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,...