Jason Blake: Sports seem to have been a crucial part of your upbringing. Did sports have any sort of influence on your artistic path? Did they have any influence on your writing?

David Bezmozgis: My father was in sports, both as a trainer and coach, and as an athlete. As a trainer and coach, he specialized in Olympic weightlifting and strength training. Before we left the Soviet Union, he achieved the level of international weightlifting judge, such that he could have officiated at the Olympics—though he never did. As an athlete, his sports were soccer and hockey. Growing up, I heard him talk about athletes and coaches he knew—some of them very famous—and we also watched a lot of sports together. It was the main area of commonality between us. I played a lot of sports growing up and was a passable athlete, though not as good as he was. The physical remains an important part of my life and my conception of myself. I think it’s integral to who I am, but at some level, probably also a reaction against some effete stereotype of writers and artists. When I started to write, I was conscious of wanting to include the physical, including athletics, in the work. Also, I wanted to counter stereotypes of Jews as being mostly intellectual and neurotic, since the men I grew up with—my father’s friends in particular—were very physical.

JB: Your writing has some deadpan humour and is also situationally funny. Do you actively think of humour or does it simply appear as your write?

DB: I think writers have sensibilities, the way they see the world. If you see the world as funny, somewhat absurd, it will find its way into the writing. What else? I think Jews are a funny people, and that humour and irony are part of the national character. Perhaps a function of being outsiders, often a minority within the larger majority—where humour is a useful tool and a defence mechanism. But it’s a hard thing to talk about. You’re only ever as funny as other people believe you to be.

JB: You’ve often mentioned the autobiographical background details behind your stories, though they are of course fiction. You’ve also mentioned that you are following in the footsteps of Richler and Roth by shining a fictional light on a community. How do you straddle the line between the public and the private?

DB: I think that’s also a sensibility question. There must be something about me that enjoys blurring the line between the real and the fictional. It is a sort of game, one that writers like Roth and Richler played, often very well. There are others who have done it too—Leonard Michaels, a writer who was and remains very meaningful to me, is another. I think one reason for this is that I believed that family’s immigration was compelling subject matter for fiction and so I just used what I had and elaborated from it. I kept much of the context—places, jobs, family dynamics—but invented most of the events. And I also like playing around with alternate versions of “myself,” placing that self in situations that never happened to see what he would do. Not arbitrarily, but for some dramatic and thematic purpose.

JB: Was Grigory Novak in any way a model for the Sergei Federenko character?

DB: No, the model for Sergei Federenko was a different lifter, Gennady Ivanchenko. He was an extraordinary athlete, and the kind of natural phenom Federenko is described as being. My father knew him well and had some hand in training him, although his principal coach was a friend of my father’s, an older Jewish coach named Misha Freifeld. These names are mostly lost to the fog of history.

JB: You manage to make a small, multilingual community understandable to any English-speaking reader. Is there an ideal reader you have in mind? (I am not suggesting that one has to be Latvian-Russian-Canadian/American-emigrated-in-the-1970s-Jewish to enjoy or appreciate your work!)

DB: I’m aware that I’m acting as kind of a tour guide and cultural interpreter for this quite marginal community. My goal when I write is to make it accessible to people outside the community but also authentic to those within it. Beyond that, my ideal reader is someone who likes the sort of books I read and the authors I like.