David Bezmozgis’ new novel, The Betrayers, follows the late-life travails of Baruch Kotler, a celebrated Soviet-Jewish-dissident-turned-Israeli-politician, who bears some resemblance to the real-life refusenik Natan Sharanksy. Like Sharansky, the fictional Kotler spent many years in jail before emigrating to Israel—where he was received as a hero—but unlike Sharansky, he finds himself embroiled in scandal when his extra-marital affair with a much younger woman is revealed.

Kotler flees the furore in the Holy Land for Crimea (because irony), where he encounters Vladimir Tankilevich, the man who once betrayed him. What follows is a delicious, compelling, literary psychodrama—and a fascinating exploration of Zionism, the right-wing trajectory of Israeli politics, and the legacy of Soviet Jewry. Writing in The New York Times, Boris Fishman (also interviewed by Jewcy) raved thusly about The Betrayers: “A novel of ideas and an engrossing story? It’s the umami experience: salty and sweet, yin and yang, the rocket scientist who is also a looker.” Tablet’s Adam Kirsch described it as “the rare book that makes being Jewish feel not just like a fate or a burden, but a great opportunity.” Michael Orbach talked with Bezmozgis about these big ideas—and more—earlier this month.

What was the genesis of the book?

I’d written an obituary in 2004 for The New York Times Magazine about a Jewish dissident in Moscow, Alexander Lerner. In researching it, I came across this detail that Lerner stood accused, along with Natan Sharansky, by a fellow Jew, a guy named Sanya Lipavsky, which I’d never heard before. I became fascinated by this idea that this one Jew had denounced his ostensibly Zionist brothers for a regime that then ceased to exist. I wondered what happened to this man when the Soviet Union fell apart; what his life would have been like. That was the beginning of it, but it led to a larger question that fascinated me about morality: why are some people—like Sharansky—incredibly principled and willing to sacrifice anything for their principles and what is it that separates them from most other people? The moral question is the heart of the book. I wondered what would happen if these two men ever encountered each other and if they did so in the present day, with the background of what was happening to the former Soviet Union and the background of what Israel had become and was changing into. That was what inspired the book.

It is a rather lovely book and it does ask that question. Do you think that question has a sort of predestinated answer?

This is part of the project of the book: one is to ask the question and then to dramatize it and the other is to pose an answer, which the book does. I don’t think we should reveal the answer during an interview; I feel it takes some of the excitement out of the reading away. But it does pose the question of what separates the highly virtuous people and most other people and how would we ever know? That was what was interesting about these two characters, Kotler and Tankilevich, because of the Soviet system a lot of the people were actually forced to declare and expose themselves morally and constitutionally: what kind of person are you and will you denounce your brother? Will you resist and, of course, what price would you pay for your resistance?

Was there a good deal of research involved in writing this book?

Yes. The Betrayers derived almost nothing from my own experience so there was a research on a number of levels. First of all, to understand people like Kotler, the refuseniks and Zionist dissidents. I read memoirs they published; I visited Israel, in part, to meet some of these people, see what their lives were like in Israel and how they felt all these years later about the country. This was in 2012, before the Gaza War that proceeded this most recent war. In 2011, I was in Crimea and traveled around to find where to set the story. I hadn’t thought it would be Yalta, but Yalta was the only place I could do it.

Why?

For the very simple reason that I needed large, fancy hotels and outside of Yalta, no place on the Crimean coast had these things.

What was the difference in your writing process between writing something loosely based around your own life (like Natasha) and something like this?

I think by the time I start writing it doesn’t make much of a difference. By the time you start writing it’s just the complication, the challenge, of writing good sentences. Whether I’m writing about myself or I’m writing about someone like Kotler, it really didn’t make much of a difference. It was leading up to the process of starting—trying to understand the subject—that was the big change.

The obvious parallel to Kotler is Natan Sharansky, but I noticed there’s a section where Kotler reminisces about being put on trial in Israel by another refusenik. For some reason, this reminded me a bit of Rudolph Kastner and his experiences post-WW2. Was this based on him?

