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The Netanyahus
Corbin College, not-quite-upstate New York, winter 1959-1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian - but not an historian of the Jews - is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host, to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixing fiction with non-fiction, the campus novel with the lecture, THE NETANYAHUS is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics - 'An Account of A Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Incident in the History of a Very Famous Family' that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers.
240 pages, Paperback
First published May 5, 2021
About the author
Joshua Cohen
81 books500 followersJoshua Aaron Cohen (born September 6, 1980 in New Jersey) is an American novelist and writer of stories.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,975 reviews
September 8, 2021
Rollicking slapstick campus novel meets Benzion Netanyahu history lecture on the Iberian Jews meets repurposed Harold Bloom anecdote - I have no idea how this book works, but it genuinely does- you learn by it and are stressed out by it in equal measure. Cohen is a brilliant, funny writer, and that shines through.
April 11, 2024
audiobook version
📕 The Netanyahus won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Pulitzer citation for the novel described it as, “A mordant, linguistically deft historical novel about the ambiguities of the Jewish-American experience, presenting ideas and disputes as volatile as its tightly-wound plot."
So, here's the thing - the story really happened and it happened to Harold Bloom, famous literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale, and his wife. It was they upon whom the Netanyahu family of five descended circa 1960 - mother and father and three boys named Yonatan, Benjamin (Bibi), and Iddo. And they were hell on wheels - the sort of people who are always right and indeed always righteous, who can do no wrong, and if something does go wrong, it's other people's fault and other people's kids' fault, always. Know anyone like that?
Humor runs throughout the novel, but is more dominant in the first 60% to 70% of the book. The academia portions can be light or dark, depending. If Benzion Netanyahu is involved, the current Israeli PM's father, it is dark and narcissistic indeed.
Believing all others fools and imbeciles, and that he is persecuted and misunderstood, Benzion is seeking a faculty position at the narrator's college. A lot of Jewish history comes into this part of the story, but in his lectures, Benzion's main thrust is less academic than political - Jews
cannot assimilate, history has shown they are rejected wherever they go; in truth, they have no history, just a mythology; so the only option is to carve out and defend a homeland, namely Israel. Benzion has a polemic far more than he has a thesis. (His actual books are available on Amazon, for instance, his Founding Fathers of Zionism.)
The behavior of the Netanyahus on campus, and in what we now know was Harold Bloom's home, was so over the top, the reader is stunned. It is crazy. It is laughable. It is insane. And the middle son produced from this chutzpah is now serving his fourth term as PM of a significant country in the Middle East, a country where Palestinians are still refused statehood and basically live out their lives in one large refugee camp. Which Benzion's son does nothing to alleviate. "Bibi, melek Yisrael!” his followers chant - “Bibi, king of Israel!” This is actually lifted from a children's song about King David. It sounds a lot like a certain dynamic in another country across the sea from Israel and the West Bank.
Will you like it? It IS funny, it IS wild, it IS entertaining. But it also requires the reader to put a lot of thought in. I wouldn't call the novel lightweight by any means. I found the history theses and academic debates fascinating, but I'm used to it. Others may or may not find it intriguing. There’s certainly black humor and satire there, even slapstick, that the reader would not want to miss. And then there’s the fun sound effects and even funnier music (audio version of course).
🏯But what an unbelievable story.
📕 The Netanyahus won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Pulitzer citation for the novel described it as, “A mordant, linguistically deft historical novel about the ambiguities of the Jewish-American experience, presenting ideas and disputes as volatile as its tightly-wound plot."
So, here's the thing - the story really happened and it happened to Harold Bloom, famous literary critic and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale, and his wife. It was they upon whom the Netanyahu family of five descended circa 1960 - mother and father and three boys named Yonatan, Benjamin (Bibi), and Iddo. And they were hell on wheels - the sort of people who are always right and indeed always righteous, who can do no wrong, and if something does go wrong, it's other people's fault and other people's kids' fault, always. Know anyone like that?
Humor runs throughout the novel, but is more dominant in the first 60% to 70% of the book. The academia portions can be light or dark, depending. If Benzion Netanyahu is involved, the current Israeli PM's father, it is dark and narcissistic indeed.
Believing all others fools and imbeciles, and that he is persecuted and misunderstood, Benzion is seeking a faculty position at the narrator's college. A lot of Jewish history comes into this part of the story, but in his lectures, Benzion's main thrust is less academic than political - Jews
cannot assimilate, history has shown they are rejected wherever they go; in truth, they have no history, just a mythology; so the only option is to carve out and defend a homeland, namely Israel. Benzion has a polemic far more than he has a thesis. (His actual books are available on Amazon, for instance, his Founding Fathers of Zionism.)
The behavior of the Netanyahus on campus, and in what we now know was Harold Bloom's home, was so over the top, the reader is stunned. It is crazy. It is laughable. It is insane. And the middle son produced from this chutzpah is now serving his fourth term as PM of a significant country in the Middle East, a country where Palestinians are still refused statehood and basically live out their lives in one large refugee camp. Which Benzion's son does nothing to alleviate. "Bibi, melek Yisrael!” his followers chant - “Bibi, king of Israel!” This is actually lifted from a children's song about King David. It sounds a lot like a certain dynamic in another country across the sea from Israel and the West Bank.
Will you like it? It IS funny, it IS wild, it IS entertaining. But it also requires the reader to put a lot of thought in. I wouldn't call the novel lightweight by any means. I found the history theses and academic debates fascinating, but I'm used to it. Others may or may not find it intriguing. There’s certainly black humor and satire there, even slapstick, that the reader would not want to miss. And then there’s the fun sound effects and even funnier music (audio version of course).
🏯But what an unbelievable story.
December 5, 2022
When Cohen published the pathologically unreadable 800-page monolith Witz in 2010 with Dalkey Archive, a flabbergasting slurry of manic logorrhoea intermittently brilliant and excruciating, there was no indication as to how Cohen might harness his astonishing stamina for further high-voltage literary wowness. The answer was Book of Numbers, a violently readable novel that shirked thickets of opaque wtf in favour of turbulent meta-antics, formal play and punnilingual wizardry, and established him as the heir apparent to David Foster Wallace.
Continuing the downsizing present in his last novel Moving Kings, Cohen serves up a compellingly odd campus tale taken from an anecdotal story as relayed to the author by critic Harold Bloom. In the late 1950s, Hebrew scholar Ben-Zion Netanyahu (father of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) visits the college of Corbindale to hold a polemical lecture on the Iberian Inquisition. Something of an affectionate tribute to Bloom, who is recast as the mild-mannered Ruben, outgunned by a chiding wife and a rebellious daughter, the novel serves up a stylish evocation of the period. The humour is occasionally reliant on pratfalls and overly long passages of domestic repartee, though on a prose level, The Netanyahus is as sublimely written a novel as anything you’re likely to read this year.
Continuing the downsizing present in his last novel Moving Kings, Cohen serves up a compellingly odd campus tale taken from an anecdotal story as relayed to the author by critic Harold Bloom. In the late 1950s, Hebrew scholar Ben-Zion Netanyahu (father of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) visits the college of Corbindale to hold a polemical lecture on the Iberian Inquisition. Something of an affectionate tribute to Bloom, who is recast as the mild-mannered Ruben, outgunned by a chiding wife and a rebellious daughter, the novel serves up a stylish evocation of the period. The humour is occasionally reliant on pratfalls and overly long passages of domestic repartee, though on a prose level, The Netanyahus is as sublimely written a novel as anything you’re likely to read this year.
February 12, 2023
L’ESERCITO DEL FARAONE
Se fosse un film, all'inizio si leggerebbe: basato su una storia vera. Perché – e ancora devo capirne la ragione - il fatto che quella che normalmente è una storia di finzione – e proprio per questa ci cattura e avvince – si rafforza se la finzione è basata su una realtà esistita o esistente. Una storia vera.
In ogni caso, la storia vera che sta dietro, o alla base, di questo romanzo, è che Harold Bloom – sì, proprio lui, quell’Harold Bloom alquanto celebre – qualche anno fa ha invitato Joshua Cohen a fargli visita perché voleva conoscerlo e complimentarsi per il suo precedente Il libro dei numeri, e fra una chiacchiera e l’altra gli ha raccontato di quando insegnava a Yale – università ben più prestigiosa della Corbin della finzione letteraria – e gli toccò fare da chaperon a quel Netanyahu che è probabilmente diventato celebre solo per avere dato i natali all’orrido Benjamin detto Bibi, più volte primo ministro d’Israele (è dal 1996 che flagella quel paese, nonostante le accuse di corruzione e frode e abuso d’ufficio, e nonostante un buon numero di nefaste scelte è il più longevo capo di Stato d’Israele). Bibi nel romanzo – e nella realtà – è il figlio numero due, all’epoca decenne, di quell’oscuro professore Netanyahu.
E così Harold Bloom diventa Ruben Blum, io-narrante di tutta la storia, professore ebreo al suo secondo anno alla piccola università Corbin - e quindi ancora nel periodo di prova – dove insegna storia della tassazione (😅): nella sua veste di professore in prova, che dunque non può rifiutarsi, e in qualità di ebreo, viene scelto per accompagnare il professor Netanyahu in visita: tanto tra voi ebrei vi capite, no?
Visita che Netanyahu padre spera si traduca in lavoro, in una cattedra di insegnamento di storia medioevale della penisola iberica. Netanyahu padre è uno storico che si sente in missione per conto di Dio - proprio come i famigerati Blues Brothers - ma più precisamente per conto del popolo ebraico, dalle credenziali accademiche controverse, basate più sull’ideologia che su fatti o ricerche o pubblicazioni.
Al di là del gustosissimo e godibilissimo aneddoto, c’è come un incontro-scontro-confronto tra modi diversi di essere ebrei: che forse si traduce anche in generazioni diverse d’ebrei.
Il professore Netanyahu è l’ebraismo che a quell’epoca era forse ancora minoritario - ma in terra d’Israele destinato a diventare maggioritario, che con quello all’epoca maggioritario condivideva l’aggressività, ma non l’ossessione persecutoria - figlio del Sionismo revisionista, quello di destra, quello del Likud di cui suo figlio Bibi diventerà il faraone. Il professore Netanyahu vive in perenne stato di precarietà esistenziale, con l’incubo dell’annientamento, del pogrom, della Shoah.
