Chapter 10 Jason Blake Immigration, Masculinity, and Olympic-Style Weightlifting in David Bezmozgis’s “The Second Strongest Man”

Weightlifting and Manliness

As its title suggests, “The Second Strongest Man” brims with the expectations that hegemonic masculinity or hypermasculinity in the age of the Cold War implied. If physical strength is a marker of manliness, then weightlifting is the marker par excellence. In a work of nonfiction about weightlifting in the Soviet Union, Bezmozgis writes that his “earliest conceptions of manhood stemmed from this world” and also from the stories his father “told and retold, often at my bidding” (2012b, 90–91). Boxers can at least bob and weave to avoid blows. Though technique is crucial to Olympic weightlifting, lifting heavy weights involves no trickery—aside from steroids, which in this sporting world are assumed to be taken by all, thus levelling the playing field. With utter coolness, Mark states, “In his capacity as Dynamo administrator it had been my father’s responsibility to ensure that all the weightlifters were taking their steroids” (“Second Strongest,” 48).

The world of hypermasculinity is a world of competition, preening, braggadocio, and skating on the edge of violence. When the primarily “Jewish university students and young professionals who wanted to look good on the beaches of Jurmala” (41) exit the gym on the night Sergei is discovered, they pick a fight with a trio of drunken soldiers. The scene may be in faraway Riga, but we can recognize the pattern from just about any night club or bar. The space outside this Riga gym differs little from the puerile, boozy space catalogued, parodied, and immortalized in Elton John’s “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting.” The insults hurled range from the anti-Semitic to the homophobic slurs so frequently employed “to diminish or mock,” since “heterosexuality is the main component of hegemonic masculinity” (MacDonald 2018, 348).

The cause of the feud is petty: one hobbyist bodybuilder “decided to flex his new muscles,” calling the smallest soldier “a dog” and saying “unflattering things about his mother”; “the two bigger soldiers got ready to crack skulls” (42). Escalation is immediate, despite Roman’s attempt to curtail violence through humour: “Doctors had proven that as muscles grow the brain shrinks.” There is a flurry of generic insults (“cocksucker,” “Chaim,” and “faggot”), but no punches are thrown (43).

They decide to settle the matter like men, albeit with a twist, as Bezmozgis yet again masterfully retreats from fulfilling the expectations of violence he has set up. “Listen, faggot,” gripes a soldier, “if one of your boys can lift the Moskvich [a small car] we’ll forget the whole thing” (43). Suddenly the scene seems staged, as if the two soldiers were not out to escalate aggression but to exploit the opportunity to show off their little gem, to bask in the reflected glory of their petit comrade: the smallest soldier, Sergei. Next to the hobbyists, Sergei’s muscles don’t look like anything to write home about—but Sergei is more of a lifter than a looker.

Bezmozgis carefully differentiates between bodybuilders and weightlifters. The hobby boys at the semi-legal club are not sportsmen like Sergei is, since as Colin McGinn writes, bodybuilding “isn’t sport. It’s exercise.” Why? Because “[b]eyond minimal coordination it requires no real skill, just the necessary will power and some enlightened masochism” (2008, 46). So after the hobbyists agree to the pact, they predictably fail to lift the vehicle. In accordance with the logic of ritual street fights, the soldiers now have a legitimate basis for smearing the walls with their foes. Instead, one of the bigger soldiers turns to Sergei and says, “show Chaim what’s impossible” (44). Sergei, putting down his drink, springs into action, transforming the hypermasculine world of soldiery, late-night drinking, and potential fisticuffs into a more ordered but still masculine world where “men lift heavy things in preparation for lifting very heavy things” in search of glory (57).

Placeless Realms and Sports

Sports fans ceaselessly complain that new stadiums have no character, arguing that the new edifices lack the aura of, say, Maple Leaf Gardens or the Montreal Forum. Such complaints are often misguided. The point of modern sport is to have a playing space that replicates the playing space in any other town, in any other country. Gone are the days when sport was relatively unstructured. Athletic contests are bound by carefully constructed and formal rules and almost-as-rigid “codes” of expected behaviour. Even a contest as seemingly simple as the Olympic clean and jerk is utterly standardized. From the perspective of the spectator, sport becomes essentially placeless: whether in Toronto or Riga, it is roped off by the same equipment, the same rules, the same routines. “By becoming sequestered,” writes Steven Connor, “sport has been able to approach ubiquity” (2011, 49). In this sense, the COVID-induced 2020 NBA Bubble at Walt Disney World was a mere continuation of what Connor dubs the “coalescence of the local and the global” (49). Olympic-style weightlifting is especially well suited to a sense of placelessness because, unlike Major League Baseball with its different distances to left field in Fenway Park (310 feet) and Wrigley Field (355 feet), lifting 150 kilograms in Boston is the same as lifting 150 kilograms in Chicago. It is therefore symbolically apt that the competition in “The Second Strongest Man” is at the Toronto Convention Centre, a venue so characterless it makes even the dullest corporate football stadium seem indelibly linked to its suburban surroundings. Once the weightlifting competition is over, the Convention Centre can clean itself up and let the dogs in for a canine convention, and perhaps follow up with an international soap show.

