About this item
Winner of the National Jewish Book AwardA Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2014A New Yorker Favorite Book of 2014 New York Times Book Review Editor's ChoiceThese incandescent pages give us one fraught, momentous day in the life of Baruch Kotler, a Soviet Jewish dissident who now finds himself a disgraced Israeli politician. When he refuses to back down from a contrary but principled stand regarding the settlements in the West Bank, his political opponents expose his affair with a mistress decades his junior, and the besieged couple escapes to Yalta, the faded Crimean resort of Kotler's youth. There, shockingly, Kotler encounters the former friend whose denunciation sent him to the Gulag almost forty years earlier.In a whirling twenty-four hours, Kotler must face the ultimate reckoning, both with those who have betrayed him and with those whom he has betrayed, including a teenage daughter, a son facing his own moral dilemma in the Israeli army, and the wife who once campaigned to secure his freedom and stood by him through so much.
About the Author
David Bezmozgis is an award-winning writer and filmmaker. David's stories have appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, Harpers, Zoetrope All-Story, and The Walrus. His first book, Natasha and Other Stories, was published in 2004 in the US and Canada and was subsequently translated into fifteen languages. Natasha was a New York Times Notable Book, one of the New York Public Library's 25 Books to Remember for 2004, and an Amazon.com Top 10 Book for 2004. Natasha was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award (UK) , the LA Times First Book Award (US) , and the Governor General's Award (Canada) . It won the Toronto Book Award and the Commonwealth Writer's Prize for First Book.He has been a performer at The New Yorker Festival (2005 & 2009) , The UCLA Armand Hammer Museum (2007) , and the Luminato Festival (2008) . His work has been broadcast on NPR, BBC, and the CBC, and his stories have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories.In 2006, David was a screenwriting fellow at the Sundance Labs where he developed his first feature, Victoria Day. The film premiered in competition at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009, had a theatrical release in Canada, and received a Genie Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay. His second feature, Natasha, adapted from his own book, was released in 2017. It was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Canadian Screen Awards (formerly Genies.) In the summer of 2010, David was included in The New Yorker's 20 Under 40 issue, celebrating the twenty most promising fiction writers under the age of forty.David has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library. In the fall of 2011, he will be a fellow at the Harvard/Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.The Free World, David's first novel, was published in April 2011 in the U.S. Canada, the UK, and Holland. The Betrayers, a second novel, was published in 2014 and won the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction.David was on the writing staff for the fifth and final season of the BBC America show, Orphan Black.Born in Riga, Latvia, David immigrated to Toronto with his parents in 1980. He currently resides there and directs the Humber School for Writers.
