Mind Picker: The Betrayers

Any review of The Betrayers should begin by noting that it can't help but be full of spoilers -- if you want a satisfying experience of having small mysteries slowly revealed, you shouldn't read any reviews before you pick up this book. At barely more than 200 sparse pages, there are no unnecessary words here and it really can't be discussed in general terms.

As we begin, Baruch Kotler -- a 60-year-old Zionist hero and Cabinet Member in Israel's Knesset -- and his decades younger mistress, Leora, have fled a scandal back home for a week of sun and relaxation in the Crimean resort town of Yalta. When their hotel reservation disappears, the pair decides to rent a room from a woman advertising one in her home, and in a twist of Fate/jest of God (the nature of which is much discussed in the book), the woman's husband turns out to be the KGB agent who had denounced Kotler forty years earlier, leading to his imprisonment in a Soviet Gulag for 13 years.

We learn that Kotler is a man of unwavering convictions: not only was he unwilling to cooperate with the Soviet system of denouncing fellow dissidents for easier treatment in prison in the past, but he is now unwilling to cooperate with a Mossad agent's attempts at blackmail -- preferring to hurt his family by allowing proof of his affair to become public rather than betray his principles as an elected official. Even when Kotler's son -- a conflicted young soldier in the Israeli army -- reaches out to him for advice, the old man isn't able to compromise his own convictions for his son's welfare. When we learn that the former KGB agent, Valodya Tankilevich, has spent the past forty years poor and wretched, and his wife begs Kotler to forgive her husband and allow him to fulfill his own dream of shedding worldwide disrepute and finally emigrating to Israel, Kotler isn't able to comply -- not because he can't forgive him (Kotler realises that his bitterness had vanished years ago), but because the world wouldn't understand and the big picture is much more important to Kotler than individual fates.

There are matters of principle where you cannot compromise. Under any circumstances. If I’d compromised, it would have been worse. Far worse for all of us. For our country and for our family, which is part of our country.

Yet even as Leora complains that Kotler is more saint than man, it's important to remember that the "betrayers" of the title is plural -- this man of unshakeable political beliefs is also the man who exposed his loyal and pious wife, Miriam, to the scandal of his affair and then disappeared; grainy pictures of him and his mistress in the departure area of the airport (that appear in the next morning's paper) the only clue as to his whereabouts. When Kotler was in the Gulag, Miriam -- who had been allowed to emigrate to Israel from the USSR -- took his case to the world press, lobbying for his release and ensuring his celebrity when he finally was. As a deeply religious woman, she is able to offer Kotler this solace from Ecclesiastics via email: For there is not a righteous man upon the earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not.

The Betrayers is an interesting morality play with strong and well-defined characters. As Kotler and Tankilevich finally have their confrontation, neither is swayed by the position of the other:

"Say what you will, but you benefited from this Gulag. You had thirteen dark years followed by how many bright ones? Without those thirteen years, where would you be? You say living a normal life. Am I living a normal life?"

"What led you to think I could be shorn of thirteen years of my life? That I should be separated from my wife? That my parents should not live to see me liberated? That they should have to meet death without their son by their side? There is no compensation for such losses. Not in this life. And no explanation but weakness."

The real genius of this book is that it doesn't take sides -- these are simply people who have done their best with what Fate has doled out.

I accept that he couldn't have acted differently any more than I could have acted differently. This is the primary insight I have gleaned from life: The moral component is no different from the physical component -- a man's soul, a man's conscience, is like the height or the shape of his nose.

Taking a step back from the specifics, The Betrayers also captures a fascinating time -- that of the Soviet Jews, and especially the refusniks under Khrushchev, and their eventual dispersal from Yalta to Jerusalem to the U.S. and Canada. We see the fractious nature of the competing beliefs in the Knesset and are reminded that no political decisions in Israel are unanimous. It's also a strange quirk of fate that this book was released just before Putin's annexation of the Crimea: upon leaving Yalta, Kotler muses on how Stalin once proposed the Crimea as a Jewish homeland as he watches ethnic Tatars building settlements; establishing their own homeland (and I wonder what has become of these Tatars in Putin's wake?)

Land! The land! What, Kotler wondered, would his old Tatar prison mate have made of this? The repatriation and autonomy of the Crimean Tatars had been his struggle. He had given his life over to it. Were he still living, he and Kotler could have had an interesting conversation. What dreams they had nurtured and what distortions now obtained. And it was all to do with land. A measure of earth under your feet that you could call your own. Was there a more primitive concept? But nobody lives in the ether. Man is a physical being who requires physical space. And his nature is a prejudicial nature of alike and unalike. That was the history of the world. How much earth can you claim with another's consent? How long can you hold it if you haven't consent? And is it possible to foster consent where none exists? Kotler didn't know the answers to the first two questions, but the essential question was the last, and the answer to that was not favorable.

There is so much brought up in this slim volume -- personal vs public struggles; the nature of Fate; forgiveness and penitence; even the difference between Zionism and Judaism (because if there's one thing Kotler is not, it's religious) -- that its weight belies its size. An enjoyable and thought-provoking read; a worthy contender for the Giller Prize.