Trends in contemporary literature aside, author David Bezmozgis isn’t especially interested in the trope of anti-hero.
The Latvian-born, Toronto-raised novelist’s third book, The Betrayers (Harper-Collins), short-listed for the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize earlier this month, features a protagonist – a man named Baruch Kotler – who has spent much of his life lauded as a hero, venerated for his moral fortitude.
The novel opens to Kotler’s sudden disgrace, and unfolds against a backdrop of political tensions as he both evaluates and struggles to keep a foothold on his principles.
An Israeli politician and former Ukrainian refusenik who, in his younger days, spent over a decade in Soviet prisons after a fellow Jew (and Zionist) denounced him to the KGB, Kotler, and through him the reader, explores grand questions of virtue, justice and forgiveness.
“I’m more interested in virtuous people who are struggling to remain virtuous, than in flawed people experiencing moments of virtue,” Bezmozgis explained by phone of his central character.
The book is set in the present day, as Kotler, now in his 60s, sees his life again upended by betrayal; a proxy for the Israeli prime minister’s attempts, through nefarious means, to persuade him to back down from his vocal opposition to a unilateral withdrawal from a block of West Bank settlements. Given the choice to acquiesce or have his affair with a young political staffer exposed to the entire country, Kotler opts for the latter.
As the scandal breaks, he and his mistress escape to the Black Sea resort city of Yalta, in the Crimean peninsula – a nostalgic spot Kotler remembers vacationing in as a child – to wait out the drama. There, he’s confronted with an unexpected figure from his past, and left to consider the betrayals he has enacted.
Morality, and why, or under what circumstances, we break from it, is not a question Bezmozgis takes lightly.
“I think about it a lot,” he said. “I try to be a good person. When I fail, I think about why it is I failed, and when I succeed, I interrogate myself to see why it is I did something consistent with my principles, and how much praise I deserve for any of these things.”
Kotler’s resistance to political tyranny of all stripes and devotion to his personal scruples, as well as his and the other characters’ various sins and hypocrisies, create a vivid intersection of the specific and the universal.
Though occurring in a slightly parallel reality – one in which Israel is pulling out of the West Bank, and Crimea has yet to be annexed by Russia (Bezmozgis wrote the book before the latter happened) – the questions raised in the story are familiar and tinged with history; reviewers have consistently compared Kotler to the Soviet-born, Israeli politician Natan Sharansky, who spent years in a Soviet prison.
In response to whether he’d explicitly modeled Kotler on Sharansky, Bezmozgis said: “You can look at Kotler as an example of any number of politicians. He could [also] be compared to Bill Clinton, depending on whether you admire Clinton or not. There’s this common question of: Can somebody be a political leader, even a moral leader, and at the same time be unfaithful to his wife? Are sexual and absolute morality mutually exclusive?”
Ultimately, Bezmozgis said the central question of the book, the thing that makes it universal, is “Why are some people highly virtuous, able to sacrifice things for their principles, and other people are not?”
As the novel’s characters demonstrate, one cannot avoid being hardened by living under an oppressive political regime; for some, this means turning inward to protect one’s self and one’s family at all costs, while for others it’s clinging to ideology or religion, or, in Kotler’s case, forsaking all for the rigidity of one’s principles, including, to some degree, his own family.
Still, the characters are far from coarsely drawn, and, in portraying schools of thought within contemporary Israeli culture, Bezmozgis doesn’t reduce things to the typical left or right dichotomy.
Kotler, who heads a presumably right-wing Russian immigrant party, objects to a unilateral withdrawal from West Bank settlements for reasons that are not explicitly articulated, nor are the reasons why a prime minister leading a coalition of the right would push for a withdrawal.
“It was important for me to write from the perspective of someone who’s as hard to pin down, ideologically, as Kotler is,” Bezmozgis said. “Someone who stood up for civil rights and free expression in the Soviet Union, but, when it comes to Israel, ends up aligning more with the right than the left. Still, when the government decides to do something that I guess is more of a leftist position, Kotler takes the position that he does…His politics are more complicated, and are informed by his time in the Gulag.”
The boundaries between the book’s betrayers and its betrayed are just as easily blurred, and we’re left wondering if forgiveness, and the loosening of one’s scruples, is not the most virtuous choice of all