The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis – flight to Crimea

It always strikes people outside the publishing industry as odd that it takes a year or more for a finished book to reach the market. Books pile up in stacks like planes circling above Heathrow, waiting for months and months to be assigned a landing slot. Of course, publishers will clear the runway for a certified moneymaker and bring that in early. But for most authors, there's a minimum 12-month wait. The long lead time favours the scheduling of publication around big anniversaries – hence the battalions of first-world-war books heading over the top right now into an increasingly murderous marketplace – but it's tough on writers who aim at being timely.

David Bezmozgis reflects on that problem in a swiftly added afterword to his new novel, which is set in Crimea – a territory that changed from Ukrainian to Russian during the time between the typesetting of this book and its publication. He writes of the mixed feelings he experiences at the region's sudden claim on international attention. In a world of slow publishing and instantaneous news, he wonders, how can a writer have the chutzpah to write about the "present cultural and political moment" in fiction? His book illustrates the risks and the necessity of having that courage.

The Betrayers tells the story of Baruch Kotler, a present-day Israeli politician. Fleeing a scandal, he seeks refuge with his younger mistress in the Black Sea resort of Yalta. It is nostalgia that brings Kotler back to Crimea at this moment of crisis. Kotler is a Russian Jew with a more than passing resemblance to the real-life Israeli politician Natan Sharansky. Like Sharansky, Kotler is a former Soviet dissident who was imprisoned in the Gulag. Like Sharansky, he was freed and welcomed to Israel as a hero.

But after a successful political career, Kotler's refusal to agree to a planned withdrawal of Israeli settlements from the occupied territories has set him at odds with opponents who are out to ruin him. Kotler is intransigent, uncompromising and therefore, the book suggests, heroic: he would rather have his reputation destroyed than concede his principles. And then, while he is on the run in Crimea, he unexpectedly meets the man whose testimony sent him to the Gulag 40 years previously. The dramatic intersection of the two men's destinies is the heart of the novel, which raises questions of integrity, compromise, identity and forgiveness.

The Betrayers packs several lives into its 230 pages. It is a vivid re-creation of the hopes and betrayals of Soviet dissidents, and of the Jewish activists who left the USSR to live in Israel. It also describes the melancholy existence of the Jews who didn't leave: waning congregations in Black Sea synagogues surviving on stipends from American-Jewish charities. It is a great picture of the tawdriness of Yalta, the defeated hopes of an elderly population labouring under a kleptocracy.

Kotler is a wry and pugnacious protagonist, with an iron-clad commitment to the Jewish cause that has been tempered in his struggle with Soviet tyranny. Like Sharansky, who resigned from the Israeli government in protest at the Gaza withdrawal in 2005, Kotler is a hawk. "If you were not willing to protect your people," he reasons, "you should not have encouraged them to live in that place, and if you were not going to encourage them to live in that place, you should never have held the territory … Now you stayed at any cost, or exchanged a pound of flesh with a pound of flesh."

These thoughts go unchallenged in the book. There is no gap between Kotler's assessment of himself and the book's opinion of him: Kotler and his author agree that he is funny, short, ugly, admirably intransigent, secure in his beliefs and identity. "To be a Jew, one did not need to worship, only to be suitably inflected. To resonate at the Jewish semitone." The smart writing registers no objection to what struck this reader as a kind of complacent essentialism. A tuning fork that can determine Jewish identity sounds like something dreamed up by a Nazi doctor.

And while the Crimea Bezmozgis depicts has changed since he wrote the book, it's another set of recent headlines that prove more discomfiting. Reading The Betrayers at this point in 2014, it's not the Crimean details that seem odd, but a lack of inclusiveness in the book's vision of redemption. On the flight home to Tel Aviv, Kotler sees a cosmopolitan assortment of passengers around him and finds in this diversity a "model of coexistence", but the scene includes no Arab faces. And when he sees an elderly woman dancing alone in Yalta's Lenin Square, Kotler feels sorry for her – because she is old and has terrible bunions. "Everywhere you look, heartbreak, he thinks." One can't help wondering what heartbreak Kotler would find if he turned his sharp eyes towards Gaza.

Marcel Theroux's latest novel is Strange Bodies (Faber). To order The Betrayers for £10.39 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk.

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