In 'Betrayers,' Bezmozgis Stays True to Literary Tradition

To read a novel like David Bezmozgis’s “The Betrayers” in this mighty age of American literary mass-production is like getting to nibble on one of those small, precious slabs of black-market chocolate in “1984.” Aha! is the feeling: here is a book that recalls what fiction can do! Its quality is concentrated in every part, not scattered about and diluted. Because of this, and because it is invested with a solemn, almost nostalgic seriousness in its elevated treatment of human relations, despite its contemporary setting it resembles Orwellian chocolate in being a kind of smuggled fare from the past. One may consume it, as with the chocolates, in a certain permissible mood of joyous, rapacious greed.

Befitting its aforementioned seriousness, the story has a severely simple premise: former friends Baruch Kotler and Chaim Tankilevich meet again in Yalta after 40 years apart. Both bear the weight of a heavy role that life has thrust upon them: betrayer. Kotler, an intellectual and an Israeli national figure, has just betrayed his family for the sake of his people; he refused to side with corrupt politicians who threatened to expose his affair with a young woman, and while the press hawks descend on his personal life he has fled abroad with his mistress. Conversely, decades ago Tankilevich betrayed the Jewish people—denouncing his Zionist friend Kotler to the Ukrainian KGB—for the sake of his family. Now, for a single day in a shabby Yalta hotel, the paths of betrayer and betrayed cross again. What will come of it? Revenge at last? Or mutual forgiveness and healing? But either of those outcomes would be too easy for a writer like Bezmozgis, whose handling of the situation is anything but simplistic.

Bezmozgis doesn’t flatter his characters. He knows their vanities and failings, though at the same time, he also gives each the dignity of accepting their own faults. As a result, every figure in his book is brilliantly drawn: entirely credible, but also unique and strangely biblical. Who could ever forget Baruch Kotler’s supremely cool dismissal of his blackmailer? “Mr. Amnon, I hope I haven’t given you the impression that we are engaged in a negotiation. There is nothing in those photographs that would lead me to change my mind. Rest assured, I have a healthy appreciation of my own vulnerabilities.” On the other hand, Tankilevich’s melodramatic demands for pity represent another kind of absolute pose: “Here’s your old enemy,” he says to Kotler. “The despicable beast. The disgrace of the Jewish people. See how fate has settled its accounts with him. Give your girl a good laugh at his expense.” The gentleman doth protest too much, one thinks; his speech is distasteful. Yet he is so determined to be recognized as the aggrieved party that he pays no attention to how much he overdoes the act. Tankilevich and Kotler’s behaviors are ill-advised, but somehow there is a lovable chutzpah in their unabashed greed for their desires—Kotler for his political principles, his childhood happiness, and his sensuality; Tankilevich for his moral and social redemption.

Greed. That is the strongest feeling hiding behind the restrained ironic prose of this book. It is not just any ordinary greed, in the sense of being greedy for money, friends, or any such trivial things for which people are normally said to be “greedy.” Bezmozgis’s conflicted Jewish protagonists are greedy for life; they hanker after the collective Zionist vision as much as their individual dreams and desires. As betrayers, they feel this greed more keenly than the others; their transgressive acts and the accompanying guilt and stigma have lost them the psychic freedom that other people take for granted. Tankilevich, it turns out, really has been shattered by what he did. At 70 years old he is sciatic, unhappily married, poor. “‘And it is I who have borne the consequences all these years,’” he tells Kotler. “‘To this day!’”

Not only does Bezmozgis offer a strong revelation in the paradox that when we betray somebody else we are really betraying ourselves, and many more times over than our victim. He knows, moreover, how to animate this truth with the skills of the master storyteller: grace, precision, compassion, and in this case, Jewish humor. His voice is often Tolstoyan in its easy immensity, as in this passage showing Kotler’s yearning for his mistress: “Through the fabric of his trousers, Kotler felt the warm, birdlike weight of her hands…. Fodder for comedy. And yet, the girl’s fingers slipping between the man’s thighs dispelled comedy. In its place, the leap of animal desire.” These sentences are short but substantial. Only two adjectives, “warm” and “birdlike,” are used; Bezmozgis instead embraces the primal power of the noun, enabling Kotler to mentally progress from male trousers to “comedy” to “the leap of animal desire”: more and more powerful and sublime.

The word “comedy” above certainly hasn’t been “dispelled” from the novel at large, which everywhere brims with it. Later, Kotler wryly observes to his mistress, “‘As is often the case in life, one imagines an opera and gets an operetta. If that.’” These bitter yet funny remarks are not uncommon in the novel; for, more than betrayal, this is a story about life’s disappointments and about the necessary comedy of our self-deceptions in the face of such disappointments. Bezmozgis’s delicious and consoling Jewish humor comes to the rescue of his menaced characters.

One scene in particular reflects this silver-lining quality of the book: after describing a bleak day in the streets of politically repressive 2013 Ukraine, Bezmozgis takes the reader inside a synagogue with Tankilevich and reveals the beauty of the place, its quiet stoicism: “The shabbiness that marked the rest of the building and the neighborhood was not to be found there. The mahogany tables and chairs were sturdy, built for epochs.” These words could describe the quality of the book containing them: sturdy, built for epochs. And, like the air inside this resilient synagogue, oddly comforting against a background of nearly universal gloom.