No, in fact it was this other little detail that I discovered when I was in Israel talking to refuseniks. There was an actual trial against Sharansky that I was fascinated by and it finds its way into the book. In Israel Sharansky stood accused of being a fraud, the opposite of what everyone believed him to be, not a victim but one of the villains. That was a fascinating detail. Not much directly from Sharansky’s life enters into the novel. It is significantly fictionalized, but that detail was striking.

What was it like meeting the refuseniks in Israel? I remember speaking to Gal Beckerman, the author of When They Come For Us We’ll Be Gone, and he made this joke in passing that a lot of refusniks complain jokingly, but also not, that Israel is just like the Soviet Union.

That wasn’t my experience at all. In fact, that was one of the things I was curious about: how did these people, who sacrificed so much to come to Israel, feel about Israel? When they came to Israel a lot of them struggled. The people I spoke to, across the board, remained very committed Zionists and loved Israel. They were on the political right and not on the political left which is true of most former Soviet Jews.

Sharansky is on the right of the Israel political spectrum and that comes across in Kotler’s character as well.

There are people far more on the right. There are moments when [Sharansky] articulates democratic positions that other people don’t. At the time of the Arab Spring he was one of the few Israeli officials that believed this sort of thing should be supported and not immediately suspected. As the case turned out we now know what happened to the Arab Spring. But he wasn’t one of the cynics.

Tangential question: Is there a more right-wing trajectory in all Israeli politics right now?

I think Israeli politics have swung to the right. The Likud has been in power for a decade or some version of the Likud, that’s a fact. Part of what prompted me to include Israel as a part of the book has to do with how that country has changed. How it’s changed has been a function of absorbing more than a million Soviet Jews. I’ve written these three books and this last one was intended to be completely contemporary and to ask the question: what is going to be the legacy of the Soviet Jews? Their real legacy isn’t in North America; their real legacy is in Israel. They’ve changed that country. And if people are interested in why that country has swung to the right, part of the answer has to do with these Russian Jews. You have to understand the mentality and the context of what formed them politically and ideologically: what the Soviet Union was like and what it did to Jews and what it means to all these Jews, speaking broadly, to no longer be the oppressed, but to actually wield power.

They’ve also contributed a lot to the culture and economy in Israel in the best possible way, but politically they’re part of the reason why that country swung to the right. The book continues on with Kotler’s son and the difference between Kotler—who most people on the left would consider a politically conservative guy—and his son. That’s the other part of the family story, which is the rise of the Zionist Orthodox and how that has changed the country.

I’ve noticed that in your story collection Natasha and this book, bad people seem to go to minyan [services]. I think any fictional character who attends minyan in your book is bound to be unpleasant or bound to meet someone quite unpleasant.

Go to any minyan in your own world and I’m sure that one of those people aren’t as pure as driven snow either. That uncle who has some real estate holdings and maybe a scrapyard. He’s the one who sponsored the Kiddush, standing there by the herring.

You’ve spoken many times about the great Jewish writer Leonard Michaels. How were you influenced by him?

Part of the experience in encountering a writer you connect with is also recognizing something of yourself, that feeling of identification: this person has written the book that you were meant to write. There was an instant of admiration and envy when I encountered Lenny’s stories. His approach to his childhood and upbringing seemed in line with mine. The way he looked at urban Jewish life wasn’t purely intellectual, he had these athletes and hustlers. It wasn’t bookish nebbish-ey representation of Jews, and growing up in a community surrounded by Soviet Jews. All the men of my grandfather’s generation served at the front; my father was in sports and many of his friends were athletes. That was the world that made sense to me: where Jews could be both physical and cerebral.

And the beauty of his prose: how economical it was and yet not at the expense of just being evocative and poetic. I still haven’t encountered very many writers that move me the way that Leonard Michaels moved me. I go back and re-read him all the time.

I don’t think anything can match his story ‘Murderers’. That’s a perfect story.

