David Bezmozgis’s The Betrayers tells the story of Baruch Kotler, a Soviet refusenik-turned-Israeli politician, and his encounter with Vladimir Tankilevich, the man who betrayed Kotler to the KGB decades earlier. Not only does the novel possess a seriousness rare in contemporary fiction, writes Marat Grinberg, but it contains within it a sophisticated evaluation of the major tensions inherent in Zionism:
The principal goal of Zionism was the normalization of the Diaspora Jew. In the infamous words attributed to David Ben-Gurion, Zionism will be victorious only once Israel has its own thieves and prostitutes. A normal country requires its people to make normal compromises: individual, moral, and political. This is what Kotler cannot abide. . . . [H]e learns from Tankilevich that the latter betrayed him because the KGB had threatened to ruin [Tankilevich’s] brother’s life if he didn’t cooperate. . . . While Kotler sees no room for moral compromise (a concession to evil), Tankilevich insists on his moral right to elevate the personal (his brother’s safety) over the collective and ideological. The real-life Tankilevich was a man named Sanya Lipavsky, who betrayed [Natan] Sharansky under very similar circumstances. The conflict is reminiscent of Dostoyevsky. Like him, Bezmozgis does not find an answer, but he does draw an analogy between the very specific challenge to his characters and the challenges facing an entire nation, and an entire people—in this case, Israel’s and the Jewish people’s.
Read more on Commentary: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/a-zionist-novel/