Blum-Bloom è della generazione di Philip Roth, di Joseph Heller, e pur avendo dieci anni di meno, la generazione presumo sia la stessa di quella di Saul Bellow e Bernard Malamud e Chaim Potok: una generazione che è entrata a fare parte della cultura americana partendo da una posizione di outsider, quando gli ebrei erano ancora un gruppo socialmente distinto, e respinto, con codici culturali e linguistici altri, un piede a New York e l’altro ancorato in uno shtetl dell’Europa orientale. E quindi si comprende lo spaesamento di Blum, accademico rispettato, ma ancora guardato dai suoi colleghi con paternalismo quando non sfacciatamente dall’alto in basso: un uomo in prova, che vive con perenne senso di precarietà sociale, con la paura di essere di nuovo rinchiuso nel ghetto.
E poi c’è un terzo livello dell’essere ebreo: ebreo in America oggi, come Joshua Cohen, in contrapposizione al suo io-narrante Blum. Oggi perfettamente integrati, e addirittura in alcuni campi, come la letteratura e il cinema, a fare scuola. Mentre nel 1959-60 gli ebrei cominciavano a non essere più, o prevalentemente non più, relegati ai margini della società ma non erano ancora pienamente accettati dalla casta e neppure dall’intellighenzia:
Per la mia generazione – dice Blum – un ebreo era fortunato a essere scambiato per bianco [...] per qualsiasi minoranza lo stile e anche la forma di protezione più affidabile era assimilarsi, non differenziarsi.
Certo, il fatto che I Netanyahu faccia esplicito e diretto riferimento a Bibi aggiunge pepe. Spezia che aumenta perché Bibi, coi suoi dieci anni, è in scena, è uno dei tre selvaggi bambini Netanyahu, capaci delle più grossolane mancanze di educazione.
Ma quello che per me ha reso il libro una lettura oltremodo piacevole è il tono adottato da Cohen: divertente, buffo, comico, esilarante, in certi momenti spinto fin quasi alla farsa, sempre deliziosa. Momenti impagabili a volontà, in pratica ogni pagina, in pratica più volte in ogni pagina. Su tutti, per me, il dialogo tra la suocera che si diletta di psicologia e l’io-narrante.
Cohen cita Philip Roth, e fa bene, cita Woody Allen, e fa bene: ma si ritaglia un suo spazio netto e preciso. In pratica, come incrociare argomenti di “peso” con leggerezza di scrittura e umorismo (in questo caso, quello ebraico, il “witz”): in pratica, una commedia sofisticata. 4,5
Sinagoga di Trieste, novembre 2022.
Sinagoga di Trieste, ottobre 1941.
Se fosse un film, all'inizio si leggerebbe: basato su una storia vera. Perché – e ancora devo capirne la ragione - il fatto che quella che normalmente è una storia di finzione – e proprio per questa ci cattura e avvince – si rafforza se la finzione è basata su una realtà esistita o esistente. Una storia vera.
In ogni caso, la storia vera che sta dietro, o alla base, di questo romanzo, è che Harold Bloom – sì, proprio lui, quell’Harold Bloom alquanto celebre – qualche anno fa ha invitato Joshua Cohen a fargli visita perché voleva conoscerlo e complimentarsi per il suo precedente Il libro dei numeri, e fra una chiacchiera e l’altra gli ha raccontato di quando insegnava a Yale – università ben più prestigiosa della Corbin della finzione letteraria – e gli toccò fare da chaperon a quel Netanyahu che è probabilmente diventato celebre solo per avere dato i natali all’orrido Benjamin detto Bibi, più volte primo ministro d’Israele (è dal 1996 che flagella quel paese, nonostante le accuse di corruzione e frode e abuso d’ufficio, e nonostante un buon numero di nefaste scelte è il più longevo capo di Stato d’Israele). Bibi nel romanzo – e nella realtà – è il figlio numero due, all’epoca decenne, di quell’oscuro professore Netanyahu.
E così Harold Bloom diventa Ruben Blum, io-narrante di tutta la storia, professore ebreo al suo secondo anno alla piccola università Corbin - e quindi ancora nel periodo di prova – dove insegna storia della tassazione (😅): nella sua veste di professore in prova, che dunque non può rifiutarsi, e in qualità di ebreo, viene scelto per accompagnare il professor Netanyahu in visita: tanto tra voi ebrei vi capite, no?
Visita che Netanyahu padre spera si traduca in lavoro, in una cattedra di insegnamento di storia medioevale della penisola iberica. Netanyahu padre è uno storico che si sente in missione per conto di Dio - proprio come i famigerati Blues Brothers - ma più precisamente per conto del popolo ebraico, dalle credenziali accademiche controverse, basate più sull’ideologia che su fatti o ricerche o pubblicazioni.
Al di là del gustosissimo e godibilissimo aneddoto, c’è come un incontro-scontro-confronto tra modi diversi di essere ebrei: che forse si traduce anche in generazioni diverse d’ebrei.
Il professore Netanyahu è l’ebraismo che a quell’epoca era forse ancora minoritario - ma in terra d’Israele destinato a diventare maggioritario, che con quello all’epoca maggioritario condivideva l’aggressività, ma non l’ossessione persecutoria - figlio del Sionismo revisionista, quello di destra, quello del Likud di cui suo figlio Bibi diventerà il faraone. Il professore Netanyahu vive in perenne stato di precarietà esistenziale, con l’incubo dell’annientamento, del pogrom, della Shoah.
Blum-Bloom è della generazione di Philip Roth, di Joseph Heller, e pur avendo dieci anni di meno, la generazione presumo sia la stessa di quella di Saul Bellow e Bernard Malamud e Chaim Potok: una generazione che è entrata a fare parte della cultura americana partendo da una posizione di outsider, quando gli ebrei erano ancora un gruppo socialmente distinto, e respinto, con codici culturali e linguistici altri, un piede a New York e l’altro ancorato in uno shtetl dell’Europa orientale. E quindi si comprende lo spaesamento di Blum, accademico rispettato, ma ancora guardato dai suoi colleghi con paternalismo quando non sfacciatamente dall’alto in basso: un uomo in prova, che vive con perenne senso di precarietà sociale, con la paura di essere di nuovo rinchiuso nel ghetto.
E poi c’è un terzo livello dell’essere ebreo: ebreo in America oggi, come Joshua Cohen, in contrapposizione al suo io-narrante Blum. Oggi perfettamente integrati, e addirittura in alcuni campi, come la letteratura e il cinema, a fare scuola. Mentre nel 1959-60 gli ebrei cominciavano a non essere più, o prevalentemente non più, relegati ai margini della società ma non erano ancora pienamente accettati dalla casta e neppure dall’intellighenzia:
Per la mia generazione – dice Blum – un ebreo era fortunato a essere scambiato per bianco [...] per qualsiasi minoranza lo stile e anche la forma di protezione più affidabile era assimilarsi, non differenziarsi.
Certo, il fatto che I Netanyahu faccia esplicito e diretto riferimento a Bibi aggiunge pepe. Spezia che aumenta perché Bibi, coi suoi dieci anni, è in scena, è uno dei tre selvaggi bambini Netanyahu, capaci delle più grossolane mancanze di educazione.
Ma quello che per me ha reso il libro una lettura oltremodo piacevole è il tono adottato da Cohen: divertente, buffo, comico, esilarante, in certi momenti spinto fin quasi alla farsa, sempre deliziosa. Momenti impagabili a volontà, in pratica ogni pagina, in pratica più volte in ogni pagina. Su tutti, per me, il dialogo tra la suocera che si diletta di psicologia e l’io-narrante.
Cohen cita Philip Roth, e fa bene, cita Woody Allen, e fa bene: ma si ritaglia un suo spazio netto e preciso. In pratica, come incrociare argomenti di “peso” con leggerezza di scrittura e umorismo (in questo caso, quello ebraico, il “witz”): in pratica, una commedia sofisticata. 4,5
Sinagoga di Trieste, novembre 2022.
Sinagoga di Trieste, ottobre 1941.
June 7, 2022
Audiobook….read by Joshua Cohen
…..8 hours and 31 minutes
Other than feeling totally inferior in understanding the advance history, theology, politics, philosophy, the Rabbi’s, the Professors, Ruben Blum, (the Jewish historian), the exiled Israeli scholar, the academics, the sophisticated vocabulary, ….
this book was often clever and hilarious…..
….in this fictionalize-real-life campus visit at Corbin College by the father of the prime minister…..
the history of a famous family.
In the audio-format, each chapter includes a little entertaining Jewish and secular music, Russian and folklore music ….(with realistic sounds of doors opening - slamming- etc. )
Topics include everything under the kitchen sink…
the lifespan of a salamander—the IRS — canceled debts—
Benjamin Netanyahu, prime Minister of Israeli jokes —
religious observances and secular differences—
matters of customs— lectures and Bible classes—American economic history—cuisines—wardrobe and cultural differences between American Jews, German Jews, Israeli Jews—
parents—love— old world and new world—the Bronx and Manhattan—immigrants—class issues— textiles, seamstresses—stereotypes-empathy culturally—socks— underwear—analysis— decorating—fashions-art-concerts—parents—in-laws—grandparents—cousins —home—university—music—Jewish identity—Jewish holidays—Jewish foods—new friends—literary references—fascism— zionism-the immediate family— shrewd bargaining—new furniture—home—unlocked doors— delicious foods cooking— memories— anxieties—visitors—shtels—church and state joined in unholy alliance—popular lectures— medieval Jews and Gentiles— present day America—
with a running theme of Jewish conflicts and America as a secular nation.
“It is not my purpose, nor my desire, to attempt a ‘reconstruction’ of Jewish music, or to base my work on
melodies more or less authentic. I am not an archaeologists….it is the Jewish soul that interests me…the freshness and then naïveté of Patriarchs; the violence of the Prophetic books; the Jewish savage love of justice”.
“The Netanyahu” is the winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
This was my first time reading anything by Joshua Cohen. Even though parts went over my head….not all of it did.
I enjoyed the Jewish musings.
…..8 hours and 31 minutes
Other than feeling totally inferior in understanding the advance history, theology, politics, philosophy, the Rabbi’s, the Professors, Ruben Blum, (the Jewish historian), the exiled Israeli scholar, the academics, the sophisticated vocabulary, ….
this book was often clever and hilarious…..
….in this fictionalize-real-life campus visit at Corbin College by the father of the prime minister…..
the history of a famous family.