It’s a perfect story. And you can read it, and re-read it and find something new. There’s not a wasted image and everything comes together. There’s humor in it; there’s a real understanding of the darkness that attends being mortal and there’s just great artistic beauty. “We sat on the roof like angels, shot through with light, derealized in brilliance.” My God, somebody else write a better line than that.

Read also: Anya Ulinich on Autobiography in Fiction, Drawing, and the Perverse Pleasures of OkCupid
Gary Shteyngart On Surviving Solomon Schechter, Soviet Pain, And Botched Circumcisions

(Image: author’s website)

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Michael Orbach caught up with her recently to talk about autobiography in fiction, drawing, Bernard Malamud, and the perverse pleasures of OkCupid.

So your new book begins with your lead character blaming the U.S. State department for her sexual awakening. That’s actually coincidental since I blame the U.S. Department of Agriculture for my own belated sexual awakening…

[Laughs] Actually I would like to stop you right there—it’s a novel, not a memoir, so I don’t want to discuss my own sexual awakening. It’s definitely semi-autobiographical. It’s informed from my own experience, there’s no question about that, but it’s not straight out of it. My life is much more boring.

I think some people are writers who write stuff because they’re very interested in what happens to them; other people aren’t like that. I can think of many writers who write about places they’ve never been to. Some people can’t do that. I need a personal connection to the material.

What was the genesis of this graphic novel?

My first novel [Petropolis] came out in 2007 and I wrote another one, and it was just not good. I didn’t entirely like it; I showed it to my agent and she didn’t exactly love it; my editor didn’t like it. After that, I was in a kind of bad personal state. I couldn’t get myself to start writing another novel but I was doing a lot of drawing and doodles. I haven’t drawn for ten years and then a freelance illustration job fell in my lap. I found that drawing was soothing. I showed those drawings to my agent and she said maybe this was my next project. I have never done any comics before—I didn’t grow up with comics. And I haven’t read that many graphic novels. The graphic novels I did read were basically literary fiction or memoirs: Persepolis [Marjane Satrapi], Fun Home [Alison Bechdel], and stories by Adrian Tomine. I read them the same way I’d read any fiction. I didn’t really know what I was doing at all.

But when I was telling stories with drawing, the space constraints of a comic panel or a speech bubble actually helped me construct a story. When I write fiction it tends to sprawl. With handwritten text, there is the issue of space constraint. It forces you to get the story out. It was an easier process in a way. Do I wrap up a scene or extend it? The choice was obvious; I have to say what I have to say, or draw it all over again. It gave me a kick in the pants as a writer. It made it more vivid. It was a good experience overall.

How long did this take you?

I started it in May 2012 and I finished it last summer—less than a year. I sold it to Penguin on proposal and they gave me a few months. I was really rushing. Drawing takes up a lot of time; the first draft was completed in a few months. I did 16-hour days, it was crazy. I work at home and my kids would be like “There’s no food!” and I’d be like “Here’s twenty bucks, go to the grocery store.” I was disappointed that I didn’t have time to perfect the drawings. Writing is finite, there’s a stopping point when you can’t improve, but with drawing it’s much more ambiguous. I’m much more judgmental of my artwork than of my prose. I would have loved to have more time to make the book more more beautiful. On the other hand, when it was finished, I was happy because the speed gave the book a kind of urgency. The momentum is more intense because the pace is intense and it’s matched by the quality of hand-written text.

I love the dialog. Did some of that come from your own experience on OkCupid?

Yes, I have that in common with my character. I spent my whole adult life in a marriage; I was married at 21, and I had a kid when I was 24 and another one when I was 28. I stayed in this marriage for 15 years. I never dated; you don’t “date” when you’re in college, you “meet people” which is different. I was absolutely fascinated by the whole dating thing; I met people whom I never would have encountered in my normal social circle. All these crazy different stories.

Not every guy I met was somehow interesting or entirely insane, like the guys in the novel. The novel does its fiction thing—even if based on reality, everything is kind of exaggerated and tweaked… But still, it was a really interesting experience for me. Doing online dating as a writer, I couldn’t help deconstructing the way people misrepresented themselves online; even if they are trying to say one thing about themselves, they said another. The way they write about themselves and what they include or choose to exclude, it’s very telling. You learn to read between the lines.

