the Rumbuli forest. Loyalty to the Communist Party provided support for Samuil. He did not even interfere when his comrades declared his cousin Yankel to be a Zionist traitor and deported him to Siberia. His service in the party as a member of a cell when he was just a 16-year-old schoolboy, as a major in the Red Army during World War Two, and a factory director in Riga after the war earned him a prominent position in the city's political hierarchy. But these privileges would certainly be lost after his sons file their visa applications to leave the country. Now he could expect the same accusations that Yankel once had to endure. Samuil hardly had the strength to bear this.
The departure brings further indignities. During the inspection, the threatening Soviet border guards throw his medals from the “Great Fatherland War” into a “container for other items that were considered smuggled goods.” In Rome he is asked to downplay his role in the party in order to improve the prospects of a successful visa application. He is bewildered as he notices the false statements that others willingly to commit to writing. How could they betray the “truth about the struggle and the triumph of the proletariat” with complaints about “communal apartments and the shortage of chocolate and jeans”? Samuil views the West with skeptical eyes. The labor disputes and wild strikes in Italy remind him of the times before the Soviet era. He perceives the Jewish sentimentality in “Anatevka” as a “burlesque” version of Sholem Aleichem’s drama Tewje the Milkman, which had inspired him as a boy in the Yiddish original. And ultimately, he is also repulsed by the religiousness of the Jewish community to which his wife and daughter-in-law feel attracted. Samuil asks himself how “a Soviet education, the war, and decades of Soviet life had failed to eradicate the seed of religious submissiveness.”

New Insights
Doubt and inner resistance eat away at him until he experiences some type of enlightenment in the unexpected form of the Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Samuil realizes that this head of state who was now at the center of international public attention due to his negotiations with Anwar as-Sadat was a once young man just like his cousin Yankel. Begin had also been deported to Siberia for his Zionist beliefs. However, he entered the Polish Army and found his way to Palestine and became a statesman. Could Yankel have experienced a similar fate? His cousin had told him many years before that he had simply bet on one horse and Samuil on another, but history had changed the outcome of the race. The harsh contrast between “Communism and Zionism” that previously determined Samuil's existence had become irrelevant. He was left with only the conclusion that “the trick is to die at the right time with the conviction of being a winner.”
The novel ends before the family leaves Rome. Samuil does not die for his cause, but as the defender of his family. At his grave, the polarities of his life are reconciled at least for the moment. After a Jewish ritual, the funeral party –including the rabbi – sings “The International.” ●

David Bezmozgis: The Free World; Picador; 349 pages, March 2012.

Monica Strauss has been an aufbau author for many years and lives in New York. She operates the blog
Refugee Tales (http://refugeetales.com).