In the audio-format, each chapter includes a little entertaining Jewish and secular music, Russian and folklore music ….(with realistic sounds of doors opening - slamming- etc. )
Topics include everything under the kitchen sink…
the lifespan of a salamander—the IRS — canceled debts—
Benjamin Netanyahu, prime Minister of Israeli jokes —
religious observances and secular differences—
matters of customs— lectures and Bible classes—American economic history—cuisines—wardrobe and cultural differences between American Jews, German Jews, Israeli Jews—
parents—love— old world and new world—the Bronx and Manhattan—immigrants—class issues— textiles, seamstresses—stereotypes-empathy culturally—socks— underwear—analysis— decorating—fashions-art-concerts—parents—in-laws—grandparents—cousins —home—university—music—Jewish identity—Jewish holidays—Jewish foods—new friends—literary references—fascism— zionism-the immediate family— shrewd bargaining—new furniture—home—unlocked doors— delicious foods cooking— memories— anxieties—visitors—shtels—church and state joined in unholy alliance—popular lectures— medieval Jews and Gentiles— present day America—
with a running theme of Jewish conflicts and America as a secular nation.
“It is not my purpose, nor my desire, to attempt a ‘reconstruction’ of Jewish music, or to base my work on
melodies more or less authentic. I am not an archaeologists….it is the Jewish soul that interests me…the freshness and then naïveté of Patriarchs; the violence of the Prophetic books; the Jewish savage love of justice”.
“The Netanyahu” is the winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
This was my first time reading anything by Joshua Cohen. Even though parts went over my head….not all of it did.
I enjoyed the Jewish musings.
May 9, 2022
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.
Joshua Cohen’s latest novel, The Nethanyahus is subtitled “An Account of A Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family.”
It is an odd - and to me uneasy - mixture of campus novel, non-fictional exposition and a rather odd attack on famous real-life family by creating a fictional version of them to ridicule.
The author explains in the afterword it is inspired by a true story told to him by the critic Harold Bloom from his time at Cornell. In the novel, the narrator is Ruben Blum, a professor in the history of taxation at the fictitious University of Corbindale in upstate New York. Although he is keen to emphasise that Blum - who by his own admission is the "dread-fuelled embodiment of the under-coordinated overintellectualizing self-depreciating male Jewish stereotype" of Woody Allen and Philip Roth's work - is not intended as a portrayal of Bloom.
Blum's account begins:
My name is Ruben Blum and I’m an, yes, an historian. Soon enough, though, I guess I’ll be historical. By which I mean I’ll die and become history myself, in a rare type of transformation traditionally reserved for the purer scholars. Lawyers die and don’t become the law, doctors die and don’t turn into medicine, but biology and chemistry professors pass away and decompose into biology and chemistry, they mineralize into geology, they disperse into their science, just as surely as mathematicians become statistics. The same process holds true for us historians—in my experience, we’re the only ones in the humanities for whom this holds true—the only ones who become what we study; we age, we yellow, we go wrinkled and brittle along with our materials until our lives subside into the past, to become the very substance of time. Or maybe that’s just the Jew in me talking... Goys believe in the Word becoming Flesh, but Jews believe in the Flesh becoming Word, a more natural, rational incarnation…
By way of further introduction, I will now quote a remark made to me by the who-shall-remain-nameless then-president of the American Historical Association, when I met him at a symposium back in my student days just after the Second World War: “Ah,” he said, limply pressing my hand, “Blum, did you say? A Jewish historian?”
Though the man surely intended this remark to wound me, it merely succeeded in bringing delight, and even now I find I can smile at the description. I appreciate its accidental imprecision, and the way the double entendre can function as a type of psychological test:
“‘A Jewish historian’—when you hear that, what do you think? What image springs to mind?” The point is, the epithet as applied is both correct and incorrect. I am a Jewish historian, but I am not an historian of the Jews—or I’ve never been one, professionally.
This last a key point to the plot - as the University is recruiting and Blum is asked to vet one the frontrunning candidate, a specialist in the Spanish Inquisition, one Benzion Nethanyahu, largely on the grounds that they are both Jewish.
And ‘Benzion Nethanyahu’, by contrast to Blum, is very much meant to be a portrayal of the real-life figure of the same name: academically author of the 1,400 page The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (which, to simplify it to a few words, argues the Iberian Inquisition was driven not by a desire to root out heresy but rather by racial anti-Semitism, tracing a direct path to the Holocaust), politically a leading Revisionist Zionist and close ally of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, and biologically the father of the current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (who features in the book as a child).
To be fair the novel allows Benzion Nethanyahu to express his views, even if one strongly suspects the author strongly disagrees with them. But it counterbalances this by making him, his wife and their three children figures of fun, Benzion something of a crackpot, his wife rude and presumptive and the children wild - Blum calls them the 'Yahus.' For example when we first meet the family, the 7 year old Iddo is still wearing a nappy, when it is removed the 10 year-old Benjamin toys with Iddo's genitals, and the 13 year old Jonathan (who in real-life was later the sole Israeli casualty of Operation Entebbe) has sex with the Blum's daughter.
The novel has had rave reviews in the UK press in both the FT (https://www.ft.com/content/873e1070-d...) and The Times (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/49...). They describe the review as “very funny” and “laugh-out-loud funny”, whereas I can’t say I found any amusement in the pages at all.
Disappointing - 1.5 stars rounded to 2.
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.
Joshua Cohen’s latest novel, The Nethanyahus is subtitled “An Account of A Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family.”
It is an odd - and to me uneasy - mixture of campus novel, non-fictional exposition and a rather odd attack on famous real-life family by creating a fictional version of them to ridicule.
The author explains in the afterword it is inspired by a true story told to him by the critic Harold Bloom from his time at Cornell. In the novel, the narrator is Ruben Blum, a professor in the history of taxation at the fictitious University of Corbindale in upstate New York. Although he is keen to emphasise that Blum - who by his own admission is the "dread-fuelled embodiment of the under-coordinated overintellectualizing self-depreciating male Jewish stereotype" of Woody Allen and Philip Roth's work - is not intended as a portrayal of Bloom.
Blum's account begins:
My name is Ruben Blum and I’m an, yes, an historian. Soon enough, though, I guess I’ll be historical. By which I mean I’ll die and become history myself, in a rare type of transformation traditionally reserved for the purer scholars. Lawyers die and don’t become the law, doctors die and don’t turn into medicine, but biology and chemistry professors pass away and decompose into biology and chemistry, they mineralize into geology, they disperse into their science, just as surely as mathematicians become statistics. The same process holds true for us historians—in my experience, we’re the only ones in the humanities for whom this holds true—the only ones who become what we study; we age, we yellow, we go wrinkled and brittle along with our materials until our lives subside into the past, to become the very substance of time. Or maybe that’s just the Jew in me talking... Goys believe in the Word becoming Flesh, but Jews believe in the Flesh becoming Word, a more natural, rational incarnation…
By way of further introduction, I will now quote a remark made to me by the who-shall-remain-nameless then-president of the American Historical Association, when I met him at a symposium back in my student days just after the Second World War: “Ah,” he said, limply pressing my hand, “Blum, did you say? A Jewish historian?”
Though the man surely intended this remark to wound me, it merely succeeded in bringing delight, and even now I find I can smile at the description. I appreciate its accidental imprecision, and the way the double entendre can function as a type of psychological test:
“‘A Jewish historian’—when you hear that, what do you think? What image springs to mind?” The point is, the epithet as applied is both correct and incorrect. I am a Jewish historian, but I am not an historian of the Jews—or I’ve never been one, professionally.
This last a key point to the plot - as the University is recruiting and Blum is asked to vet one the frontrunning candidate, a specialist in the Spanish Inquisition, one Benzion Nethanyahu, largely on the grounds that they are both Jewish.
And ‘Benzion Nethanyahu’, by contrast to Blum, is very much meant to be a portrayal of the real-life figure of the same name: academically author of the 1,400 page The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain (which, to simplify it to a few words, argues the Iberian Inquisition was driven not by a desire to root out heresy but rather by racial anti-Semitism, tracing a direct path to the Holocaust), politically a leading Revisionist Zionist and close ally of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, and biologically the father of the current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (who features in the book as a child).
To be fair the novel allows Benzion Nethanyahu to express his views, even if one strongly suspects the author strongly disagrees with them. But it counterbalances this by making him, his wife and their three children figures of fun, Benzion something of a crackpot, his wife rude and presumptive and the children wild - Blum calls them the 'Yahus.' For example when we first meet the family, the 7 year old Iddo is still wearing a nappy, when it is removed the 10 year-old Benjamin toys with Iddo's genitals, and the 13 year old Jonathan (who in real-life was later the sole Israeli casualty of Operation Entebbe) has sex with the Blum's daughter.
The novel has had rave reviews in the UK press in both the FT (https://www.ft.com/content/873e1070-d...) and The Times (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/49...). They describe the review as “very funny” and “laugh-out-loud funny”, whereas I can’t say I found any amusement in the pages at all.
Disappointing - 1.5 stars rounded to 2.
August 31, 2022
[4+] I like this bizarre novel about the Blum family in 1959 upstate New York who host the out-of-control Netanyahus for an evening. The novel is an engaging blend of family life, humor, slapstick drama, academic politics and medieval Jewish history. Even the audiobook, which contains sound effects like running water and slamming doors, is odd. I am glad I went into the book blind because the afterword is a delightful surprise. (My son was a student of Harold Bloom and I am fascinated by him.) This book is certainly an unusual choice for the Pulitzer as it will appeal to a fairly narrow group of readers - but I am one of them!
August 17, 2023
“Eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate you.”
So goes the opening quote of Joshua Cohen’s Pulitzer winner, The Netanyahus. Throughout the book, this tension remains. For me, that’s the strength of the novel - I’m in awe of how Cohen has managed to capture the weight of social expectation between minorities in an “expatriate” situation. Obviously, the American-Jewish and Israeli relations are not the same as those between, say, two Swedes abroad. There are cultural scripts. There are 1960’s norms. There are microaggressions to traverse. There are big M macroaggressions to traverse. But that’s the beauty and the heart of this novel, the main question: flourish and feed the increasingly separate life of the individual, or “feed into” and “support” diaspora relations? I have felt this before, continue to feel this, and it’s not too much of a surprise that I see this to be the main machine behind the forward momentum of the book.