This placelessness contrasts with the ways in which sport easily plays into national identity: when players from “our” team compete against “their” team, for once we can, for example, see exactly where “we” stop and “they” begin—by looking at the colours of and patterns on the uniforms. To quote Eric Hobsbawm, an “imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people” (1990, 143). Bezmozgis gives this trope a twirl, downplaying the concerns of national identity and individualism so common in sports discourse. When Mark is allowed into the warm-up area at the convention centre, he gets lost in a sea of different coaches, trainers, and athletes from different nations. “Teams could be distinguished from one another by the colors of their Adidas training suits” (56), but otherwise these ideologically opposed individuals and nations have much in common. Unless you were already familiar with the colours of a Russian uniform or a Turkish uniform, you would not be able to discern Cold War tensions.

Within this neutral territory, Mark’s father recedes into his previous self, into his old picture. Mark has often perused a “photo of him [Roman] taken years before the trials of immigration,” when his father’s “face carried the detached confidence of the highly placed Soviet functionary.” Mark reflects, “It was comforting to think that the man in the picture and my father were once the same person” (39). Immigration has taken its toll on Roman Berman, but in the neutral space of the competition, among the other judges, “he looked very much like his old picture in the IWF [International Weightlifting Federation] passport” (57). In a past world of exit visas, anti-Semitism, and decaying empires, the IWF passport obtains a comfortable solidity. Yet it will not last. Roman may look like a lofty functionary of yore in this placeless realm, but after the competition he will exit into the streets of Toronto and return to his new life as an immigrant.

Doublings

In a piece on Leonard Michaels, Bezmozgis praises the writer’s “humor, pathos, and . . . appreciation for the absurdity to be found in everyday life” (2012a). For much of “The Second Strongest Man,” humor, pathos, and absurdity straddle the East and West, hinting that universal experience transcends politics. In one such humorous moment, Bezmozgis lets us know that the Soviet team’s accompanying KGB agent does not initially realize that Roman had emigrated. Early in the story, the agent says, “Roman Abramovich, you’re here? I didn’t see you on the plane” (46). The comment points to Roman’s existence between his Soviet past and Canadian present, an in-betweenness that the author neatly captures through a series of doublings or parallels that at times make one question whether life in the Free World is in fact all that different from life behind the Iron Curtain. Bezmozgis sees similarities as well as ideological divides.

In Latvia, Roman “had operated a very successful side venture out of the gym at Riga Dynamo” (40), which required paying “kickbacks to the Dynamo directors” (41). This grey market activity has a counterpart in Toronto, where a capable dentist’s Soviet credentials go unnoticed. Now the Berman family’s dentist in Toronto, Dusa had been “a top professional in Moscow” (47) who now “worked nights as a maid for a Canadian dentist” because she was not yet qualified to practice in her new country (47). She was, however, allowed to “see her own patients, for cash, under the table,” as long as she gave her boss half of her profits—though, “in the event of trouble, he would deny everything and it would be Dusa’s ass on the line” (47). On the surface, the social distance between Canada and the Soviet Union seems miniscule: minor rule-bending and rule-breaking exist as Russians in both the Soviet Union and in Canada attempt to get by.

But we should not push this parallel too far. In “Roman Berman, Massage Therapist,” the story that precedes “The Second Strongest Man” in Natasha and Other Stories, Roman has an iffy side-job “at the Italian Community Center, where he massaged mobsters and manufacturers and trained seven amateur weightlifters” (21). Plus ça change, the narrator seems to suggest. But by the early 1980s, “Russia was becoming a colossal piece of shit” (60)—a key, if over-stated line—and the prevalence of anti-Semitism within the Soviet Union clearly made Canada an attractive destination. As the seven linked stories forming the arc of Natasha and Other Stories progress, the Bermans achieve upward mobility and declare Canada the better option. In other words, the double structure of struggling in Russia and struggling in Canada is not a perfect parallel. Laura Phillips astutely and eloquently observes that, for Mark, Sergei’s visit “is an object lesson in disillusionment, rather like the feeling one has on revisiting a favourite childhood haunt only to find it smaller, meaner and shabbier than one remembers” (2005).

