THE BETRAYERS chronicles several fraught, days in the life of Baruch Kotler, a Soviet Jewish dissident who now finds himself a disgraced Israeli politician. When he refuses to lend his support behind a right-wing coalition, his political opponents expose his affair with a mistress decades his junior. The besieged couple escapes to Yalta, the faded Crimean resort of Kotler's youth. There, Kotler encounters the former friend, Vladimir Tankilevich, whose denunciation sent him to the Gulag almost forty years earlier.  While Kotler found adulation and fame, Tankilevich was trapped in post-Soviet Russia and suffered in obscurity, poverty and disgrace. When they meet, both men are in dire straits, and the unexpected encounter offers them not just the chance to settle old scores but also to find redemption.

Embroiled in the drama is Kotler’s smart and formidable young mistress, Leora Rosenberg, his teenage daughter and his wife, who once campaigned to secure his freedom and stood by him through so much. Also caught up is Tankilevich’s wife, who sees Kotler’s arrival as a sign of divine providence, their chance to escape the miseries of Crimea on the cusp of Russia’s attack on Ukraine.