For others, this is not the case. A quick look around at articles and reviews for this book shows that people are chomping at the bit to compare this novel to Roth, to Bellow, to Malamud, all in a pejorative manner. That is, quite honestly, insanely lazy. That’s the best you can do? This is not to say I haven’t done it - god knows I’m lazy. But I guess when I do it, I feel shame, at the very least. Presumably these are individuals with MFAs and a variety of other literature- and writing-related degrees. You’re just comparing him to Roth and calling it a day? Nathan Goldman does it in his Jewish Currents article called “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore”. At first, there is his weird insistence of saying that Ruben Blum is Harold Bloom (Cohen has explicitly mentioned, countless times and across multiple interviews, that this is not the case - it may have started that way, but grew into a completely different character with time and necessary modifications). But then there are successive comments about Cohen’s work being worse than other Jewish-Americans. For instance: “The homage to the Jewish American canon dictates the novel’s entire form, turning The Netanyahus into a midcentury pastiche—a Jewish campus novel animated by Rothian hijinks and brief bursts of Bellowish lyricism.” I can’t quite disagree, as I have read 1 Bellow and 4 Roths, but I want to. This had its own peaks and they were as good, if not better, than Roth’s. It also seems as though Cohen’s not-too-polite fictionalization of the real Netanyahu family did not sit well with many. I don’t know anything about the politics, but that seems to be criticism levelled at a specific portion of the contents, as opposed to Cohen’s ability to write a novel as well as Roth or Bellow or Malamud. Later on in the very same article, Goldman says: “By subsuming the Netanyahus into the paradigmatic, phallic folly of American Jewish fiction, the novel effectively transforms them into diaspora Jews, understood as a literary production of the diasporic imagination.” If that’s the real issue, fair enough. I don’t know enough to have an opinion.
But it’s not entirely as though Cohen is “unaware” of the effect that Roth has had on his writing. In other words, a pejorative comparison to Roth isn’t the insult that these critics think that it is. After the passing of Roth, Cohen wrote a dedication/obituary/tribute in The New Republic, called “The Cult of Philip Roth”. In it, he said:
He also said:
And let’s not forget that he wrote an entire review of Roth’s biography for Harper’s Magazine, titled “The Possessed”, as Roth.
But whatever. The lazy negative reviews aside, I’ll move forward toward the end of my equally lazy positive review. I adored the humour, the effortless prose, the references that made me feel more intelligent than I am, and the digressions from traditional fiction prose style (isn’t it hilarious? A week or so ago, I said this was a negative for Graham Greene - I am just making it up as I go, it seems).
I want to start slowing down by referring to the author’s Paris Review interview with Martin Riker. The interviewer says:
Cohen’s response is interesting to me. It is self-serving and masturbatory for sure - no getting around that. But it does sum up what I feel about a lot of great literature that I read:
I will end with a couple of quotes I liked from the book:
“To this day, the transmogrification of ancient feuds remains the primary process by which immigrants nativize: to renew a conflict is to acculturate.”
“What I’m trying to say, Ruben, is that meeting this horrible man and his horrible wife, it made me realize something. It made me realize I don’t believe in anything anymore and not just that, but I don’t care. I have no beliefs and I’m OK with it; I’m more than OK, I’m glad… I’m glad I’m getting older without convictions…”
So goes the opening quote of Joshua Cohen’s Pulitzer winner, The Netanyahus. Throughout the book, this tension remains. For me, that’s the strength of the novel - I’m in awe of how Cohen has managed to capture the weight of social expectation between minorities in an “expatriate” situation. Obviously, the American-Jewish and Israeli relations are not the same as those between, say, two Swedes abroad. There are cultural scripts. There are 1960’s norms. There are microaggressions to traverse. There are big M macroaggressions to traverse. But that’s the beauty and the heart of this novel, the main question: flourish and feed the increasingly separate life of the individual, or “feed into” and “support” diaspora relations? I have felt this before, continue to feel this, and it’s not too much of a surprise that I see this to be the main machine behind the forward momentum of the book.
For others, this is not the case. A quick look around at articles and reviews for this book shows that people are chomping at the bit to compare this novel to Roth, to Bellow, to Malamud, all in a pejorative manner. That is, quite honestly, insanely lazy. That’s the best you can do? This is not to say I haven’t done it - god knows I’m lazy. But I guess when I do it, I feel shame, at the very least. Presumably these are individuals with MFAs and a variety of other literature- and writing-related degrees. You’re just comparing him to Roth and calling it a day? Nathan Goldman does it in his Jewish Currents article called “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore”. At first, there is his weird insistence of saying that Ruben Blum is Harold Bloom (Cohen has explicitly mentioned, countless times and across multiple interviews, that this is not the case - it may have started that way, but grew into a completely different character with time and necessary modifications). But then there are successive comments about Cohen’s work being worse than other Jewish-Americans. For instance: “The homage to the Jewish American canon dictates the novel’s entire form, turning The Netanyahus into a midcentury pastiche—a Jewish campus novel animated by Rothian hijinks and brief bursts of Bellowish lyricism.” I can’t quite disagree, as I have read 1 Bellow and 4 Roths, but I want to. This had its own peaks and they were as good, if not better, than Roth’s. It also seems as though Cohen’s not-too-polite fictionalization of the real Netanyahu family did not sit well with many. I don’t know anything about the politics, but that seems to be criticism levelled at a specific portion of the contents, as opposed to Cohen’s ability to write a novel as well as Roth or Bellow or Malamud. Later on in the very same article, Goldman says: “By subsuming the Netanyahus into the paradigmatic, phallic folly of American Jewish fiction, the novel effectively transforms them into diaspora Jews, understood as a literary production of the diasporic imagination.” If that’s the real issue, fair enough. I don’t know enough to have an opinion.
But it’s not entirely as though Cohen is “unaware” of the effect that Roth has had on his writing. In other words, a pejorative comparison to Roth isn’t the insult that these critics think that it is. After the passing of Roth, Cohen wrote a dedication/obituary/tribute in The New Republic, called “The Cult of Philip Roth”. In it, he said:
“Roth, to me, was the True Judge. His literature exerted that authority: What he wrote, I accepted; I swallowed. Even his most outlandish fictions, I subscribed and assented to. I felt I had no choice. His writing had the style of a verdict, an edict. His sentences, with their total and carefully claused control, came down to me from the mountain—or from the high shelves of the library of the Hebrew Academy of Atlantic County, New Jersey—like commandments cut into stone, and as the descriptions accumulated, as the arguments and counter-arguments piled up, and the appetites were embraced and disavowed with equal fervor, all I could do was submit, surrender, and give myself up completely to his power.”
He also said:
“Every immigrant American writer of every ethnicity, race and, yes, gender, who followed in his wake—whether they acknowledge it or not, whether they like acknowledging it or not—is in his debt. Sure, other writers had tried this transubstantiation trick before—notably Bellow, whom Roth idolized, and that other Roth, Henry—but only Philip Roth attempted it so explicitly, and yet, paradoxically, so casually, in book after book after book (almost 30 novels in all), as if by sheer effort he could drag not just the Old World into the New World, but the New World into the Global.”
And let’s not forget that he wrote an entire review of Roth’s biography for Harper’s Magazine, titled “The Possessed”, as Roth.
But whatever. The lazy negative reviews aside, I’ll move forward toward the end of my equally lazy positive review. I adored the humour, the effortless prose, the references that made me feel more intelligent than I am, and the digressions from traditional fiction prose style (isn’t it hilarious? A week or so ago, I said this was a negative for Graham Greene - I am just making it up as I go, it seems).
I want to start slowing down by referring to the author’s Paris Review interview with Martin Riker. The interviewer says:
“I think I’m also saying I did not find much darkness in this book. But maybe what I should be saying is that I find darkness around the book, inescapably, in the looming shadow of the real-life future—the political rise of Benjamin Netanyahu and all that has meant for the world—that readers of Blum’s tale can’t help but hold in mind. The book’s title suggests it is about current events, but really, current events are the book’s unspoken truth. In this particular sense I might put The Netanyahus in a lineage with Georges Perec’s W or W. G. Sebald’s novels, books with absent centers, dark jokes for which history provides the punch line.”
Cohen’s response is interesting to me. It is self-serving and masturbatory for sure - no getting around that. But it does sum up what I feel about a lot of great literature that I read:
“That’s extremely generous because I know how much Perec means to you. I’m a student of his, too—interested if not in the strictly Oulipian nature of some of the work then in his principle of writing through lacunae, of purposefully excluding something from a book that might ultimately provide its key. These books tend to be tests, of the reader as much as of the culture itself—tests as to whether a culture has preserved within itself enough of what Van Wyck Brooks called “a usable past,” to enable the book’s comprehension. If you had only the most superficial idea of Nazi aesthetics—if you knew nothing at all of its cult of physicality—would you be able to understand W? If you knew nothing about German writing outside of Germany—in Austria, in Austria-Hungary, at the fringes of the German-speaking world—how could you hope to get at what Sebald is trying for, the assertion of an alternative German canon in the wake of et cetera? Their novels become trials of historical consciousness—do you remember enough to understand them?—as much as of present-day consciousness—do you see and hear the world around you clearly enough to make any connections between the world and the page? Books that omit context or explanation, books that refrain from acknowledging their analogies and allegories, books that withhold from the reader not in a spirit of exclusion but as a spiritual catalyst, books that, yes, summon up the cherub to cover their intentions—these are the books that provoke the reader, or at least provoke me as a reader, into seeking out the sources that are being denied, and in the process of that seeking I find myself situated within and vital to myriad continua. Or, to put it another way, this is how tradition works. This is what it means to live in a culture. Our books should be missing something, the finding of which makes us whole.”
I will end with a couple of quotes I liked from the book:
“To this day, the transmogrification of ancient feuds remains the primary process by which immigrants nativize: to renew a conflict is to acculturate.”
“What I’m trying to say, Ruben, is that meeting this horrible man and his horrible wife, it made me realize something. It made me realize I don’t believe in anything anymore and not just that, but I don’t care. I have no beliefs and I’m OK with it; I’m more than OK, I’m glad… I’m glad I’m getting older without convictions…”
August 21, 2023
107th book of 2023.
2nd reading. This is still one of the most wickedly smart novels I've read that's been published in the last few years, maybe decade. Every single intellectual I've thrown this at has returned to me, gleeful. The humour, which make no mistake, is on nearly every single page of the novel, operates at a sort of postmodern high - there's a rich satirical flare spliced with an almost slapstick happenings. The passages on history and Jewishness aren't far off being painfully intelligent. It's a writer's novel, the sort of thing you wish you were smart enough to write. Cohen says he hates campus novels and hates historical novels. In his research, reading campus novels, he barely finished a single one (if you were to name a retirement home for Yiddish writers, you'd call it David Lodge). Someone, incredulous, asked him, 'Stoner?' to which he replied, 'Yeah' [pause] 'It was nice.' I'm bitter about that, I'll admit. Campus novels have always done it for me. Unlike Cohen, I love campuses.
