The reviewer's galley of Natasha, David Bezmozgis's short-story collection about a Russian émigré family in Toronto, begins with words not from the writer but the publisher. "The summer before last," writes the editor of the collection, "on a park bench in Union Square, a friend handed me a typescript of the story "Natasha".... [The author] had never sent his work to agents or magazine editors." This anecdote, so reminiscent of the exchanges of samizdat manuscripts in the old Soviet Union, makes the reader hold his breath with excitement. Will Bezmozgis's book be special? Forbidden in some way? Or at least out of the ordinary? Alas, there is no reason I can see why Bezmozgis had been hitherto shut out of the American short-story mill. This is a slim, well-observed collection, but it lacks span or muscle. Critics have mentioned Natasha in the same breath with Nathan Englander's remarkable For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, but it doesn't bear comparison. It lacks the intelligence of that book, its inventiveness and its commitment to memory. While Natasha covers the same territory, the wave of horrors the Jews suffered in the last century, it is just another short-story collection, a standard product of the American short-story sensibility, a prisoner of a form that has become as ossified as nineteenth-century opera.

Take the second story in the collection, "Roman Berman, Massage Therapist." "Roman Berman" is narrated by Roman's son Mark. Roman had trained weight lifters in Riga, a prestige occupation. But in Toronto he works at a chocolate factory and gives massages after hours. He has gotten a masseur's license, passing an exam in a language that "was more an enemy than an instrument." Now he finds that he lacks that most Western of skills, the ability to build a business. The Bermans are not religious, but having grown up in the USSR, they recognize authority. So Roman and his son go to a local rabbi, who tells the father to advertise. They leaflet the neighborhood.

One leaflet reaches Harvey Kornblum, a doctor. Kornblum invites the Berman family to dinner. They assume the doctor is a step on the way to business success, though of what sort they can't be sure. They arrive, overdressed, with an apple cake Mark's mother has baked. Already waiting is another Canadian Jewish couple, Jerry and Shirley, and another overdressed immigrant couple with a child. The Kornblums and their circle collect émigré Jews; it makes them feel generous and their friends admire it. "This was 1983," as Mark notes, and Jewish émigrés are still "a cause.... We had good PR. We could trade on our history."

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