“From, To”
by David Bezmozgis
from the April 14, 2025 issue of The New Yorker
It’s been a while since I read anything by David Bezmozgis, though I really enjoyed what I read from him around the time his debut novel Free World came out in 2011. He was named one of The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 in 2010, and since Free World he has published another novel (The Betrayers, 2014) and another short story collection (Immigrant City, 2019). I’m afraid I have read neither, though I’d like to get to them. First, though, this relatively long short story, “From, To.” Here is how it begins:
At ten o’clock on a Wednesday night, he gets a call from his aunt’s number. It’s late to get a call from his aunt, but his mother is often with his aunt, and it’s not unusual for her to call at that hour. But it’s his aunt on the line, her voice pained, then disintegrating.
And that’s it; he feels a plummet and a deletion commensurate with the space his mother occupied in his life. Nothing will fill it. He knows this from his father’s death. He’ll go around with another amorphous blank, until he himself becomes one in the consciousnesses of his children.
I think that’s a pretty strong opening. If you read the story and have thoughts, please share them below!
I thought this was excellent. It could have worked if it only was about a son dealing with his mother’s sudden death, his need to plan the funeral and Shiva, and his relation with his daughters and ex-wife and current girlfriend. But…the second layer is his disagreement with his daughter who is encamped, presumably at Columbia, protesting Israel’s activities in Gaza. Compared to his mom and her generation, he is a liberal, but his daughter’s beliefs are jarring.
Watching him negotiate all of this shows how well Bezmozgis can structure and pace things and also present various points-of-view with relative objectivity. His awareness of the difference between the generations is also well-delivered. Ironically, the narrator’s parents were less tolerant of his relative liberalism, yet he always returned to them, while his relative tolerance towards his daughter doesn’t seem to have healed their growing rift. I hope somehow there’s not a suggestion here that permissiveness and appeasement aren’t good strategies in terms of child-rearing.
Excellent writing has the ability to take any situation and dispassionately sort it out. Not maybe to everyone’s liking. But still, view it from an omniscient perspective deep diving into all aspects of a matter, laying all the sometimes simple, sometimes very complex components out on the table to be closely examined.
This short story is a stellar example of that amazingly reticent ability. When one thinks about October 7th it very easy to feel incredibly uncomfortable and upset. Yet for me this story is very healing because of its meticulous restraint in examing the unexaminable by taking a good look at everything.
It is left up to the reader what the takeaway is. Maybe the reader cannot make up their mind but they have so much more to consider what they can’t make up their mind about. Or they do not find themselves as easily or implacably taking a harsh unchangable decision.
There are little bits of truth, little viewpoints dropped in throughout such as a character’s observation that “Gentile zeal for Jewish death is implacable and that only Jewish strength in a Jewish land can oppose it. That only Jews themselves could provide a plausible answer.”
The protagonist, Vadik, struggles with his estrangement from his youngest daughter whose Lesbian girlfriend is Palestinian Egyptian who tells him, “I’m very sorry for your loss,” referring to the sudden death of his mother and youngest daughter’s grandmother. She says this even as she wears buttons, one of them of the Palestinian flag and one of the rainbow flag.
All the incongruities show up such as
British Mandatory Palestine from 1948.
There is no answer except the prayer at the end. And prayer can comfort just a bit even if one is not religious because the temporal can never be totally separate from the sacred both being woven out of the same spiritual fabric. Thanks to the New Yorker for publishing this story that could be seen as political but yet detaches somewhat from the political into the literary third person personal. And maybe hints at the right direction to take even if seen as impossible for right now.