Anyway. This is brilliant, a true accomplishment and an astounding league above this year's joint-winner, Demon Copperhead, which against this novel, I almost feel embarrassed for Kingsolver.
____________________________
42nd book of 2021. Artist for this review is photographer Jonathan Brand.
It's blowing a hooley outside tonight. Over the last few years (this is unrelated to the hooley) I've mostly avoided reading new contemporary fiction, mostly because I never think it's any good. This year I've been trying slightly harder, and with mixed results. I've read some fairly mediocre novels like Real Life, Writers & Lovers, The Vegetarian, etc. I mostly say unsavory things of new literary fiction, which never seems to be very interesting or very original. I'm probably reading the wrong things, in fact, I clearly am. Anyway, the search is over and if literary fiction steers itself into Cohen's wry waters, then I would finally accept that the novel is bucking over some promising waves.
The Netanyahus is officially published tomorrow, 4th May. It is described by the blurb as "mixing fiction with non-fiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics." At times, it felt almost like a Jewish Pnin to me. Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian, but as he distinguishes, not "an historian of the Jews", is on Corbin College's committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar, Benzion Netanyahu. 1959-1960 New York, because they are both Jews, the College presumed it would be necessary, even obvious, that Blum help with deciding a fellow Jew's fate. The expected sort of lines are used, "One of your kind", so along such lines. Netanyahu stays distant from the semi-abstract narrative at first. Cohen breaks down Jewish life in New York. Blum, his wife and his daughter try to live comfortable lives. Judy, the daughter, despises her nose, which causes her to snore loudly and profusely drip snot. There are several attempts (one very shocking) at changing the shape, reducing it, or simply damaging it beyond repair in an act of self-destruction, to lead to reconstruction. Once Netanyahu and his family arrive however, the true narrative kicks off and the pages move faster.
It is a comic novel, wildly dry and intelligent, wicked, almost. Cohen's wit drips from every line of prose and carries the novel. He's a fantastic writer, and I read that Granta named him one of America's greatest young writers of today. I think it's a fair claim. I recently read Bellow's Paris Review interview (Bellow, with Roth, being one of the writers who frequently appears in any discussion of Jewish literature) where he says, "He [a professor of Bellow's] said the subject was much too serious for fooling. I felt that my fooling was fairly serious." This struck me as oddly profound when I read it the other week and as I was reading Cohen's novel, it kept lingering: I felt as if Cohen's fooling here was fairly serious. There are some wonderful lectures involved in the novel about Jewish history, about religion, about Europe. At one point, in the interview itself:
And Cohen balances the lecture, the seriousness (seriousness that still reads with this sly humour), with scenes of great comic effect.
Really, I could type out whole portions of dialogue and whole scenes of humorous events. The novel is very fairly serious in its fooling. Anyway, bravo to Cohen. This is probably the best "new" novel I've read in some time. I want to discuss the back pages of the book to end.
The novel is dedicated, I noticed (surprised) on starting, to Harold Bloom. I wondered why. At the back of the novel is Cohen's "Credits and Extra Credit"; I read it with great interest and for the final punchline in this wonderful and strange novel. It turns out, Cohen got to know the late Bloom in the last years of his life and would visit him. Bloom would ask Cohen about what was being published in the world and if it was any good. All the while, Cohen admitted to trying to steer the conversation onto Bloom's own views, which he wanted to hear from the horse's mouth. He got some fantastic things from Bloom: a car crash he'd [Bloom] gotten into with Paul de Man, that he had argued with Anthony Burgess about limbo and purgatory ("as a lapsed Catholic, Burgess was going to hell, whereas I am still here and going nowhere"), that Bloom played chess with Nabokov ("it astonished no one that I did not emerge the winner"), that Cormac McCarthy would call Bloom on the telephone "while soaking like a cowboy in the bath", and that Bloom thought W.G. Sebald was "gentle, maybe too gentle.". I am including these purely because they are beautiful to know (I think) and want to record them. But the point eventually comes down to the fact that Bloom told Cohen of a time he was asked to coordinate the campus visit of an obscure Israeli historian named Ben-Zion Netanyahu, who showed up for a job interview and lecture with his wife and three children in tow and proceeded to make a mess. (This works as a fairly apt blurb to the novel, funnily enough.) Cohen says it was one of the last stories Bloom told him before his death in 2019; later, he went about writing it as a novel, with many inventions from his own imagination to fill in the gaps Bloom left out (quite a few, it seems). Long story short: Cohen tried to contact a certain somebody who "features" in the novel, to ask for their consent to being involved, though mostly "unrecognisable". No answer the first time so Cohen went ahead and wrote the novel anyway. He then sent the finished draft to her for one final attempt and the book ends with her reply in verbatim. Its inclusion to end the book feels like the last punchline, in a way, the last laugh at the hilarity of the world and his fairly serious fooling:
2nd reading. This is still one of the most wickedly smart novels I've read that's been published in the last few years, maybe decade. Every single intellectual I've thrown this at has returned to me, gleeful. The humour, which make no mistake, is on nearly every single page of the novel, operates at a sort of postmodern high - there's a rich satirical flare spliced with an almost slapstick happenings. The passages on history and Jewishness aren't far off being painfully intelligent. It's a writer's novel, the sort of thing you wish you were smart enough to write. Cohen says he hates campus novels and hates historical novels. In his research, reading campus novels, he barely finished a single one (if you were to name a retirement home for Yiddish writers, you'd call it David Lodge). Someone, incredulous, asked him, 'Stoner?' to which he replied, 'Yeah' [pause] 'It was nice.' I'm bitter about that, I'll admit. Campus novels have always done it for me. Unlike Cohen, I love campuses.
Anyway. This is brilliant, a true accomplishment and an astounding league above this year's joint-winner, Demon Copperhead, which against this novel, I almost feel embarrassed for Kingsolver.
____________________________
42nd book of 2021. Artist for this review is photographer Jonathan Brand.
It's blowing a hooley outside tonight. Over the last few years (this is unrelated to the hooley) I've mostly avoided reading new contemporary fiction, mostly because I never think it's any good. This year I've been trying slightly harder, and with mixed results. I've read some fairly mediocre novels like Real Life, Writers & Lovers, The Vegetarian, etc. I mostly say unsavory things of new literary fiction, which never seems to be very interesting or very original. I'm probably reading the wrong things, in fact, I clearly am. Anyway, the search is over and if literary fiction steers itself into Cohen's wry waters, then I would finally accept that the novel is bucking over some promising waves.
The Netanyahus is officially published tomorrow, 4th May. It is described by the blurb as "mixing fiction with non-fiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics." At times, it felt almost like a Jewish Pnin to me. Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian, but as he distinguishes, not "an historian of the Jews", is on Corbin College's committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar, Benzion Netanyahu. 1959-1960 New York, because they are both Jews, the College presumed it would be necessary, even obvious, that Blum help with deciding a fellow Jew's fate. The expected sort of lines are used, "One of your kind", so along such lines. Netanyahu stays distant from the semi-abstract narrative at first. Cohen breaks down Jewish life in New York. Blum, his wife and his daughter try to live comfortable lives. Judy, the daughter, despises her nose, which causes her to snore loudly and profusely drip snot. There are several attempts (one very shocking) at changing the shape, reducing it, or simply damaging it beyond repair in an act of self-destruction, to lead to reconstruction. Once Netanyahu and his family arrive however, the true narrative kicks off and the pages move faster.
It is a comic novel, wildly dry and intelligent, wicked, almost. Cohen's wit drips from every line of prose and carries the novel. He's a fantastic writer, and I read that Granta named him one of America's greatest young writers of today. I think it's a fair claim. I recently read Bellow's Paris Review interview (Bellow, with Roth, being one of the writers who frequently appears in any discussion of Jewish literature) where he says, "He [a professor of Bellow's] said the subject was much too serious for fooling. I felt that my fooling was fairly serious." This struck me as oddly profound when I read it the other week and as I was reading Cohen's novel, it kept lingering: I felt as if Cohen's fooling here was fairly serious. There are some wonderful lectures involved in the novel about Jewish history, about religion, about Europe. At one point, in the interview itself:
"I know the Jews are the chosen people, Dr. Netanyahu, but why choose them for this? What makes them the best vehicle, as you say, for such an undertaking?"
"Because of all the peoples in the world, none is less historical, or less historically minded. Which is curious, given Judaism's antiquity. As Dr. Blum can surely confirm for you, it's a common enough quip among contemporary American Jews that Jewish parents would rather their children become pediatricians or litigators than, say, the messiah. But I would submit that even messianism, even false messianism, is more Jewish a discipline than history, whose allegiance to sublunary powers such as regents and facts was traditionally regarded by the rabbis as idolatry."
And Cohen balances the lecture, the seriousness (seriousness that still reads with this sly humour), with scenes of great comic effect.
"Forget just in this weather, also in summer. And you only know you left when you get to Allentown. Wilkes something, like the man who shot Lincoln."
"Wilkes-Barre," I said.
"No, that's not it."
Jonathan, sleeve-wiping cocoa beads from his sparse Puerto Rican moustache hairs, said, "Wilkes Booth."
"Yes, Wilkes Booth."
"Wilkes-Barre," I said, "near Scranton."
Jonathan said, "The actor John Wilkes Booth shooted, shot President Avraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president of the United States who gave to the slaves their freedom in 1865 at the end of the American Civil War."
Really, I could type out whole portions of dialogue and whole scenes of humorous events. The novel is very fairly serious in its fooling. Anyway, bravo to Cohen. This is probably the best "new" novel I've read in some time. I want to discuss the back pages of the book to end.
