The Betrayers

Starred review from July 21, 2014
Bezmozgis’s second novel (after The Free World) is a beautifully written exploration of the role fate can play in the finer distinctions between a heroic life and a villainous one. Baruch Kotler is a Soviet Jewish dissident who, after he is freed from prison, becomes a celebrated Israeli politician. When scandal forces Kotler to flee Israel for the Crimea with his mistress, Leora, a coincidence leads him to the door of Chaim Tankilevich, the man whose testimony led to Kotler’s imprisonment in a Russian jail 39 years ago. With all the makings of a standard revenge tale and told in Bezmogis’s trademark direct prose, the story resists oversimplification. Kotler and Tankilevich, now advanced in years, both suffered after Kotler’s trial, and, though the trial is well behind them, both are now desperate in different ways. As the two men struggle with their past, Kotler contends with the scandal he fled, the family he left behind, and his son, Benzion, who aspires to be a dissident despite his now age-tempered father’s advice against it. Though the action is fixed largely in one location, Bezmozgis’s novel feels vast, its pages heavy with the complicated debts we owe one another, which are impossible to leave behind.

Starred review from July 1, 2014
An Israeli leader confronts the man who sold him out to the KGB decades earlier in a striking exploration of memory, patriotism, faith and duplicity from Bezmozgis (The Free World, 2011, etc.).As the novel opens, Baruch Kotler, a 60-something Russian-born Israeli politician, arrives in Yalta as damaged goods. His support of a Jewish settlement on disputed land has outraged the prime minister, one of whose lackeys attempts to blackmail him with photos of his young mistress. Refusing to back down, he pursues some peace and quiet with said mistress, Leora, in the run-down Crimean resort city he fondly recalls from childhood. (The novel is set in August, 2013, and none of the current political turmoil factors into the story.) The home the couple rents, however, is owned by Chaim Tankilevich, who years earlier reported the dissident Baruch to the authorities, leading to a 13-year gulag sentence. If the coincidence seems impossibly unrealistic, the conversations between the two men, and the depth of thought and feeling Bezmozgis brings to them, redeem any such concerns. Chaim has lived on the edge of poverty ever since his betrayal, while Baruch has come away from his ordeal a political celebrity hardly wounded by his affair with Leora. Who deserves esteem or contempt here? Who merits punishment? The debate between the two men is a nakedly allegorical one, connected to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute that lays a scrim over the entire narrative. (Baruch's son is an Israeli soldier with orders to help clear the settlement.) Taking place over the course of one day, the novel offers no pat resolutions to entrenched arguments. But it gains a satisfying tension from its compression, of two men forced to settle accounts in some way about their past in a culture thick with long memories.Philosophical, provocative and nervy-an interior novel that manages to encompass a breadth of issues.

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Starred review from August 1, 2014
Bezmozgis (The Free World, 2011) takes a more tightly focused approach than in his previous kinetic works in this taut, vigorous, and fast-flowing tale of an unexpected encounter between two old enemies in Crimea. After arousing outrage by opposing the prime minister's stand on the West Bank settlements, Baruch Kotler, a famous Soviet dissident turned prominent Israeli politician, flees Tel Aviv, his longtime marriage, his whip-smart daughter, and his son, who is experiencing an intense moral quandary over his service in the Israeli army. To add to the scandal, Baruch is accompanied by his much younger lover; then their search for lodging in Yalta delivers them to the home of Tankilevich, the man who betrayed Baruch to the KGB. Bezmozgis tracks back and forth between Kotler and Tankilevich's radically different lives, which encompass the fear and misery of the Soviet era, and the sorrows, tenacity, and struggles of Israel. Bezmozgis' dialogue has the ringing clarity of a play, while his characters' churning thoughts address the dilemmas of marriage and family relationships and the hidden predicaments that make judging others such a perilous undertaking. Nearly everyone is a betrayer in some way in Bezmozgis' wise, transfixing, and annealing novel of humor and pathos in which today's personal and political paradoxes embody the archetypal conflicts of humankind.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

Starred review from August 1, 2014

Crimea has been dominating the headlines lately, but four years ago, when Bezmozgis (Natasha and Other Stories; The Free World) began writing this novel, the region was part of a stable Ukraine. Any story set in contemporary Crimea will find its narrative warped by our understanding of the unrest there today, but then the main character's actions distort our knowledge of the modern world. A defamed Israeli politician who flees to Crimea with his young mistress, Baruch Kotler was a Jewish dissident in the former Soviet Union, earning political notoriety by spending his early years in prison for his identity and beliefs. Then, after he takes an unpopular stance on the destruction of settlements in the West Bank, his affair is leaked to the press, destroying his political career, marriage, and relationship with his children. Baruch is both betrayed and betrayer, and as he hides out in Crimea he comes face-to-face with the man who sent him to prison. VERDICT A masterly treatise on the complexity of blame and forgiveness that successfully articulates the loss of individual freedom one experiences while navigating political, family, and religious structures. [See Prepub Alert, 3/10/14.]--Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2015

When Baruch Kolter's illicit affair is exposed, the disgraced Israeli politician flees with his young mistress to a Crimean resort town. When he runs into the former friend who denounced him to the KGB 40 years earlier, he must reconcile with his betrayer, his wife, his son, and his own poor choices. While Bezmozgis wrote about Soviet Jewish immigrants in North America in previous works (Natasha; The Free World), this novel, the 2014 National Jewish Book Award winner for fiction, explores the influence that this community has had in Israel. (LJ 8/14)

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2014

A New Yorker 20 Under 40 honoree, Bezmozgis offers a second novel after winning a stack of awards and nominations for both Natasha and Other Stories and The Free World. When Soviet Jewish dissident-turned-Israeli politician Baruch Kotler offers principled opposition to West Bank settlements, his enemies retaliate by exposing his affair with a much younger woman. The couple flee to crumbling Yalta, where Baruch encounters the old friend whose betrayal sent him to the Gulag, even as he contemplates the family in Israel he has betrayed. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2014

Crimea has been dominating the headlines lately, but four years ago, when Bezmozgis (Natasha and Other Stories; The Free World) began writing this novel, the region was part of a stable Ukraine. Any story set in contemporary Crimea will find its narrative warped by our understanding of the unrest there today, but then the main character's actions distort our knowledge of the modern world. A defamed Israeli politician who flees to Crimea with his young mistress, Baruch Kotler was a Jewish dissident in the former Soviet Union, earning political notoriety by spending his early years in prison for his identity and beliefs. Then, after he takes an unpopular stance on the destruction of settlements in the West Bank, his affair is leaked to the press, destroying his political career, marriage, and relationship with his children. Baruch is both betrayed and betrayer, and as he hides out in Crimea he comes face-to-face with the man who sent him to prison. VERDICT A masterly treatise on the complexity of blame and forgiveness that successfully articulates the loss of individual freedom one experiences while navigating political, family, and religious structures. [See Prepub Alert, 3/10/14.]--Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.