H-WPL READERS BOOK DISCUSSION GROUP May 2016
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H-WPL READERS BOOK DISCUSSION GROUP May 2016 Monday, May 9, 2016, at 11:00 A.M. (please note different time this month) The Betrayers, by David Bezmozgis Discussion Leader: Mira Rosenfeld Sennett Baruch Kotler is an Israeli politician who flees to the Crimean city of Yalta after a personal scandal hits the front pages….Set in a parallel reality in which Israel has voted to withdraw from its West Bank settlements and Crimea is still an uncontested part of Ukraine, the novel takes on contentious questions about Zionism and the fate of post-Soviet Jewry, undistracted by the caprices of the news ticker or the polemics of the moment. (www.wsj.com) Monday, June 6, 2016, at 1:00 P.M. My Name is Lucy Barton, by Elizabeth Strout Discussion Leader: Candace Plotsker-Herman Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn't spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy's childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of Lucy's life: her escape from her troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, her love for her two daughters. (publisher) SUMMER BOOK DISCUSSIONS Tuesday, July 12, at 11:00 A.M. The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty, by Vendela Vida Tuesday, August 9, at 11:00 A.M. As Close to Us As Breathing, by Elizabeth Poliner The Betrayers Review by Donald Weber (www.jewishbookcouncil.org) David Bezmozgis’s Jews are haunted by the traumas and indignities of modern history. Drawn with psychological nuance, historical acuity, and deep compassion tinged with irony—in the tradition of great storytellers like Isaac Babel and Bernard Malamud—Bezmozgis’s Jews tend to find themselves on the edge of history: displaced, in transit, suitcases already packed, seeking spiritual and physical asylum. In his richly-imagined new novel, The Betrayers, Bezmozgis focuses on a major chapter in recent Jewish political and social history: the ordeal experienced by “refuseniks”—Jews who sought to emigrate from the Soviet Union but were “refused” exit by the implacable Russian State. (As Gal Beckerman shows in his harrowing account When They Come for Us, We'll be Gone, beginning in the 1970s thousands of refuseniks petitioned to leave, but were inevitably harassed and threatened by the KGB.) Probably the most famous refusenik is Natan Sharansky, now an Israeli citizen and vocal political actor on the far Right. In The Betrayers, Bezmozgis conjures a Shcharanksy-like character in the figure of Baruch (née Boris) Kotler, a high-ranking Israeli Cabinet minister in his early sixties who survived thirteen years in a Soviet prison. After winning his release through a 98-day hunger strike and the sheer power of his will to resist, “the world’s most illustrious refusenik” landed in Israel, where he was lionized as a Biblical hero, the reincarnation of King David himself. As The Betrayers opens, we learn that after twenty-five years of refusenik celebrity and as leader of “his Russian immigrant party,” “a dissident champion,” Kotler has publicly voiced his dissent regarding the government’s policy of forced removal of Orthodox settlers in the West Bank. As a result, Kotler has been named a defector; his refusal of allegiance to the Prime Minister and, by extension, to the Israeli State represents the first of many layers of “betrayal” Bezmozgis explores in this resonant political novel. Kotler’s betrayal also has a personal dimension. He has fled to the resort town of Yalta in the Crimea accompanied by Leora, his young mistress. They are in shameful flight from Israel, where photos exposing their affair are now spread on the front page of every newspaper in the land, much to the chagrin of Kotler's wife, daughter, and son, Benzion, who is currently serving in the Israeli army. The day before his hasty departure, Kotler was blackmailed by a government emissary with evidence of the affair: the official will not release the photos if Kotler reverses his position and publicly announces his support for the removal policy. True to his deepest character, shaped by his refusenik ordeal, Baruch refuses to cave in to this political threat, which uncannily recalls the KGB tactics of his Russian past. “If you or the people you represent think that I can be intimidated by this sort of KGB thuggery,” he says, “you are mistaken.” In this respect, The Betrayers carries a substantial charge of social criticism, in this case leveled at the Jewish State. In drawing the complex figure of Baruch Kotler, a betrayer—and, as it turns out—among the betrayed, Bezmozgis aims to deepen our understanding of the sordid psychic and political landscape of