The novel is dedicated, I noticed (surprised) on starting, to Harold Bloom. I wondered why. At the back of the novel is Cohen's "Credits and Extra Credit"; I read it with great interest and for the final punchline in this wonderful and strange novel. It turns out, Cohen got to know the late Bloom in the last years of his life and would visit him. Bloom would ask Cohen about what was being published in the world and if it was any good. All the while, Cohen admitted to trying to steer the conversation onto Bloom's own views, which he wanted to hear from the horse's mouth. He got some fantastic things from Bloom: a car crash he'd [Bloom] gotten into with Paul de Man, that he had argued with Anthony Burgess about limbo and purgatory ("as a lapsed Catholic, Burgess was going to hell, whereas I am still here and going nowhere"), that Bloom played chess with Nabokov ("it astonished no one that I did not emerge the winner"), that Cormac McCarthy would call Bloom on the telephone "while soaking like a cowboy in the bath", and that Bloom thought W.G. Sebald was "gentle, maybe too gentle.". I am including these purely because they are beautiful to know (I think) and want to record them. But the point eventually comes down to the fact that Bloom told Cohen of a time he was asked to coordinate the campus visit of an obscure Israeli historian named Ben-Zion Netanyahu, who showed up for a job interview and lecture with his wife and three children in tow and proceeded to make a mess. (This works as a fairly apt blurb to the novel, funnily enough.) Cohen says it was one of the last stories Bloom told him before his death in 2019; later, he went about writing it as a novel, with many inventions from his own imagination to fill in the gaps Bloom left out (quite a few, it seems). Long story short: Cohen tried to contact a certain somebody who "features" in the novel, to ask for their consent to being involved, though mostly "unrecognisable". No answer the first time so Cohen went ahead and wrote the novel anyway. He then sent the finished draft to her for one final attempt and the book ends with her reply in verbatim. Its inclusion to end the book feels like the last punchline, in a way, the last laugh at the hilarity of the world and his fairly serious fooling:
Dear Joshua Cohen,
I've just finished reading your 'book', and I'm going to say it once and for all and that's it: Judaism is just another word for THE PATRIARCHY (and for PATRIARCIAL HEGEMONY). We're all one people, the Human People, with no differences between us. The planet is ruined, the machines are taking over, and none of this Jewish crap still matters. WAKE UP!!!!!! No one reads books anymore and the Jews are either on the wrong side of history or just irrelevant. IF YOU'RE HAVING AN IDENTITY CRISIS, I'm sorry, your only choice is to expand your consciousness and join the Human People in our common struggle against pollution and technology or spend the rest of your life crying for a past that let's be honest couldn't have been that great if this is where it leads. Everything you believe in never existed, including your individual self, if you ever believed you could change that. Admit it, even literacy is dying—and when the last old Jew of you is finally as dead as (((God))) this proud nonbinary dyke YES DYKE IS GOING TO DANCE NAKED AS HELL ON HIS GRAVE.
June 6, 2021
this is so much fun
September 8, 2021
4.5 stars, rounded slightly down. A superb blend of crude farce and political satire, laying bare the cultural divides on either side of the Jewish diaspora, between assimilated American Jews and battle-hardened Israelis. Cohen also painfully probes the deep psychic scars borne by professorial mediocrities and scholarly pedants who populate academia (not to mention their wives and families). Beyond Cohen's two hilarious parodies of tendentious recommendation letters and epic-fail job talks, this is much more than an academic roman à clef, and positions him as the heir to a long lineage of Jewish-American Men of Letters: Bellow, Malamud, Roth.
The novel bears the ponderous and knowingly ridiculous subtitle An Account Of A Minor And Ultimately Even Negligible Episode In The History Of A Very Famous Family. Cohen has very loosely fictionalized the literary scholar Harold Bloom's first-person story about the ill-fated campus visit to Cornell of the Israeli historian Ben-Zion Netanyahu, who dragged his (uninvited) wife and three sons with him to invade Bloom's house for a weekend.
The elder Netanyahu was a revisionist Zionist political activist who spent his working life as a journeyman academic in America, slaving away on a massive tome about the Jews in the Spanish Inquisition. But of course, he was more famous for his progeny, as the father of Yonatan (Yoni) and Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu: respectively, the martyred hero of Entebbe and the long-serving and recently-deposed Likudnik prime minister of Israel.
Our narrator, Ruben Blum (who is totally not a stand-in for Harold Bloom, okay?), is looking back upon his early career as a young and untenured American history professor at the fictional Corbin University (a stand-in for Cornell) in the early 1960s. Born in the Bronx to working-class Eastern European parents but married to Edith, a wealthy German Jew from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Ruben is negotiating the boundaries of assimilation and seeking upward mobility into the professorial bourgeoisie at a time when strict quotas limited the number of Jews in the Ivy League.
Ruben's the only Jew in his workplace, making him the recipient of unending anti-Semitic microaggressions from his WASPy department chair and dull colleagues. The Blums are the only Jews in their snowy upstate New York town, ingratiatingly attempting to fit into the American mainstream of Christmas parties, TV dinners, and TV Westerns, while their teenage daughter Judith is desperately begging her parents for a rhinoplasty to blend in with the gentiles at high school.
With typical tokenism, Blum has been drafted to host his co-religionist Netanyahu, whom he's assured will be arriving alone to interview for a position at Corbin. Cringeworthy and disgusting hi-jinks ensue when the entire family (whom Blum mockingly deems The Yahus, sotto voce) suddenly shows up in a crowded and broken-down old Ford station wagon in the midst of a January snowstorm. The situation gradually escalates into total slapstick anarchy (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf-style) as the wives engage in passive-aggressive emotional warfare, the bottomless martinis flow, and the ferally aggressive Netanyahu boys (one of whom is a diaper-wearing 7-year-old) destroy Chez Blum and threaten Judith's chastity, while Blum witnesses Netanyahu's spectacularly self-immolating lectures.
Beyond its farcical and parodic elements, the novel's real source of tension is ideological and characterological, pitting Blum's assimilationist and accommodationist docility-- and his mortal fear of being associated with anything, you know, too Jewish-- against Netanyahu's militantly uncompromising dogmatism and insistence that the world will always be murderously hostile to Jews, and that the next pogrom is always right around the corner.
In such a short semi-comic novel, all of these elements would normally be highly combustible and explosive, but Cohen narrates them with masterful precision, intellectual rigor, tight control, and perfect pacing.
The novel bears the ponderous and knowingly ridiculous subtitle An Account Of A Minor And Ultimately Even Negligible Episode In The History Of A Very Famous Family. Cohen has very loosely fictionalized the literary scholar Harold Bloom's first-person story about the ill-fated campus visit to Cornell of the Israeli historian Ben-Zion Netanyahu, who dragged his (uninvited) wife and three sons with him to invade Bloom's house for a weekend.
The elder Netanyahu was a revisionist Zionist political activist who spent his working life as a journeyman academic in America, slaving away on a massive tome about the Jews in the Spanish Inquisition. But of course, he was more famous for his progeny, as the father of Yonatan (Yoni) and Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu: respectively, the martyred hero of Entebbe and the long-serving and recently-deposed Likudnik prime minister of Israel.
Our narrator, Ruben Blum (who is totally not a stand-in for Harold Bloom, okay?), is looking back upon his early career as a young and untenured American history professor at the fictional Corbin University (a stand-in for Cornell) in the early 1960s. Born in the Bronx to working-class Eastern European parents but married to Edith, a wealthy German Jew from the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Ruben is negotiating the boundaries of assimilation and seeking upward mobility into the professorial bourgeoisie at a time when strict quotas limited the number of Jews in the Ivy League.
Ruben's the only Jew in his workplace, making him the recipient of unending anti-Semitic microaggressions from his WASPy department chair and dull colleagues. The Blums are the only Jews in their snowy upstate New York town, ingratiatingly attempting to fit into the American mainstream of Christmas parties, TV dinners, and TV Westerns, while their teenage daughter Judith is desperately begging her parents for a rhinoplasty to blend in with the gentiles at high school.
With typical tokenism, Blum has been drafted to host his co-religionist Netanyahu, whom he's assured will be arriving alone to interview for a position at Corbin. Cringeworthy and disgusting hi-jinks ensue when the entire family (whom Blum mockingly deems The Yahus, sotto voce) suddenly shows up in a crowded and broken-down old Ford station wagon in the midst of a January snowstorm. The situation gradually escalates into total slapstick anarchy (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf-style) as the wives engage in passive-aggressive emotional warfare, the bottomless martinis flow, and the ferally aggressive Netanyahu boys (one of whom is a diaper-wearing 7-year-old) destroy Chez Blum and threaten Judith's chastity, while Blum witnesses Netanyahu's spectacularly self-immolating lectures.
Beyond its farcical and parodic elements, the novel's real source of tension is ideological and characterological, pitting Blum's assimilationist and accommodationist docility-- and his mortal fear of being associated with anything, you know, too Jewish-- against Netanyahu's militantly uncompromising dogmatism and insistence that the world will always be murderously hostile to Jews, and that the next pogrom is always right around the corner.
In such a short semi-comic novel, all of these elements would normally be highly combustible and explosive, but Cohen narrates them with masterful precision, intellectual rigor, tight control, and perfect pacing.
May 9, 2022
UPDATED! Pulitzer Winner for 2022!!
This was a really interesting read. It takes a while to realize that he really is talking about Netanyahu's father and the former Israeli president as a kid, apparently based on a true story. It is written in a subtle Philip Roth-like self-deprecating tone. We are inside this Jewish family in 1959 and experience the endemic anti-Semitism faced by our protagonist, the only Hebrew professor at a celebrated university - their token Jew of sorts. The denouement is hilarious and the afterward helpful to add perspective to the entire book. Highly recommended.
This book just won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize! What a surprise! I have not heard of either of the runners-up, Monkey Boy or Palmeras. I would note that Cohen is only the 5th Jewish person to win, the others being Michael Chabon (2001) and the holy trinity of Roth, Bellow, and Malamud. Sadly no Latina or Jewish woman has still ever won…
My list of Pulitzer hopefuls here! Come today and vote on your favorite!
This was a really interesting read. It takes a while to realize that he really is talking about Netanyahu's father and the former Israeli president as a kid, apparently based on a true story. It is written in a subtle Philip Roth-like self-deprecating tone. We are inside this Jewish family in 1959 and experience the endemic anti-Semitism faced by our protagonist, the only Hebrew professor at a celebrated university - their token Jew of sorts. The denouement is hilarious and the afterward helpful to add perspective to the entire book. Highly recommended.
This book just won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize! What a surprise! I have not heard of either of the runners-up, Monkey Boy or Palmeras. I would note that Cohen is only the 5th Jewish person to win, the others being Michael Chabon (2001) and the holy trinity of Roth, Bellow, and Malamud. Sadly no Latina or Jewish woman has still ever won…
My list of Pulitzer hopefuls here! Come today and vote on your favorite!
January 12, 2023
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2022
A satire about a historian who must interview Benzion Netanyahu for a position in his department. Why? Because he is Jewish too.
Inspired by true events, this is more accessible and funny than it looks at first sight. I find it refreshing that I'm not sure what the message of the book is.
A satire about a historian who must interview Benzion Netanyahu for a position in his department. Why? Because he is Jewish too.
Inspired by true events, this is more accessible and funny than it looks at first sight. I find it refreshing that I'm not sure what the message of the book is.
June 29, 2021
Update: Interview w author in Paris Review 2021-06-23:
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...