I never looked at OkCupid like that, but I probably should.

I’m almost tempted to do a sociological study of OkCupid profiles and what people do. Our relationship with our photographs for example: we all have something we think is our best feature and our worst feature and we take pictures accordingly. Or something that’s meaningful and sentimental and we put it in our profile, but it’s not necessarily our best picture or looks like that you, or that you’re visible in. Another interesting thing is the language people use and what we chose to include in our reading lists. We don’t put down our favorite guilty pleasure, we put down the kind of stuff that we think will attract the kind of people we want. The men OkCupid matched me with usually “loved” David Sedaris and Charles Bukowski. There’s a list of three writers that the guy who doesn’t actually read books likes to use. No man ever likes any women writers, except for Sylvia Plath.

I’m going to my OkCupid profile to add a female writer now.

Add one who isn’t Sylvia Plath. You can so get the chicks.

Our interview is on hold, while I add Margaret Atwood.

She’s okay. Put Lorrie Moore in there.

Alice Munro?

Yeah, that’ll help.

If I get laid because of this interview…

You can buy me a drink.

I waste a lot of time on OkCupid, but you really made something useful out of it.

To me it was not a waste of time. I waste time professionally, I’m a writer. I gather material. It was fascinating, especially the way people answer some of the questions. Probably 90 percent of men answer the question “Are you smarter than most people?” in the affirmative. I get matched with a certain sub-set of men: basically, educated New Yorkers. And lot of them are white people, and I guess white men think they’re smarter than most people. I wouldn’t date anyone who said that he was smarter than people. What kind of thing is that to say?

I liked how you picked up on the question OkCupid has about whether people with low IQs shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce. They should rename the site OkHitler.

How many over-educated hipsters actually say yes—that the world would be a better place if people with low IQs couldn’t reproduce? It’s really crazy.

In the book, Lena has this moment where she has a nightmare about Philip Roth and picks Bernard Malamud instead. Can you talk a little about that?

Lena has a nightmare about Philip Roth on a Greyhound bus. I had a good dream about Roth on a Greyhound bus, he was really nice to me, but narratively speaking it needed be a nightmare. Malamud is a great artist—his writing is so fine. I like him as an artist better than Roth—but I identity with Roth’s autobiographical characters more. But although I identify with them, I also think if Roth and I met he wouldn’t have given me the time of day. He’d dismiss me. I relate to Alexander Portnoy but I’m not supposed to, because I’m a woman. It’s complicated with Philip Roth… Anyway, sometimes things in novels aren’t put in to be straightforward; it’s not like Lena picking Malamud over Roth. it’s just a sequence.

The story “The Magic Barrel” spoke to me so much because it’s about an existential crisis and desperate scramble for meaning and love. I really related it and I got a kick out of the parallel between the marriage broker’s Magic Barrel full of girls and OkCupid. It’s just a nice framing device for the book. Lena is similar to Leo [the lead character in “The Magic Barrel”], but Leo becomes depressed and is pretty passive. He gives up and mopes around his apartment and finally finds the girl he falls in in love with in an envelope of photos, right in his apartment. But Lena is a woman and women tend to be proactive about fixing their fate. They get off their ass—if things aren’t good, let’s make them better. Especially immigrant women; they’re kinda into survival of all sorts. Lena’s actively searching, rather than throwing up her hands and saying “There is no such thing as love and meaning.” She thinks there might not be, but she doesn’t give up and then she finds it.

Related: Russian as an American Language: A Conversation with Anya Ulinich
Graphic Novelist Liana Finck on Yiddish Letters, Teen Angst, and Becoming a Book Person
Boris Fishman on Grandfathers, Russian Hirsuteness, and the Immigrant Experience

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Here’s an excerpt taken from the title story—it’s about weed and Texas and a hairdresser named Kathleen:

“The haircut would be easier to get than the weed, but he wanted the weed first so he could be stoned during the haircut. For the weed I had to approach a Texan. The Texans hated us, but some hated us less than others. Luckily, a kind woman bummed a cigarette off me, called me “Sweetheart,” and agreed to help with both my tasks. Her name was Kathleen, and she was the on-set hairdresser.