The most significant of the doublings has to do with the life of the professional weightlifter. Like other professional athletes, the life of a weightlifter reflects the life cycle we all have, but theirs is more compact and on display. Because athletes retire young, we are tempted to look at their careers as a symbolic representation of life. Eventually a hockey player can no longer keep up with younger, faster players, the aches and pains take a little longer to heal—but isn’t this just like the slowing-down we all face as we age? As Michael Oriard reminds us, “[t]he retired player faces the predicament of every human growing old, but at a much earlier period in his life” (1982, 152).

It would, however, be more accurate to describe the athlete’s life as a distorted reflection of the usual life cycle. In his 1983 book The Game, Ken Dryden notes, “If it is true that a sports career prolongs adolescence, it is also true that when that career ends, it deposits a player into premature middle age” (14). Unlike Dryden the lawyer-goalie, many athletes have few other career options, meaning that they have to survive for decades on low skills and often broken bodies, given the physical strains a sports career entails. In “The Second Strongest Man” we are told that “[a] weightlifter’s career was five, maybe seven years,” and even though the Soviet system took care of its retired athletes through sinecures—“[a] lucrative job with customs. Maybe a coaching placement, or moving papers from one corner of the desk to the other” (60)—they faced a similar fading into obscurity.

Inevitably, at some point Sergei Federenko—the strongest man in the world—must lose—and he does, in Toronto, to Krutov, “a new young lifter . . . who showed considerable promise” (55). This public loss merely mirrors the natural order. Father Time comes for us all. Young defeats old, eventually—even when the young contender is an earlier version of ourselves. In another instance of doubling, when Krutov and Sergei compete in the clean and jerk, the clock becomes a symbol of cruel truth: “I watched the seconds on the huge clock behind him tick away. Just to stay in the competition, he had to match his own world record” (58). To stay in the game, Sergei must defeat his younger self. When he fails to lift a weight he used to be able to lift, he loses the competition to the younger Krutov (whose name evokes the Russian word for “cruel”). This doubling is reflected in the story’s hyphenless title: not “The Second-Strongest Man” but “The Second Strongest Man.” By beating Sergei, the original strongest man, Krutov becomes the new strongest man: the second one. At the same time, Sergei also becomes the second strongest man: a has-been in terms of absolute rankings.

Initially, Sergei does not appear to lament his defeat and relegation. He lets Mark hold his medal and says, redundantly, “A silver medal. It’s not gold, but I guess you don’t find them lying in the street” (58). Because Bezmozgis is such a subtle, sparse writer, this statement invites us to look more closely. Sergei’s obvious listener is the boy, but at the same time he is speaking to himself, talking himself into a truth and consolation that he, a former king of the weightlifting world, does not truly feel. Like the many athletes who refer to themselves in the third person or consider their bodies to be machines, Sergei objectifies himself and considers himself not as an individual but as part of a team, a cog in the wheel. “Don’t forget to congratulate Comrade Ziskin on another great day for Dynamo,” he tells Mark blandly, sliding in the epithet “Comrade” (otherwise used only by the KGB agent), and following up with, “Another one-two finish. What difference does it make to him [the coach] if all of a sudden one is two and two is one?” (58). Sergei realizes his glory days have passed. Though he is as revered as a movie star, he is ultimately a placeholder who, in the Soviet sports system, is replaceable.

Bezmozgis highlights the accelerated aging process we know from professional sports. We read that Sergei looked “as though he hadn’t changed at all in the last five years” (50), but what is praise for most of us—“You haven’t aged a day!”—contains a jagged truth: five years is a lifetime for athletes. At the competition, we see Sergei age on the spot. “[S]training under the bar,” he looks old compared to the younger “blond weightlifter” (57). After the competition Sergei visits Mark’s home, consumes a great deal of vodka, and staggers off to the boy’s bed. The symbolism is overt: Sergei is simultaneously the old, drunken athlete and a child being sent to bed. When Mark enters the room, Sergei challenges him: “Let’s go. You and me. Fifty push-ups” (61). Machos use similar phrasing when challenging others to a fight. He then tells Mark, somewhat creepily, to get into the bed: “His tone left no room for negotiation. I kicked off my shoes and lifted the covers” (62). Years after he blithely and drunkenly “lifted the car a meter off the ground” (44), Sergei proceeds to lift the entire bed, with Mark in it, his face straining just as it had when he was at the Convention Centre.