A gem. I just loved every sentence. As I said in an update, this reader was entranced by the reined-in but evident erudition, but most of all by a similar sense of how the author is in complete control of an artistry that always feels like it could burst out of the strictures he chooses to impose upon himself. May not read Witz, but will definitely go on to more Cohen.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...
A gem. I just loved every sentence. As I said in an update, this reader was entranced by the reined-in but evident erudition, but most of all by a similar sense of how the author is in complete control of an artistry that always feels like it could burst out of the strictures he chooses to impose upon himself. May not read Witz, but will definitely go on to more Cohen.
May 1, 2021
I never feel properly equipped to talk about Cohen’s writing; his intelligence and wit are so powerful they kind of terrify me. This is simply a masterfully written novel. Involving, surprising and very funny. (May write more later.)
I received an advance review copy of The Netanyahus from the publisher, Fitzcarraldo Editions.
TinyLetter | Linktree
I received an advance review copy of The Netanyahus from the publisher, Fitzcarraldo Editions.
TinyLetter | Linktree
Read
January 12, 2024No rating
Read this in June of 2021.
I don't think I was the only one who was very surprised this book won the PP for "Fiction" .
There was a past discussions thread on this book that I participated in so no reason for a repeat. The discussion is in the Jewish Book Club Group under Moderators Choice -Topic: August, 2021
The Natanyahus..
This book is written about the "father" of a political man; not the one the title alludes to which made me think it was about the one who happens to reside in Israel.
-My own fault for not reading the synopsis.
Read this in June of 2021.
I don't think I was the only one who was very surprised this book won the PP for "Fiction" .
There was a past discussions thread on this book that I participated in so no reason for a repeat. The discussion is in the Jewish Book Club Group under Moderators Choice -Topic: August, 2021
The Natanyahus..
This book is written about the "father" of a political man; not the one the title alludes to which made me think it was about the one who happens to reside in Israel.
-My own fault for not reading the synopsis.
December 1, 2023
The Netanyahu Family Song
We are the Netanyahus
A family on the run
We got holes in both our shoes
Our father is Ben-Zion
We will barge into your house
From top to toe in muck
We’ll look down your daughter’s blouse
And treat you like a schmuck
We are the Netanyahus
A family on the run
We got holes in both our shoes
Our mother ain’t no fun
If you have a nice TV
It’ll surely end up broken
If you serve out scalding tea
Expletives will be spoken
We are the Netanyahus
A family on the run
We got holes in both our shoes
A car we ain't got none
We were raised by mom and pop
Ben-Zion and sweet Tzila
Who do love to yell nonstop
Like the saxes in Tequila
We are the Netanyahus
A family on the run
We got holes in both our shoes
But yours we’ll gladly tread on
We are the world’s most fearsome brats
And one day we’ll be kings
Meanwhile hold on to your hats
And lock away your things!
(All together now!)
We are the Netanyahus
A family on the run
We got holes in both our shoes
But some day we’ll own Zion
September 18, 2022
Thanks to all the recent readers of this review. I've subsequently completed my 2nd read of the book. I was in charge of a small-group discussion, and there's nothing like that to motivate a wrestling match between me and the book.
The original review is immediately below, followed by the update.
Rube and the Yahoos
I once made a lame joke in Torah study to the effect that it was a good thing Reuben got himself disqualified in favor of Judah; otherwise, instead of "the Jews" we would have been "the Rubes."
So when Ruben Blum, the narrator and protagonist of this story, and also the firstJewish faculty member Jew ever at the fictional Corbin College, is called "Rube" by his department head, I thought it was just another microaggression. But, no: that's Ruben's nickname; that's what he calls himself.
Ruben has been called into Dr. Morse's office and told he's been chosen (ha ha) to take charge of a prospective hire's visit. That would be Dr. Ben-Zion Netanyahu.
Will the father of the (until recently) future Israeli prime minister be Corbin's second Jew?
The senior Netanyahu arrives with wife and three rowdy sons in tow, and hilarity ensues (or not).
In the course of the book, traditionalist Jews, invariably from Eastern Europe, are defined as those who wish to hang on to some semblance of Jewish identity and who fear accommodation to American mores will erode that identity. In case the picture is not clear enough, they also fear assimilation will lead inevitably to passive disarmament and, before long, going (once again) like lambs to the slaughter.
Well, it is 1959 and not that long post-Holocaust.
But any shred of Jewish particularism comes hand-in-hand with all the rest.
In the scenario imagined by this book, Eastern Europeans = Zionists = right-wingers.
Western Europeans were the passive leftists.
In this dichotomy, where are modern Americans Jews circa 1959, other than literally in the wilds of New York State? Ruben Blum and family: who are they? What do they stand for?
They don't know!
They want to be American. As such, they espouse universalist values.
They bend over backward to fit in.
They abhor these pushy demanding people.
They are passive victims to these Yahus.
Even masochistic.
Joshua Cohen shapes these factors into a polarity that some professional reviewers are eager to embrace as history. He does cast them into high relief.
Ostensibly, his "bad guys" are (of course) the "right-wing" particularists. (The opposite of the breakdown in Philip Roth's "Eli, the Fanatic.")
He runs the risk of recapitulating the snobby attitude of early-twentieth century German-American Jews toward the influx of Eastern European Jews, whose otherness might affect their own status and acceptance.
Who does the author want to send up? To take down?
Who in this book are the "good" Jews?
I started out being reminded of Roth, then Michael Chabon and his anti-Jewish particularism, and now maybe I've circled back to Roth.
Either by design or by accident, the author paints such an uncertain, passive, and unattractive picture of the assimilationists that he comes close to proving the point their antagonists are making.
The Second Reading
The history according to The Netanyahus bothered me: the sweeping stereotypical characterizations of wide swaths of Jews in recent history, on top of the way the author conformed his groups to the political polarization we have today. I had learned something about the development of Zionism in Eastern Europe, but it didn't jibe with what Joshua Cohen's book says. And I knew next to nothing about Benjamin Netanyahu's father and the career of Jabotinsky.
Well, Ben-Zion was a Jabotinsky disciple. That's right.
But Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky was 20 years younger than Theodor Herzl. Herzl was born in 1860 and Jabotinsky in 1880. Therefore he was 17 years old at the time of the First Zionist Congress. Now 17 then isn't 17 now, and by the time Jabotinsky was 18 and 19, he was a journalist. But he was not a Zionist. That happened after he was galvanized by the Kishinev pogrom in Bessarabia, in 1903 -- or maybe by Chaim Nachman Bialik's poem "In the City of Slaughter" about the pogrom. It was designed to galvanize (in today's language, to outrage), and it did its job with many young men. Bialik, too, had been residing in Odessa, a center of the development of Zionist thought in Eastern Europe. For that matter, so had Ahad Ha'am, who, before Herzl, had been the putative father of Zionism. And far from wanting to take up arms for his cause, Ahad Ha'am was quite patient for the culture to emerge. He thought only the cultural and intellectual elite of the Jews need return to Zion, from there to light the way for the diaspora, which he thought would and should continue to constitute the masses of Jews.
What was on the horizon -- what we now call the Holocaust -- Ahad Ha'am didn't see coming. Herzl did. It was Theodor Herzl, that scion of assimilated Western European Jews, who was in a hurry, not the Eastern European Jewish intellectuals, at least not until Herzl lit a fire under them.
Once Jabotinsky developed Zionist leanings, he idolized Herzl. He was not his "rival," as Cohen writes in his epilogue.
He didn't have much time to be, since Herzl was dead in 1904, having blown out his heart with his efforts.
Maybe what's meant is that Jabotinsky became a right-winger and did want to take up arms. That history I have yet to pursue. Although maybe circa the mid- and late-1930s, being in that kind of a hurry was not as unreasonable as Joshua Cohen and/or his characters make it sound.
Jabotinsky himself died of a heart attack in 1940. How would his nationalistic ideas have changed after the end of the war? After the founding of the state of Israel?
Most of the early Zionist migrants to the Land of Israel were the poor and the young from Eastern Europe. They had been the victims of the pogroms, and, being poor and young, had less to lose. But I wouldn't say Zionist ideas in Eastern Europe were a poor people's product. No, they were born among the intellectuals, like new ideas everywhere.
These ideas are in lots of books. They are out there! If I can find them in the last 12 or 13 years, or via Google, surely Joshua Cohen cut his teeth on them!
So why the garbled history?
That's why I've begun to entertain the idea of unreliable narrator(s). Yes, multiple unreliable narrators.
There is some evidence beyond the apparent unlikeliness of his getting it so wrong.
He plays with names. The original name of his character who gives most of the "Zionist history" means "liar" in German.
That character also has this line:
On my first read, I thought the author was just being intellectually lazy. That's a line that could discourage the reader from checking out the author!
Well, I don't know.
I do know if you look for patterns you will see them.
Maybe this "unreliable narrator" pattern is more interesting than seeing the author as following in Michael Chabon's footsteps, or something of the kind.
I could also learn more about Joshua Cohen by reading his earlier books. But that may be a bridge too far....
One more thing. That professional reviewer who said Joshua Cohen only attracted interest and eventually approbation because he used a famous name. That's "predicting" something that has already happened. A real prediction that the name "Netanyahu" would do that would have to have been made before the book was published.
Since the book has make me think this hard, it gets another star.
The original review is immediately below, followed by the update.
Rube and the Yahoos
I once made a lame joke in Torah study to the effect that it was a good thing Reuben got himself disqualified in favor of Judah; otherwise, instead of "the Jews" we would have been "the Rubes."
So when Ruben Blum, the narrator and protagonist of this story, and also the first
Ruben has been called into Dr. Morse's office and told he's been chosen (ha ha) to take charge of a prospective hire's visit. That would be Dr. Ben-Zion Netanyahu.
Will the father of the (until recently) future Israeli prime minister be Corbin's second Jew?
The senior Netanyahu arrives with wife and three rowdy sons in tow, and hilarity ensues (or not).
In the course of the book, traditionalist Jews, invariably from Eastern Europe, are defined as those who wish to hang on to some semblance of Jewish identity and who fear accommodation to American mores will erode that identity. In case the picture is not clear enough, they also fear assimilation will lead inevitably to passive disarmament and, before long, going (once again) like lambs to the slaughter.
Well, it is 1959 and not that long post-Holocaust.
But any shred of Jewish particularism comes hand-in-hand with all the rest.
In the scenario imagined by this book, Eastern Europeans = Zionists = right-wingers.
Western Europeans were the passive leftists.
