To Catch a Traitor

What’s my favorite book of the summer? Oh man, so much good stuff to choose from: goofy work relationships, royal intrigues, marriages renewed on the beach. No, I think my favorite is a Russian spy thriller set in the 1980s. Sofia, a scientist whose been demoted to janitorial work because of her politics, is surreptitiously using her toilet cleaning nights to photograph secret documents that she passes to the west. Her husband, Mendel, has been imprisoned on trumped up charges for seven years. The work she does, she does for him. For him and her son and her parents and all the dissidents that suffer under the Kremlin’s oppressive regime.

 

Artur is her secret nemesis. His take on the world is very different. Son-in-law to the Chief of the Second Directorate, Foreign Intelligence known as the “Spymaster”, Artur is anxious to prove himself against this nest of traitors. He’s thinking he can use her devoted cousin against her. Or maybe he can go against her, be against her, himself.

When Mendel is unexpectedly released from prison, Sofia is elated and then worried. Her husband is not the man she married. He is changed. He is distant. He was tortured. Why did they let him go? Are they using him to catch her? Can she trust her own husband with her fate?

If you’re a fan of the FX series The Americans, the story begins in the same era during the intelligence build-up of the Cold War. Thousands of Russian Jews are hoping to leave the discrimination and objectification for immigration. The Soviets, to avoid the optics that anyone would want to leave such a communist paradise, have refused to let them go.

I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but I have to say I just love that this spy story about a woman is no sexy vamp. Sofia is neither Mata Hari nor Red Sparrow, she’s wife and a mom and a scientist and a spy.

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Meet the Author

 

This is the first book I’ve read by D.B. Shuster, so I wanted to ask some questions:

I’m old enough to remember this era, but I’m thinking that you are not. What was it about this last furious gasp of the Cold War that captured your interest?

Growing up, the Russians were our big enemy. I was in middle school in 1985, the year the book is set in. In public school, my classmates and I were taught to worry about nuclear bombs, the evil Commies who threatened our American way of life, and the potential for World War III. In the late 1980s, the famous Jewish dissident and Refusenik, Natan Sharansky, came to speak at my synagogue. His story of what life was like for Jews in the Soviet Union, of his own harsh treatment at the hands of the Soviet authorities, and of his brave survival captured my imagination then and apparently now, too. Soon after, in 1987, when Gorbachev came to the US for a summit with President Reagan, my family joined the march in Washington, DC to free Soviet Jews. Not long after that, the door opened for Soviet Jews to emigrate, my now husband’s family among them. In 1992, President George Bush declared that the Cold War was over and that America had won, but in 2011, there was a big scandal with a number of Russian spies discovered operating under deep cover in the US. That story planted the seed for this family saga, which starts during the Cold War with To Catch a Traitor and then picks up in current-day Brooklyn, NY, in Kings of Brighton Beach.

Did you interview any Refuseniks (is that what they are called?) during your research?

Refuseniks were Jews who had applied to emigrate from the Soviet Union and been refused; it’s an American term, not a Russian one. My husband’s family applied to emigrate during the period when permission was being granted, and so they came, as many families did, as refugees. Over the years, I have spoken to a very large number of Soviet refugees (and the sociologist in me seems to constantly be in interview mode), although it wasn’t until very recently that I knew I was writing a book.

What is it about spies and secrets that we, as readers, find so intriguing?

Are you any good at keeping secrets? It’s uncomfortable. There’s a compulsion to confess. A worry that someone will discover the information you’re trying to keep hidden. Perhaps the need to lie to protect the secret and possibly to lie some more to cover up the original lie.

We’ve all had the unsettling experience of trying to hold onto a secret. Many of us have also at one time or another struggled with impostor syndrome, the sickening fear that someone will discover we don’t belong and expose us as frauds. Spies are the ultimate impostors and secret keepers, and I think we’re intrigued by this “super power” that most of us lack.

Your settings are so visual, have you visited Russia?

 I have not visited Russia. But I spend a lot of time looking at Google satellite images. In researching the series, I also acquired some used travel and photography books from the1980s to give me a sense of the neighborhoods and feel at the time.

Can we pre-order book 2?

Book 2, To Hunt a Spy, comes out in January and is available for pre-order at the major retailers.

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Is there a movie or series in the works?

 I would love to see Artur and Sofia on television or the big screen! If you have any idea how to make that happen, let me know.

 

Want to do your own reconnaissance of D.B. Shuster? Check out her website for other books, news, and more.