This week’s IJN has a large dose of the literary, staff summertime reading choices to Andrea Jacobs’ feature in Education & Culture on post-Soviet American novelists.
And in a nice twist, one of the books mentioned by Andrea’s interviewee, Prof. Sasha Senderovich, is a novel I just finished reading: The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis. This is the second book by Bezmozgis, a Canadian, that I’ve read. The first, The Free World, plays in a transit camp where Soviet émigrés were often held before their fate — North America or Israel — was decided.
The Betrayers fast-forwards to a later phase in Soviet Jewry, when they have settled and become part of Israel’s fabric and when the Soviet Union is no more. Baruch Kotler (formerly Boris, whose characters seems based in many ways on Natan Sharansky) is a high-ranking Israeli cabinet minister, who in his previous life did time in a gulag after being denounced as an American spy by a ‘friend.’ At the start of the novel, which takes places over 24 hours, Kotler is once again forced into exile — ironically back to the Former Soviet Union — having been betrayed by a contradictory combination of his own moral righteousness and unrighteousness. Betrayal here plays on a multitude of levels: the familial, spousal, national and personal.
Something American Jews may not realize is that in Europe, particularly in Germany, there is a lot of anti-Russian sentiment among European Jews. Russian Jews are viewed as not really Jewish, as scam artists who faked being Jewish to get out of the Soviet Union. To be fair, this way of thinking is not strong among newcomers to European Jewry, such as Chabad, but is dominant among German Jews descended from pre-World War II families. This has in large part to do with the reality that a large percentage of contemporary German Jewry is of Russian origin. There is resentment among German Jews that synagogues now hold Russian services, that sermons are delivered in Russian.
Having grown up knowing a lot of Russian Jews, and having several good friends of Russian origin, this always deeply bothered me. It smacked of that German Jewish superiority prevalent before the war, as if the condescension toward Ostjuden never disappeared. You’d think the Holocaust would have removed some of those social constructs, but apparently not.
In The Betrayers, Bezmozgis portrays the integration of Russian Jews into Israeli society — even into the highest echelons in the form of Kotler’s cabinet position — and delves into the fact that many Russian Jews are quite right-wing when it comes to Israel. Bezmozgis also evokes what Jewry, and particularly Zionism, meant to Jews behind the Iron Curtain, and how many were prepared to sacrifice their culture to embrace that identity.
At the same time, however, he doesn’t shy away from acknowledging that there were many Russians who tried to take advantage of the refusenik movement as a way out. Bezmozgis does this not through the past, but in the present, in the form of the non-Jewish wife of one of the principle characters, who desperately wants to emigrate from Crimea to Israel with her Jewish husband.
While reading the novel, I felt it really should be mandatory reading for all those German Jews decrying the influx of Russian Jewry (another aspect I never understood: Didn’t they realize that without these Russian Jews, German Jewry would be a tenth of the size?), for them to understand that Russian Jewry cannot be painted in one broad brushstroke just because it is different. But maybe there’s a reason this kind of writing is taking off in North America, and not in Continental Europe. There is a strong element of tribalism to European culture, and what’s incredible is that this way of thinking applies within the Jewish European world as well.
This is what really drew me into the novel, but beyond the Soviet Jewry angle, The Betrayers is a wonderfully rounded exploration of characters, motivations and behaviors that works on the human level, regardless of the specific historical and cultural context.
