The Betrayers

The Betrayers

by David Bezmozgis

Some books are written to really make the reader think.  The Betrayers is one of those novels.  This is a book that makes the reader question and weigh their personal opinions.  When someone has committed acts of betrayal at different times in their lives should they be forgiven or condemned.  Can one earn the right to forgiveness or once you have sinned that becomes what defines you?  Can the person you wronged offer you absolution.

Those are the topics that author, David Bezmozgis explores in his debut novel, The Betrayers.  By following a day in the life of protagonist Baruch Kolter we learn the story

of his rise to power as an Israeli politician from the life of a Soviet Jewish dissident and his crash to disgrace as his political viewpoint on the West Bank settlements lead to the exposure of his affair with a women as young as his daughter.  They try to escape the backlash of the press by running off to Russian Crimea and a seaside town of his youth.  While he is there fate leads him to reconnect with the man who forty years earlier, as a KGB agent denounced Kolter and had him sent to the Gulag for thirteen years.  As these two mens lives intersect in the present, the past is explained.  The reader is only privy to the parts of the characters lives as they come up in dialog.  There is no extra room here for sentimental feelings.  In answer to Svetlana accusations Kolter replies, “Svetlana, you may not believe it, but I harbor no ill will toward your husband.  So it is not even a matter of forgiveness.  I hold him blameless.  I accept  that he couldn’t have acted any differently any more than I could have acted differently.  THis is the primary insight I have gleaned from life: The moral component is no different from the physical component - a man’s soul, a man’s conscience, is like his height or the shape of his nose.  We are all born with inherent propensities and limits.  You can no more be reviled for your character than for your height.  No more reviled than revered.”

We follow the lives of Kolter on the holiday with his mistress, Leora Rosenberg as they encounter Vladimir Tankilevich, his betrayer and his wife Svetlana.  The four main characters meet at the home of Tankilevich and as they square off between their hurt feelings from the past and a sense of morality.  Each of them has acted from what they believe is a position of righteousness.  Kolter as an ardent Zionist and Tankilevich, a man with strong family loyalty.

The question of how each man’s life was shaped by the events of Israel and the former Soviet Union during the 1960s.  Each man stubbornly acting on what he felt was the moral and ethical high road.  The reader is left to find their own answers. Is there one correct answer or does man follow his beliefs and fate controls the outcome.  Kolter argues, “You spoke before of fate, that you believe in a Divine Providence.  You asked my opinion, and I said that I believed we walk hand in hand with fate.  We choose to follow it or pull against it, depending on our characters.  But it is character that decides, and the trouble is, we don’t decide our characters.  We are born as we are.”

In the end, the irony is finally not lost on Baruch Kolter who betrayed his family, wife, son and daughter for his principles, that man he hated all these years stood up for his family.  As he returns to Israel to face the future and the consequences of his actions we see him as a changed man.

David Bezmozgis is an award winning writer and filmmaker whose fiction has appeared in many magazines.  He is also the author of Natasha and the novel The Free World.  In 2010 he was named one of The New Yorker’s, “20 Under 40” writers.