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)

The post David Bezmozgis on Zionism, Betrayal, and the Legacy of Soviet Jewry appeared first on Jewcy.

Next Saturday, hundreds of people will gather at an art and music festival at the New York Aquarium and the adjacent beach to celebrate the creative post-Soviet immigrants of Brighton Beach, New York City, and beyond. ArtOnBrighton 2012, the second annual manifestation of its kind in New York’s Little Odessa, celebrates the post-Soviet Jewish identity that has been largely unexcavated by its members, partly because of the traumatic goings on that the refugees suffered, and partly because of the absence of a tangible community among post-Soviet Jews. And despite the painful tragedy surrounding roots, the artists of this festival encourage the embracing of reality, giving credit to warriors where credit is due, and looking optimistically at the future of the freshly forming community. After more than 20 years of repatriation, there is much strength to be drawn from the shared cultural history that uniquely sets this tribe apart within the American and American Jewish communities.

Let’s look at this a la Estelle Getty. Picture it, Soviet Union, 1980s: You are a parent immigrating from the Soviet Union with your family, maybe already in America if you were lucky enough to make the paper-thin window in the 70s, maybe finally making the trek after waiting several years as refuseniks waiting for clearance to leave while living under severe persecution in a Kafkaesque purgatory, maybe laying low as cooperating citizens of the state until the gates opened during Perestroika. You envision a future without restrictions on your most personal freedoms, a joining of your private and public personas, and most importantly, a tabula rasa for your children. They will not know this hell you escaped, they will know freedom and opportunity that allows the individual being to just breathe already. When your children ask, “What was it like before America?” you answer, “Why do you need to know? You are American now.” But what if you were able to heal through profound communal catharsis, acknowledging victimization and transcending it stronger than ever as individuals and as a community?

That’s exactly what happened unexpectedly this April when over 250 people congregated for the 130th anniversary of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which helped hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews make the courageous escape as refugees. The celebration manifested as a launch party for HIAS @130, a book containing thirty stories and one poem capturing the personal immigration accounts submitted through the organization’s myStory online forum that echo the untold experiences of emigres. It was a reunion between strangers, many hearing their own tales of refuge for the first time, but from the mouths of others. It was the first time for many to shed light on the dark past in a community environment. They cried, they laughed, they got to know themselves through others. Indeed, it was apparent that the gold-chained FOB stereotype was a bad fit, not quite describing the entrepreneurial strides and American successes of the demographic’s members since the trek.

HEALING THROUGH THE ARTS

Regina Spektor, who headlined that event, and left the former Soviet Union with her family during Perestroika, said in an interview a couple of days ago on NPR’s Fresh Air, On Growing Up A ‘Soviet Kid’, “My mind is so overwhelmed by these giant things and has been since I was a kid that sometimes I just have a hard time not feeling so guilty for how, how easy we have it.” Deconstructing the complex identity with many unconscious layers is nearly impossible through prose—though it can be done: Jewcy favorite Alina Simone, who authored You Must Go and Win, a book of essays revealing much about her family’s life in Kharkov, Ukraine, also doubles as a songstress, doing her thing next Saturday at the Aquarium.

ArtOnBrighton 2012’s Master of Ceremonies, Kira Soltanovich, a compatriot of Jay Leno and Joan Rivers who has been a staple on the comedy scene for over a decade, was born in the former Soviet Union and raised by immigrant parents in San Francisco. “There are about four-trillion Jewish comedians in the world,” she estimates roughly, “But guess what? There are only a handful of post-Soviet Jewish comedians. I’m talking born in the USSR and now standing on stage and making people laugh. I can name maybe five. There’s something really special about being in such a unique group.”

As she remembers of her household,

Even though we were in America I think it was very, very Soviet. Sure, I was only two years old when we arrived in America, so I didn’t have much personal Communistic experience to draw from, but that didn’t stop my parents from reminding me every day what they had to go through back in Russia. They also constantly reminded me what they had to go through to bid farewell to the motherland and journey over to the States in the mid 1970’s. The propaganda was so thick back then, my parents were told they would never be accepted anywhere else outside of Russia, so they might as well just stay there along with all the other Jews that were desperate to leave. I feel like I’ve carried this history with me throughout my entire childhood. I don’t know why, but it really stuck with me and resonates in my stand up as well.

