Eating latkes in Toronto

Without getting too Old Testament about it, knowledge is acquired and somebody gets hurt -- Tapka gets hurt, and the families don't have enough money to pay for her surgery. Rita Nahumovsky is inconsolable. And this is where Bezmozgis transcends his wry, understated style and ends the story on a wonderfully strange note: The Nahumovskys are crumpled in the hallway of the veterinary hospital, swaying and weeping, and out of sympathy Tapka's doctor joins them. All three sway together on the floor. Suddenly there follows a dialogue between Mark and "the swaying," regarding the fate of Tapka and the guilt of Mark. That's it. It's one of the best endings Ive read in a long, long time; it made me shudder to imagine being on either end of the conversation.

The other stories show us Mark's parents adjusting to life in Canada; Mark dealing with (or failing to deal with) his Jewishness by becoming the school bully; and Mark discovering sex, via his 14-year-old cousin Natasha. The plots here are very simple: Mostly the stories deal with minor events that raise characters' hopes only to disappoint them. In "Roman Berman, Massage Therapist," Mark's dad struggles to gain a professional footing in Canada; a few stories on, we're simply told that his massage business eventually picked up and the family graduated to a bigger house.

But it's not the plotlines that make these stories so compelling; it's the perfect details of the characters' behavior combined with the narrator's cool and occasionally arch tone. Mark doesn't flinch from much. In "Natasha," the longest story here, he peels apart his own motivations during the course of his first love affair and does a good job of training his eye on things as diverse as pornography, the culture of suburban drug-dealing, and the strange effect Russia in the 1990s had on the character of its citizens. In the story, either Natasha's mother is a monster or the girl is a manipulative Lolita -- the beauty of it is that we're never told what to believe. All we know, in the end, is that Mark's Rilkean conclusion rings true. He feels betrayed by the girl and decides to literally put himself in her place, gazing down into his own basement from a backyard window: "In the full light of summer, I looked into darkness. It was the end of my subterranean life."

Perhaps to balance the classic simplicity of his plots, Bezmozgis has mastered the well-timed segue. Most of these stories hinge on a single moment of change that propels the rest of the action: In "Tapka," it was that line about Mark's "cerebral catch basin" that brought on catastrophe. In "The Second Strongest Man," Mark describes in detail how Romans career as a weight trainer, back home in Riga, was endangered for political reasons -- when we are suddenly dropped into a fresh reality: "The next day my father discovered Sergei Federenko."

In "An Animal to the Memory," in which Mark unsuccessfully tries to persuade his mother to take him out of Hebrew school, the hinge moment is a gorgeous non sequitur: "My mother was resolute. Nothing I said helped my case. So that April, just after Passover, I put Jerry Ackerman in the hospital." You feel as if Bezmozgis has grabbed the hem of the tablecloth and whipped it off without rippling the wine in your glass. It's a simple thing, a classic storyteller's trick. But you want to keep reading in case he pulls it off again.

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