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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Who says you have to be a high school graduate to go to Brown University? Well, in most cases you do, but Gabriel Kahane is an exception. The 33-year-old “indie-classical” musician and composer goes beyond musical genres in every way possible, particularly on his new album, The Ambassador.

L.A.-born, New York bred Kahane recently found himself back in his birth-state, enraptured by the architecture and history of a city that gets a bad rep for being transient, superficial, and bottomless. The Ambassador focuses on the little known history of L.A.: its buildings and stories; its hopefulness and tragedies.

I met up with Kahane at Littlefield in Brooklyn before a recent show, as he was rehearsing with his three-piece orchestra. He crooned poetic lyrics while playing the piano, and was quick to jump on and off stage to direct the band towards a more “perfect” sound. Afterwards, we spoke about his inspiration for his new album, the restrictions of musical categories, and his newfound interest in architecture.

How does someone without a GED get into Brown University?

I was definitely somewhat of a fuck up in high school. I was in some ways a ne’er-do-well, and in other ways a very high achiever. I was a nationally ranked chess player and had acted professionally in operas and plays, but just couldn’t really get my shit together academically; partly out of boredom and partly out of some ADD that prevented me from learning study skills… I ended up going to New England Conservatory for a year as a jazz pianist, and found it pretty myopic, intellectually. After my first semester I started to think about transferring elsewhere; I ended up playing a concert at Brown and briefly dating someone there, and sort of fell in love with the campus.

I decided on a whim to apply as a transfer student… I wrote this impassioned letter, in addition to the regular application, explaining how my hubris had led to my failing out of high school. I included all these ancillary materials in my application; like a book about chess, to which I had contributed a chapter, as well as musical materials. The year that they accepted me, they took 100 too many transfer students; they made an error in calculating the matriculation rate of the freshman class—so I probably shouldn’t have gotten in. It was basically a fluke.

Tell me about the inspiration for your album. Why did you choose to focus on L.A.?

Starting in 2007, I began to return to L.A. frequently as an adult. I was born in L.A. but I didn’t grow up there… I had sort of adopted the dogmatic antipathy for L.A. that a lot of New Yorkers have—and also having spent my high school years in northern California, I was primed to hate L.A. Going back there as a young adult, I was pretty vulnerable, and I found myself getting in touch with the 90 per cent of Los Angeles that wasn’t the film and TV industry; the Los Angeles that aches constantly.

I was reading Joan Didion and Mike Davis for the first time, and I just saw the layer immediately beneath the veneer, and then it was about four years later that BAM commissioned me to do a new piece, and right around the same time Sony Masterworks starting courting me. I began thinking about BAM and the kind of work that they do; their Next Wave Festival tends to have a strong visual component.

While in L.A., I took a drive to the airport at 5 o’clock one morning, and decided to take service roads. I felt really overwhelmed by the pathos of the city; its failed aspirations, the beauty in decay, the weird poignant beauty of a city that has trouble remembering to have memory, and so I decided around then I wanted to do something on Los Angeles. That fed into a more specific interest in architecture. I intuitively felt drawn to the architecture, but I didn’t know exactly why.

So you weren’t always into architecture?

No, it’s a very recent thing for me. I just found myself really drawn to the buildings. When I’m in L.A., I stay in this small servants’ quarter that’s attached to a house that Rudolph Schindler heavily remodeled. I was living and working in this house built by one of the great modernist masters, but then I started thinking about the extent to which there are two L.A.s: the L.A. of film and fiction and TV, that is experienced through mediation, versus the very vulnerable, physical, tactical city; the city of the 1994 North Ridge earthquake, the city of raging fires in Malibu, the city of Joan Didion’s Santa Ana Winds. Architecture sets up the intersection of these two L.A.s because architecture is aesthetic, it is mythology—but buildings are vulnerable, they burn down, they crumble. I could draw from film by thinking about buildings as film locations; I could draw from fiction as scenic locations; from history, and so on and so forth.

What was the research component like?

I watched a lot of movies; I watched Die Hard many, many times. I’ve come to believe that it’s a very, very important film. It’s the apotheosis of commerce and well-crafted entertainment meeting in a perfect marriage. It also made Bruce Willis a star. I jest a little bit; I did watch a lot of old films, tracing the trajectory of noir from the early adaptations of Raymond Chandler novels, up through the Cold War noir of Kiss Me Deadly, to the neo-noir, Blade Runner set in the Bradbury Building. I read a lot of detective fiction, histories, and critical theory, and spent a lot of time in L.A. just walking and driving. I made a list of 25 addresses; initially I was going to write 25 songs—I ended up writing 20 and put 10 on the record. I would just visit all of these addresses and sit in the places and meditate on their history.

You write from multiple perspectives, which indicates a strong literary background. You also seem very keen on writing on themes, not so much personal/romantic hardships like many others musicians. Can you speak to that?

