[URBAN NOTE] "Reflecting on My Immigration to Toronto, Through Film"

[rfmcdonald]

Moroccan-born Torontonian describes how Natasha, about a Russian Jewish immigrant family in Toronto, speaks to her experiences of assimilation and personal transformation.

I met the Bermans more than 10 years ago in a fiction-writing workshop. It was my first semester at Concordia University in Montreal, and I was always overdressed for those early fall days—evidence that not too long ago, I was accustomed to living under an African sun. Halfway through the semester, as an example of ethnic literature, my professor introduced our class to the short story collection Natasha and Other Stories. The writer, David Bezmozgis, was a rising young Canadian author, and the collection was his first successful published book (it was nominated for the Governor General’s Award, and went on to win the Toronto Book Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for First Book—it became a bestseller).

In the collection, the Bermans—husband and wife Roman and Bella and their son Mark—move to Toronto in 1980 from Latvia, then still an entity of the Soviet Union, to begin their lives as Canadian immigrants. They experiment with the English language, with the North American way of doing business (Roman struggles as a massage therapist, taking on odd temporary jobs he was not trained for), with love in the suburbs in a home they can eventually afford to purchase. They move forward balancing a deeply entrenched Russian identity with the expectations of integration—often with awkward and uncomfortable results.

Although the seven stories that live in Natasha and Other Stories revolve around their specific immigration and assimilation experience as a Jewish Russian family, I—a Muslim Arab from Morocco—connected with the earnest aspirations of its characters. I felt a warm sense of belonging, a sudden surge of hope. With the Bermans, I was less alone.

[. . .]

Having been “Americanized” during my pre-university years at the Rabat American School in Morocco did nothing to prepare me for the cultural dislocation I experienced when I first came to Canada. It was an illumination to my silly ignorance to discover that Canadians are actually not at all like Americans, and that moving to another country is not at all like travelling.

Growing up in Morocco, I was a conflicted teenager: I was naturally extroverted, but would often turn down social gatherings in favour of reading books from abroad in my room. Looking back now, I understand that I was an artist at heart awkwardly looking to forge an identity in the arts while aunts, uncles, and friends of the family would insist I get up at weddings and belly-dance like the rest of the women (I still don’t know how to belly-dance). I decided to forge a career in the world of words in an English-speaking country. My late father was thrilled that I wanted more than to find a good Moroccan husband.

The things you learn.