Becoming young again is the realm of fantasy and hope in the sporting world and in life alike. In the sports world, maturity often is a means of hanging on, not winning. Instead, commentators speak of athletes being “back to their old self”—that is, young. Literature, too, makes use of this trope. In Ernest Hemingway’s baseball-happy The Old Man and the Sea, first published in 1952, Santiago finds faith and solace in the New York Yankees—“Have faith in the Yankees my son. Think of the great DiMaggio” (18)—and is relieved when “The great DiMaggio is himself again” (22). The disturbed narrator in Frederick Exley’s sublime 1968 novel A Fan’s Notes hitches his life and existence to football player Frank Gifford and suffers psychologically as Gifford’s skills decline. In one passage, the narrator hopes for a time machine, wishing that New York Giants quarterback George Shaw could choose to throw to one of two different versions of wide receiver Frank Giffords: the current over-the-hill Gifford and the young Gifford in his prime: “Shaw would not, of course, pass to the Gifford who was even now flanked wide to the left side of the field but to some memory of the ball player he once had been” (346).

By the end of “The Second Strongest Man,” Sergei’s return to a younger self is marked by sadness. He has reverted to the alcoholic state in which Roman Berman first found him back in Riga, when Sergei remained “completely unperturbed,” hovering on the edge of conversation drinking vodka while the amateur bodybuilders and Soviet soldiers trash-talked each other outside the Dynamo gym (43). A near-identical event happens at the Bermans’ Toronto apartment. While the old friends enjoy a meal together, discussing old times and bringing East and West together, Sergei silently “listened to all the conversations and drank,” and “continued to address the bottle of vodka . . . after the requisite toasts” (59).

When Sergei finally does speak up at the dinner table, he praises Roman for getting “the hell out” of the Soviet “cemetery” because now he can “look forward to a real life” (59). Sergei then turns on Gregory, his coach, and thus also on the sporting system that helped turn him into a star: “And what do we look forward to? What kind of life, Gregory Davidovich, you KGB cocksucker!” (59). The slur, too, takes us back to the beginning of the story: one of the hobbyist bodybuilders used it against Sergei’s soldier friend while claiming that nobody could lift a Moskvich (“Impossible even for a stupid cocksucker like you” [43]), and the soldier repeated it in his build-up to Sergei’s performance (“you watch the stupid cocksucker” [44]). Now, Sergei uses it. And just as Sergei once put the hobbyists in their place, now Gregory does the same, admitting that Sergei is correct in assuming he will be “put out . . . to pasture. Soviet pasture” (59), perhaps forgotten, perhaps left to reminisce about glory days.

At this point in the story, conversation between Berman and his old friends breaks down. Gregory admits that he “should have left [the Soviet Union] when he had the chance” (60), while Roman expresses regrets or second thoughts about having left: “Don’t be fooled, Grisha [Gregory]. I often think of going back” (60). Here the reunion between friends falters. Not believing Roman, Gregory assumes his friend is trying to console him: “I see your car. I see your apartment. I see how you struggle. Believe me, your worst day is better than my best” (60). In a perceptive and symbolic interpretation of this exchange, critic James Wood points out the story’s “depictions of shifting hierarchies and the changed fortune that exile brings: the Soviet gold medallist is only a silver medallist in the West, and no longer the idol he once was; yet the struggling Russian immigrant, whose life seems to be day upon day of hard graft, is envied by the visiting Soviet” (2004). If Roman longs for his old life, where language would not be an enemy, where his skills and credentials would be acknowledged, he does not express envy.

* * *

When dealing with Bezmozgis’s works, it is often tempting to point out parallels to his biography. This practice, however, devalues the crafted and created aspect of his fiction: to point out that details from Bezmozgis’s life are close to many contained in stories such as “The Second Strongest Man” implies that the author is merely jotting down his life experience. While it is true that Bezmozgis emigrated to Canada from Riga, and while it is true that his father trained weightlifters and “on the side . . . ran a bodybuilding class, particularly popular with young Riga Jews” (Bezmozgis 2012b, 90), the fiction does not improve (or worsen) if we know the author’s own story. Bezmozgis has often addressed this life-or-literature dichotomy in interviews. For example, in 2004 interview with Quill and Quire published after Natasha and Other Stories, he stated: “The stories may be called autobiographical fiction but the part that interests me is the fiction.” He is clearly resourceful in mining his past for details that can meaningfully flourish in his fiction, much of which plays itself out in an in-between space.

Weightlifting proves the perfect sport for probing masculinity, in-betweenness, and how quickly athletic fame and prowess can fade. Like the immigrant whose life is split between a before and an after, the fading athlete moves into another realm of existence. Raising a bar above one’s head in search of victory epitomizes individuality just as it epitomizes absolute, crystalline strength. Mark places Sergei on a pedestal, showing reverence but also taking him beyond the realm of the natural. “I had seen statues with such arms,” says Mark. “I understood that the statues were meant to reflect the real arms of real men, but except for Sergei I had never met anyone with arms like that” (52). At moments like this, Sergei exists in an in-between space, on the margins of reality, between art and flesh.

Works Cited

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