COJECO (The Council of Jewish Emigre Community Organizations), an umbrella nonprofit over thirty-something New York City alliances and the producer of ArtOnBrighton, is dismantling the silence that disjoints the post-Soviet Jewish community: it puts power and resources in the hands of its artists. I, for one, am coming on board at a marketing capacity with the goal of rebranding the post-Soviet Jewish identity after working with the organization as one of about 20 fellows in their Blueprint Fellowship, which funnels UJA and Genesis Foundation funds to creative community and art projects of young innovators that expand understanding of what it means to be us. So who are we?

We are rooted in our past stories, worldly in our interests, recontextualized in the American landscape, hybrid and unlike any breed the former Soviet states and America have seen before, sexy in our playfulness with the je-ne-sais-quoi aura assigned to us by others, and outside-the-box in what we bring to the table in professional, community, and social settings. The resourceful and adaptable nature that our families’ immigrant experiences have bred in us might elicit a favorite adjective of RuPaul: we are fierce.

AND IT’S NOT AN EXCLUSIVE CLUB

One of ArtOnBrighton 2012’s acts, the fire-breathing, sword-swallowing Lady Aye, says of her family, which originally made their way to the States during waves in the late 1800s up until just after WWII, “Our connection to our Ukrainian past is interestingly tenuous, but ever present. My grandparents dropped their names as they left and didn’t look back with any nostalgia, but it was also a part of who they were. It made a definite impression, so I think my generation is curious and chases down those origins.”

Headlining performer Y-Love is also not a post-Soviet Jew, yet his experience as a gay, black hip-hop artist who converted to Orthodox Judaism has many relatable points. Like in my essay for Tablet on what post-Soviet Jewish child immigrants could learn from Kanye West, Y-Love’s multifaceted voice holds a few lessons of its own. In Erika Davis’ interview with Yitz for Jewcy in May, he envisioned an ideal Jewish community thusly: “Everyone would respect each other’s traditions, beliefs, and orientations. Only when we recognize that people deserve to exist on their own terms will we get there.” But what does it take to embrace a complex identity that the larger community is to accept? I posed this question to Yitz over the phone, and as he sees it, “We are all finite beings trying to connect to an infinite.” He feels there is no such thing as the American Jew, rejecting the theory of a melting pot in describing any multicultural community. And while he’s normalized in the Hasidic community in many ways, he also naturally distinguishes himself through his own experience as a Jew of Color, which in turn enhances the greater community. It is this pursuit of personal potential spiritually, socially, and creatively that is each individual’s right and responsibility.

And for outsiders to be confronted by the real thing does critical work in diminishing false stereotypes that are rarely as efficiently dismantled outside of the arts. Says Kira, “I’m amazed at how little people know about the old Soviet culture. There are pockets of this country that think Soviets are Boris & Natasha from the Bullwinkle cartoon series. No joke! I like being about to get up on stage and make fun of immigrants and also do some educating about what it was really like to wait in line for food.”

Indeed, the artists have it, and their sharing brings catharsis and healing. In Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, he orients the birth of hip-hop in the 1970s as something that tackled social malaise in the community in ways government programs could not and would not touch. When slumlords set fires to buildings to make a buck over and over while politicians argued that it was the residents in poverty who were to blame for their own victimization, ignoring that the Bronx was burning due to systematic neglect did nothing to extinguish the fires. Ignoring that we are post-Soviet Jews with a shared tumultuous past is to tacitly remain stagnant in the victim role. Owning it and moving on, to use the hip-hop colloquial, is about keeping it real, and as Jeff argues, it’s also about keeping it right. America is vibrantly multicultural, and the post-Soviet Jewish identity is an important color we must use on our canvases in painting the American landscape.

ArtOnBrighton 2012 is going down September 8, 2012 at the New York Aquarium with food, beverages, art, music, and comedy, followed by a DJ-spun dance party on the adjacent beach. Get your tickets in advance for $10, $15 at the door.

Editor’s note: Today is Margarita’s last day at Jewcy. Since starting in June 2010, she has been nothing short of exceptional in her various roles at Tablet Magazine, Nextbook Press, and Jewcy. While we will miss Margarita’s inspired vision, urban pop flair, and super-human work ethic, we couldn’t be more proud of her as she follows her passions and makes good by her refusenik roots.

Art, as always, by Margarita Korol.

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