Kathleen didn’t give a shit about the higher-ups like Tipplehorn. Just did her thing in the hair trailer, smoking bats and talking on speakerphone to her teenage daughter who was spending the summer at an arts camp ­outside Denton. When they said good-bye, Kathleen waved her hand as if her daughter could see her from the other end of the line. She said, “Girl,” and her daughter said, “Bye now,” and Kathleen looked in the mirror and saw me behind her, squint-eyed in the barber’s chair, finally sun-shaded, ­almost asleep.”

Participating is a piece of cake: just log onto Twitter when the chat begins at 1:30pm, follow Jewcy and the Jewish Book Council, and tweet your questions for Wilson (@BubblesDepot) with the hashtag #JLit.

Read more about Twitter book club here.

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We’re thrilled to announce that our Twitter book club collaboration with the Jewish Book Council is back! We’ll be chatting (well, tweeting) with Jean Hanff Korelitz, author of You Should Have Known, on April 2 at 1:30pm Eastern Time.

Her latest novel is a juicy, unputdownable, emotional, psychological literary thriller, you guys—think Gone Girl meets Atmospheric Disturbances. Here’s the synopsis:

Grace Reinhart Sachs is living the only life she ever wanted for herself. Devoted to her husband, a pediatric oncologist at a major cancer hospital, their young son Henry, and the patients she sees in her therapy practice, her days are full of familiar things: she lives in the very New York apartment in which she was raised, and sends Henry to the school she herself once attended.

Dismayed by the ways in which women delude themselves, Grace is also the author of a book, You Should Have Known, in which she cautions women to really hear what men are trying to tell them at the very beginning of the relationship. But weeks before the book is published a chasm opens in her own life: a violent death, a missing husband, and, in the place of a man Grace thought she knew, only an ongoing chain of terrible revelations.

Participating is a piece of cake: just log onto Twitter when the chat begins, follow Jewcy and the Jewish Book Council, and tweet your questions for Korelitz with the hashtag #JLit.

Read more about the Twitter book club here, and enter the draw to win  a copy here!

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Join us today at 1:30 p.m. EST for the first Twitter Book Club of 2013. Times of Israel writer Matti Friedman joins us and the Jewish Book Council to discuss his book, The Aleppo Codex, the never-before told mystery behind an ancient text’s alleged disappearance. We’ll be talking Jews, books, and secrets, and everyone’s invited.

Follow along on Twitter with the hashtag #JLit and be sure to follow @MattiFriedman and @JewishBook.

What to do before then:

• Cliffsnotes: Listen to Friedman discuss the book with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry.

• Context: Read Codex vs. Kindle, Matti Friedman’s Visiting Scribe blog post for the Jewish Book Council.

• Reviews: Peruse the New York Times Magazine’s review of The Aleppo Codex, which they call a “High Holy Whodunit.”

We’ll see you at 1:30!

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We’re thrilled to announce our partnership with the Jewish Book Council on their great Twitter Book Club series. We’re huge fans of the JBC (we love their Prosen People blog), and are excited to team up with them.

Here’s the deal: Every month or so, we’ll have an exciting author on Twitter with us discussing his or her new book. You can ask questions directly (we will be!) or just follow along in real-time our brand new hashtag #JLit. Check out the transcripts of some our favorite Twitter Book Clubs past: Nathan Englander, David Bezmozgis, and Dara Horn.

Tune in Tuesday, October 23, when Doreen Carvajal will be answering questions about her new book, The Forgetting River. We’ll be tweeting up a storm from 1:30-2:10 p.m., and we hope you will be too! Until then, you can find the full archive and game day rules here.

