David Bezmozgis
The Globe and Mail, Nov. 3, 2023
“In the weeks since Hamas massacred some 1,400 Israelis and abducted more than 200 others into Gaza, Jews around the world, including in Canada and the United States, have come to the shocking realization that a significant number of their fellow citizens are indifferent to their pain, openly celebrate it or, under the right conditions, would inflict more.”
David Bezmozgis is an author and filmmaker whose most recent book is Immigrant City. He is creative director of the Humber School for Writers.
I was born in Riga, Latvia, when it was still part of the Soviet Union. The forest behind the apartment complex where I lived with my parents was called Bikernieki forest. From a very young age, perhaps as early as 4, I knew that Nazis had shot Jews in that forest.
In a different part of Riga, my grandparents lived in a house also inhabited by a Latvian couple of their generation. During the Nazi occupation, the husband had served in the auxiliary police and killed Jews. When my grandparents and this man passed one another coming and going, they exchanged greetings.
At the time of the Doctors’ Plot, an antisemitic conspiracy against Soviet Jews that was intended to lay the groundwork for a pogrom and mass deportation of Soviet Jews to Siberia, my father was a high-school student. He remembered seeing articles in the papers demonizing Jewish doctors and Jews in general. Stalin died in 1953 and the campaign was abandoned, but not before many Jewish doctors lost their jobs and Jews across the Soviet Union experienced the dread of some inchoate, impending catastrophe – this time to be perpetrated by the country that had defeated Hitler.
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