A lot of artists/song writers focus on confessional themes, and I think that’s something that becomes tiresome to some people, and then they look elsewhere… I think that there comes a moment where you want to have the lens go elsewhere. And having written for the theater, and continuing to write for the theater, that’s an imperative. You have to be able to look inside someone else and find that negative capability for empathy. There are writers who inform in subtle ways the kind of work I’m trying to do. Among them, the German novelist W.G. Sebald, who for me just defies categorization. He creates this tapestry of beautiful prose… Anne Carson is someone else who in a different way achieves the same thing. She’s known mostly as a poet, as a classicist; Autobiography of Red, it’s a predominately a verse novel, but it’s so much more than that. So that kind of stuff that knows no bounds, that was important for me with this record.

You pull from so many genres—classical, indie, pop, and rock—in a way that is difficult to categorize. But in music, people want to label you, like you’re the “classical-indie guy.” How does that make you feel?

The sort of pathological need to categorize comes from a cultural discomfort with emotion. People are actually really uncomfortable taking things in and judging them for themselves. This is not limited to music, it happens in all of the arts. The need to categorize is a short-hand for what something is going to make someone feel, and that’s something that I obviously reject. I sort of wish that people would never use these genre-monikers.

But in writing about an album, don’t you have to describe the music? I mean, how do people know what they’re going to hear without some sort of categorization?

To me, the thing that creates unity is storytelling. What all of these songs have in common is that they tell stories. And for me, that transcends questions of style. I think that when listeners read about music, what they really want to know is if something is going to make me feel or not; is it going to make me think or not; not does it fit neatly into some preordained category that ‘I know and like.’

I’m sure it’s something that will continue to irritate me forever, but I do also think that we may be on the cusp; it feels like in the past five years there’s been this narrative of genre-bending, genre-less, etc. At a certain point, even from a crass, economic standpoint, whoever is the head honcho at “X” website is going to say these headlines no longer do well with clicks. And people will have to start figuring out new ways to attain order. So maybe it will go away.

Out of all the song titles, is there a place whose story resonated the most?

Yes, getting to know the story of Latasha Harlins and her tragic death. She was shot and killed in a grocery store when she was 15-years-old by a Korean woman over a bottle of orange juice. It’s a story that is wholeheartedly part of the fabric of black, contemporary history. It’s something that Angelenos know about, but it’s not really a story the rest of the country knows; and generally not the story that white people know. And the parallels with the Trayvon Martin shooting are many.

What are you listening to now?

This new Sylvan Esso record, which came out about a month ago. That record has been on repeat since it came out. I’ve listen to some other new music that hasn’t spoken to me that much, but that record really captured my attention in a real way.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on another piece for the Public Theater. I wrote a piece for them in 2012 entitled, “February House.” I’m also in the process of doing research for a piece for them on Alcoholics Anonymous. And then there’s the stage version of The Ambassador, which is happening at BAM in December. And I’m making some very preliminary plans for writing an opera.

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Ever wondered where the iconic Seinfeld phrases ‘yada yada,’ ‘shrinkage,’ and ‘double-dip’ originated? I mean, can you believe there was a time when ‘double dip’ wasn’t part of America’s vernacular? How did grumpy couples passive-aggressively chastise each other at parties before the concept entered our cultural consciousness? (The Jews have actually been double dipping for centuries (see: Passover), but I guess the word ‘matbilin’ doesn’t roll off the tongue quite so easily.)

Anyway, wonder no more! The answers to those questions (OK, some of them) can be found in Vulture’s fascinating interview with Seinfeld writer and producer Peter Mehlman, the man who coined the phrases ‘yada yada’ and ‘double dip,’ among others. Apparently he once heard ‘yada yada’ used by the editor of a women’s magazine (heyyy ladies!), then decided to adopt it as a catch-all term for things you can’t be bothered explaining:

… A couple of times she used the words yada yada and I don’t think I had even heard anyone say it after. And I don’t know why, but it just popped back into my mind. At first, I just thought of it as some little quirk that I could throw in, but then all of a sudden, I started thinking of all of the things you could just gloss over using yada yada.

Seriously, what a goddamned gift to the world. To Mehlman’s surprise, the popularity of ‘yada yada’ quickly usurped ‘anti-dentite,’ which was his personal favorite: “I love when Kramer goes, ‘You’re a rabid anti-dentite!’ I really liked that one more than ‘yada yada.'”

Alas, an ironic professional slur which pokes fun at Jews’ preoccupation with anti-Semitism is no match for a phrase which can mean anything from “we had sex” to “my fiancée died licking our wedding invitation envelopes.”

Related: ‘Seinfeld’ Saw the Future, And it Was Facebook
Now You Can Take a Virtual Tour of Jerry Seinfeld’s TV Apartment

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