Twitter Book Club Schedule:

October 23, 1:30PM-2:10PM: Doreen Carvajal, The Forgetting River

November 20, 1:30PM-2:10PM: Shani Boianjiu, The People of Forever Are Not Afraid

December 12, 1:30PM-2:10PM: Jami Attenberg, The Middlesteins

(image via Shutterstock)

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With a September and October that the New York Times has dubbed “one of the most crowded literary traffic jams in recent memory,” even the most voracious of readers may need a Guide for the Perplexed to navigate the abundance of Friday night reading options.

Yesterday alone saw the publication of three major new releases, including the latest from Jewish Literary Superhero Michael Chabon, that are bound to be on people’s minds this High Holiday season. Don’t have time to read all three before Rosh Hashanah? Here’s a handy guide:

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women, by Hanna Rosin:

From a wildly popular 2010 article in the Atlantic titled “The End of Men,” to last week’s attention-grabbing excerpt in the New York Times Magazine, Hanna Rosin’s new book, The End of Men: And the Rise of Women, is finally here.

The book explores what Rosin argues is an unprecedented gender role reversal in America. Women, it turns out, have pulled ahead of men in many categories—the two most interesting of which are work and sex. Drop some knowledge at Rosh Hashanah dinner with this Vox Tablet podcast that asks whether the same is also true in Jewish communal life.

The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, by Shani Boianjiu:

In a debut novel that Vogue called “searing,” Shani Boianjiu writes about three Israeli women who are conscripted to their national service in the Israeli Defense Forces. Boianjiu, an Israeli of Romanian and Iraqi descent, grew up in a town near the Lebanese border. She wrote movingly about her own experience in the Israeli army in Sunday’s New York Times.

While you’re at it, here are three Israeli writers she recommends you check out: Sara Shilo, Eli Amir, and Galila Ron-Feder Amit.

Telegraph Avenue, by Michael Chabon

Chabon’s new work of fiction includes a variety of eccentric characters all struggling with love, friendship, and money. Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, described it as a “rich, comic new novel” by an author who has “made a career of routing big, ambitious projects … with superlative results.” Adam Kirsch called it “typically stylish, but overwritten.”

Read an excerpt, or just listen to one:

Happy reading!

(Image via Shutterstock)

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The notion of writers “peaking” is a scary one.  The notion of anyone peaking is really quite scary, but in the case of a fiction writer, to think that one could be capable at one point of writing a fantastic novel that actually resonates with people, and then never be able do it again, it’s frightening.  To be a writer, and manage to convince yourself that you’ve got something to contribute to the world and succeed, only to realize as a certain point that you’ve lost your knack, well, I can think of a handful of preferable diseases.

I don’t know if Adam Schwartz believed that he had at some point peaked, but his story is unique.  He published a story in the New Yorker in 1988, and then again in 1992.  He’d had a big shot agent and a solid book deal, but only now, in 2011, is his book, A Stranger on the Planet, being released.  What’s more, the route, by which it found publication, has become nearly mythological in this day and age:  A Stranger on the Planet was discovered by readers at Soho Press in the slush pile.

A Stranger on the Planet is the life story of Seth Shapiro.  We meet him as a young boy who, though interested in baseball, is most wrapped up in the world of his family: his mother, with whom he has an oddly sexual relationship, his father who left him for another life with another family, and his twin sister who understands him often better than he does himself.  We see the many stages of Seth’s life, from his sexual awakening following a death-defying swim across a lake on the day of the moon landing, to his college years in which his girlfriend learns that she’s a lesbian.  We follow him into adulthood where he works as a stand up comic and English teacher in Chicago and then into a tumultuous and ill-fated marriage.

It would be remiss not to mention how unflinchingly Jewish this novel is. Every adventure we experience as Seth is strongly grounded in the Jewish American experience.  From his stint as the token Jewish in-law to his wife’s WASP-y family to his Orthodox brother Seamus looking constant disapproval of his lifestyle.  At times reading this book, I found myself fantasizing about cultural relics of American Judaism’s past.  Picturing this novel as it unfolded, glimpses of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Seize the Day seemed to appear alongside the novel’s world.  A Stranger on the Planet is the first great Jewish novel of 2011 and a book for outsiders of all stripes, one that serves as a reminder of how many chapters we all get.

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