David Bezmozgis | The Canadian Encyclopedia

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David Bezmozgis

​David Bezmozgis, writer, filmmaker (born 2 June 1973 in Riga, Latvia).

David Bezmozgis, writer, filmmaker (born 2 June 1973 in Riga, Latvia). Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book and nominated for the Governor General’s Award, David Bezmozgis is best known for his collection of short stories, Natasha and Other Stories, and his novel The Betrayers.

Early Life and Education

David Bezmozgis immigrated to Toronto, Ontario, with his parents from Riga, Latvia, then part of the Soviet Union, at the age of six. His family settled in North York, a neighbourhood with a large Russian Jewish community. At home, he spoke Russian, and at his grandparents’ house — they had also immigrated to Toronto — the languages spoken were Russian and Yiddish.

Bezmozgis went to high school in Toronto, then moved to Montréal, Québec, where he attended McGill University. At McGill, he wrote a one-act play, The Last Waltz: An Inheritance,about a boy who finds a photograph that he believes to be of his grandparents moments before they perished in the Holocaust. The play was produced at a McGill theatre festival, then at the Playwrights’ Workshop Montreal. He graduated with a BA in English literature.

Although Bezmozgis had ambitions to write novels and stories, this did not seem like a financially feasible career path, and he was discouraged by his practical-minded parents. After McGill, choosing a path that appeared to offer more professional opportunity than writing fiction, he studied film at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles, California. Bezmozgis excelled in film school, and in 1999, his short documentary, L.A. Mohel, about three ritual circumcisers in Los Angeles, won a major award for student filmmakers.

It was also at the University of Southern California that Bezmozgis was introduced to the work of Leonard Michaels by a creative writing instructor. Bezmozgis was immediately drawn to the work of the American novelist, essayist and short-story writer, and eventually got in touch with him in an effort to adapt one of his short stories to film. The adaptation never got made; instead what ensued was a three-year correspondence that would have a profound impact on Bezmozgis’ development as a writer. Bezmozgis’ thoughtful essay, “On Literary Love,” tells the story of their friendship and the deep influence the elder writer had on him. Michaels was 40 years his senior and died in 2003.

Mid-career

Bezmozgis’ first book, Natasha and Other Stories,was published in 2004 in the United States and Canada. Stories from the collection first appeared in Zoetrope, Harper’s and the New Yorker. The content of Natasha and Other Stories for the most part revolves around the Bermans, a family of Soviet Jews who have immigrated to Toronto, in similar circumstances to Bezmozgis’ own family. “The stories may be called autobiographical fiction but the part that interests me is the fiction,” Bezmozgis said in a 2004 interview with Quill and Quire. “The autobiographical part is largely context; the plot and most everything else is fictional.”

Natasha and Other Stories was widely praised for its concise prose style, restrained wisdom, wit and pathos, and was nominated for the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction, the Governor General’s Award, and won the Toronto Book Award, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, and the JQ-Wingate Prize. In 2007, Natasha and Other Stories was chosen for Canada Reads, where it was defended by Steven Page of Barenaked Ladies.

Notwithstanding the success of Natasha and Other Stories,Bezmozgis continued to work in film, and in 2009 his first feature film, Victoria Day,which he wrote and directed, premiered in competition at the Sundance Film Festival and received a Genie Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Like his stories, Victoria Day is set in the North York neighbourhood of Toronto. It takes place in 1988 and tells the story of Ben Spektor, a 16-year-old who inadvertently gets caught up in the disappearance of a classmate.

In 2010, Bezmozgis was included in the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” issue, highlighting the magazine’s picks for the 20 most promising fiction writers under the age of 40. A year later, Bezmozgis published his first novel, The Free World, which is set in 1978 Rome and chronicles a family of Soviet Jews fleeing the Iron Curtain. The Free World was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Book Award, and won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award.

Bezmozgis’ second novel, The Betrayers, was published in 2014. A taut political and moral thriller, the book spans 24 hours in the life of Baruch Kotler, a Soviet Jewish dissident and Israeli minister. During that time, a storm of coincidences lead him to confront the informant who sent him to the Gulag almost 40 years earlier. The Betrayers won a 2014 Jewish Book Award and was nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Awards and Upcoming Projects

Bezmozgis currently lives in Toronto. His second feature film, an adaptation of his story “Natasha,” will be released in 2016. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow for a residency at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, and a Radcliffe Fellow at the Radcliff Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.