David Bezmozgis

These incandescent pages give us one momentous day in the life of Baruch Kotler, a disgraced Israeli politician. When he refuses to back down from a contrary but principled stand regarding the West Bank settlements, his political opponents expose his affair with a mistress decades his junior. He and the fierce young Leora flee the scandal for Yalta, where, in an unexpected turn of events, he comes...

Welcome to Rome. It's the summer of 1978, and the Krasnansky family are passing through. Alongside thousands of other Soviet refugees they await passage to a new home in the West. But escaping Communism is not so easy (especially when some of the Krasnanskys insist on bringing it with them), and it's harder still when their sponsor in the USA lets them down and they find that they'r...

A dazzling debut, and a publishing phenomenon: the tender, savagely funny collection from a young immigrant who has taken the critics by storm. Few readers had heard of David Bezmozgis before May 2003, when Harper's, Zoetrope, and The New Yorker all printed stories from his forthcoming collection. In the space of a few weeks, America thus met the Bermans--Bella and Roman and their son, Mar...