refusenik-era Russia and its tangled, ironic legacies in the present. The powerful drama of The Betrayers unfolds during Kotler's twenty-four-hour sojourn—or adulterous flight—to Yalta, once filled with Jewish vacationers, and now home to an aging remnant of Jews struggling to survive in the corrupt post-Soviet era. By accident, the journey brings Kotler face-to-face with his own betrayer from when he was a young political activist in Moscow. This is Chaim Tankilevitch, now a weary and disheartened old man, “tormented body and soul,” who rents out a portion of his home in the summer to tourists—Baruch and Leora among them. For the principled dissident Kotler, however, the charged scene of recognition makes his knees buckle as he undergoes a shattering return of the repressed: he “sensed the nearness of his old tormentors;” seeing Tankilevich summons the “cold menace of the KGB.” Shifting from present to past, we learn that Tankilevich had been a KGB informant who, during the refusenik era, falsely denounced Kotler (his own roommate, no less) in the Soviet press and was instrumental as a State witness in Kotler’s “conviction” and prison sentence. [Tankilevich appears, in this respect, to be modeled on the real-life Sanya Lipavsky, who publicly accused Sharansky in the Soviet newspaper Izvestia.] Now a broken man scraping by, forced to travel every Saturday three hours each way to a synagogue in Simferopol to help a doddering group of old Jews maintain a minyan, Tankilevich is still not wholly abject. Despite the indignities he suffers in the new Russia, where casual anti-Semitism—“the penetrating look of contempt”— injures his Jewish soul, Tankilevich, like many Jews dangling on the edge, has managed to hang on. Bezmozgis feels profound compassion for this betrayer, for Tankilevich is a survivor. Above all, Tankilevich feels the palpable claims of affiliation. Observing his fellow aging Shabbat worshippers, he reflects: “History had laid its heavy hand on them, but they had burrowed, eluded, and remained. One needed only to look at their faces—expressive Jewish faces—to see that they had known the depths of life." In The Betrayers, shameful history and guilty memories continue to haunt, rupturing uncannily into the present. Each a victim and a betrayer, each blackmailed and betrayed by a Jew-hating Soviet state and by fellow Jews, Kotler and Tankilevich, once roommates, now enemies, undergo a soul-wrenching encounter with their pasts. In this impressive new novel, David Bezmozgis deepens his excavation of Jewish history and memory. He remains an artist with a Jewish heart, compelled to paint, in words, the range of “expressive Jewish faces.” Interview: David Bezmozgis Monday, September 29, 2014| by Donald Weber (www.jewishbookcouncil.org) Donald Weber recently spoke with David Bezmozgis about his new book, The Betrayers, which was published last week by Little, Brown and Company. Bezmozgis is also the author of the short story collection Natasha and the novel The Free World. Donald Weber: I’m curious why you were drawn to the refusenik story based around Natan Sharansky: in light of your core themes of exile, displacement, and history (I'm thinking of the powerful vision of Jewish memory and history in a story like "Minyan"), how does The Betrayers continue or, perhaps, depart from what has engaged your work in the past? David Bezmozgis: It's true that the original inspiration for the novel had to do with Natan Sharansky. In 2004, I'd been researching an obituary about Alexander Lerner, another prominent refusenik, when I came upon a curious and compelling detail: Lerner and Sharansky were both in the same circle of refuseniks in Moscow and they were both falsely accused of being CIA spies by another Jew, Sanya Lipavsky. As often happens, it is the curious exception that sparks the idea for a story. Put plainly, I was intrigued by the case of Lipavsky. I wondered what happened to him. I wondered what led him to commit this betrayal. I wondered too what might be the fate of a man who betrayed his own people for a country that subsequently ceased to exist. But deeper still—and this is where the idea accrued for me the necessary substance to sustain a novel—I wondered about the moral and constitutional difference between a man like Lipavsky and one like Sharansky. The question at the heart of the book is a moral one: Why is one person able to sacrifice everything for the sake of his or her principles while another is not? In other words, the central idea behind the book is one of virtue or goodness. The question is as old as philosophy. What does it mean to lead a virtuous life? I am conscious—I assume like most people—of my own moral behavior.