In this dichotomy, where are modern Americans Jews circa 1959, other than literally in the wilds of New York State? Ruben Blum and family: who are they? What do they stand for?
They don't know!
They want to be American. As such, they espouse universalist values.
They bend over backward to fit in.
They abhor these pushy demanding people.
They are passive victims to these Yahus.
Even masochistic.
Joshua Cohen shapes these factors into a polarity that some professional reviewers are eager to embrace as history. He does cast them into high relief.
Ostensibly, his "bad guys" are (of course) the "right-wing" particularists. (The opposite of the breakdown in Philip Roth's "Eli, the Fanatic.")
He runs the risk of recapitulating the snobby attitude of early-twentieth century German-American Jews toward the influx of Eastern European Jews, whose otherness might affect their own status and acceptance.
Who does the author want to send up? To take down?
Who in this book are the "good" Jews?
I started out being reminded of Roth, then Michael Chabon and his anti-Jewish particularism, and now maybe I've circled back to Roth.
Either by design or by accident, the author paints such an uncertain, passive, and unattractive picture of the assimilationists that he comes close to proving the point their antagonists are making.
After my first time through, the review ended here.
The Second Reading
The history according to The Netanyahus bothered me: the sweeping stereotypical characterizations of wide swaths of Jews in recent history, on top of the way the author conformed his groups to the political polarization we have today. I had learned something about the development of Zionism in Eastern Europe, but it didn't jibe with what Joshua Cohen's book says. And I knew next to nothing about Benjamin Netanyahu's father and the career of Jabotinsky.
Well, Ben-Zion was a Jabotinsky disciple. That's right.
But Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky was 20 years younger than Theodor Herzl. Herzl was born in 1860 and Jabotinsky in 1880. Therefore he was 17 years old at the time of the First Zionist Congress. Now 17 then isn't 17 now, and by the time Jabotinsky was 18 and 19, he was a journalist. But he was not a Zionist. That happened after he was galvanized by the Kishinev pogrom in Bessarabia, in 1903 -- or maybe by Chaim Nachman Bialik's poem "In the City of Slaughter" about the pogrom. It was designed to galvanize (in today's language, to outrage), and it did its job with many young men. Bialik, too, had been residing in Odessa, a center of the development of Zionist thought in Eastern Europe. For that matter, so had Ahad Ha'am, who, before Herzl, had been the putative father of Zionism. And far from wanting to take up arms for his cause, Ahad Ha'am was quite patient for the culture to emerge. He thought only the cultural and intellectual elite of the Jews need return to Zion, from there to light the way for the diaspora, which he thought would and should continue to constitute the masses of Jews.
What was on the horizon -- what we now call the Holocaust -- Ahad Ha'am didn't see coming. Herzl did. It was Theodor Herzl, that scion of assimilated Western European Jews, who was in a hurry, not the Eastern European Jewish intellectuals, at least not until Herzl lit a fire under them.
Once Jabotinsky developed Zionist leanings, he idolized Herzl. He was not his "rival," as Cohen writes in his epilogue.
He didn't have much time to be, since Herzl was dead in 1904, having blown out his heart with his efforts.
Maybe what's meant is that Jabotinsky became a right-winger and did want to take up arms. That history I have yet to pursue. Although maybe circa the mid- and late-1930s, being in that kind of a hurry was not as unreasonable as Joshua Cohen and/or his characters make it sound.
Jabotinsky himself died of a heart attack in 1940. How would his nationalistic ideas have changed after the end of the war? After the founding of the state of Israel?
Most of the early Zionist migrants to the Land of Israel were the poor and the young from Eastern Europe. They had been the victims of the pogroms, and, being poor and young, had less to lose. But I wouldn't say Zionist ideas in Eastern Europe were a poor people's product. No, they were born among the intellectuals, like new ideas everywhere.
These ideas are in lots of books. They are out there! If I can find them in the last 12 or 13 years, or via Google, surely Joshua Cohen cut his teeth on them!
So why the garbled history?
That's why I've begun to entertain the idea of unreliable narrator(s). Yes, multiple unreliable narrators.
There is some evidence beyond the apparent unlikeliness of his getting it so wrong.
He plays with names. The original name of his character who gives most of the "Zionist history" means "liar" in German.
That character also has this line:
... The history of Zionism is so difficult to recount, and all attempts evanesce into metaphysics. ...
On my first read, I thought the author was just being intellectually lazy. That's a line that could discourage the reader from checking out the author!
Well, I don't know.
I do know if you look for patterns you will see them.
Maybe this "unreliable narrator" pattern is more interesting than seeing the author as following in Michael Chabon's footsteps, or something of the kind.
I could also learn more about Joshua Cohen by reading his earlier books. But that may be a bridge too far....
One more thing. That professional reviewer who said Joshua Cohen only attracted interest and eventually approbation because he used a famous name. That's "predicting" something that has already happened. A real prediction that the name "Netanyahu" would do that would have to have been made before the book was published.
Since the book has make me think this hard, it gets another star.
Read
September 8, 2023All about the time the Netanyahus came to a formerly quiet little New York campus as guests of fellow Jew, Dr. Blum, whose wife Edith and daughter Judith and co-workers (assume typical names here) are in for the surprises of their lives.
Oddly, for a 235-page book, the Netanyahus do not "land" until p. 135 or so. Up until then, a lot of angst and foreshadowing and humor. Well, humor after that page, too. Before it's most memorable when the laws and the in-laws visit (the text reads like a sitcom script here).
Then, after the infamous Family N. lands, the humor moves to Benzion Netanyahu and his handful-ain't-the-word-for-it wife as well as their three devil incarnate sons. Most notable is how the author uses Netanyahu's field of expertise (Iberian Jews in the Middle Ages), ignorance (he thinks upstate New York is part of New England), and fierce individualism to make the book so quixotic and erudite. This while slapstick humor is tumbling to the floor (or a snowbank) and rolling all around it.
If you think this is easy to pull off, I wish you well in trying it. Though it's not consistently funny, it is funny so often that it's hard to complain without coming across as overcritical and petty. So you read, disbelieve, laugh, turn pages, and actually learn a little about the Jews (for starters, stop considering them as a monolithic bloc with like beliefs and opinions)
Deceivingly complex, in its way. The ending takes all.
Oddly, for a 235-page book, the Netanyahus do not "land" until p. 135 or so. Up until then, a lot of angst and foreshadowing and humor. Well, humor after that page, too. Before it's most memorable when the laws and the in-laws visit (the text reads like a sitcom script here).
Then, after the infamous Family N. lands, the humor moves to Benzion Netanyahu and his handful-ain't-the-word-for-it wife as well as their three devil incarnate sons. Most notable is how the author uses Netanyahu's field of expertise (Iberian Jews in the Middle Ages), ignorance (he thinks upstate New York is part of New England), and fierce individualism to make the book so quixotic and erudite. This while slapstick humor is tumbling to the floor (or a snowbank) and rolling all around it.
If you think this is easy to pull off, I wish you well in trying it. Though it's not consistently funny, it is funny so often that it's hard to complain without coming across as overcritical and petty. So you read, disbelieve, laugh, turn pages, and actually learn a little about the Jews (for starters, stop considering them as a monolithic bloc with like beliefs and opinions)
Deceivingly complex, in its way. The ending takes all.
Read
July 26, 2021Oh, those Netanyahus. Their part in this spliced work of fiction and non-fiction is apparently the non-fiction. Benjamin, I'd guess the most famous one, has a bit part here, but the story kind of explains how he became who he became.
The other part, the fiction part, is the narrator and his family who have the Netanyahus foisted on them. Except that narrator, Ruben Blum, is really based on Harold Bloom and his for-real encounter with those Netanyahus, so that part is kinda true too.
This is inventive. And it's definitely Jewish. I mean a lot of it is an exploration of what it means to be Jewish. A lot of it is scholarly, in the sense that characters are giving erudite college lectures. But they weren't boring.
Everyone says this is funny and, sure, much of it is. There's a building that was once a synagogue but is now a Church of the Assumption, and the narrator has a lot of literal fun with that. Me too. But characters could become stereotypical, caricaturish, like the narrator's parents who could be George Costanza's parents. That made me wince.
Inventive? There's a non-epilogue epilogue entitled: Credits & Extra Credit. Which explains things. And was cool.
The other part, the fiction part, is the narrator and his family who have the Netanyahus foisted on them. Except that narrator, Ruben Blum, is really based on Harold Bloom and his for-real encounter with those Netanyahus, so that part is kinda true too.
This is inventive. And it's definitely Jewish. I mean a lot of it is an exploration of what it means to be Jewish. A lot of it is scholarly, in the sense that characters are giving erudite college lectures. But they weren't boring.
Everyone says this is funny and, sure, much of it is. There's a building that was once a synagogue but is now a Church of the Assumption, and the narrator has a lot of literal fun with that. Me too. But characters could become stereotypical, caricaturish, like the narrator's parents who could be George Costanza's parents. That made me wince.
Inventive? There's a non-epilogue epilogue entitled: Credits & Extra Credit. Which explains things. And was cool.
January 18, 2024
When I think that Joshua Cohen is just two years younger than me, I don’t know if I should applaud or cry. What has this guy been doing all of his life? Or, shall I ask instead, what have I been doing with mine?
I think that, perhaps, novels like this can only be written by people (under sixty years old) who manage to read a hundred and fifty books (or more) a year and can still find the time to dissect, review and (intensively) discuss them (all).
I mean, I’m happy for those people but, on the other hand, very disappointed with the way I’ve been managing my time.
Why can’t I find a way to read three books a week while having to work five days (for eight hours, excluding commute), do house chores, exercise, eat, (try to) sleep (for another eight hours every night), walk the dog and still find a way to feel like I’m a functioning stable human being?
I can see clearly now, the rain is gone…
I’m just an average fucked up middle age guy who, despite loving literature above everything else, still needs to leave the house sometimes and have normal interactions like face to face conversations with other people (remember those?)) to feel alive.
No wonder I never won a Pulitzer Prize.
I think that, perhaps, novels like this can only be written by people (under sixty years old) who manage to read a hundred and fifty books (or more) a year and can still find the time to dissect, review and (intensively) discuss them (all).
I mean, I’m happy for those people but, on the other hand, very disappointed with the way I’ve been managing my time.
Why can’t I find a way to read three books a week while having to work five days (for eight hours, excluding commute), do house chores, exercise, eat, (try to) sleep (for another eight hours every night), walk the dog and still find a way to feel like I’m a functioning stable human being?
I can see clearly now, the rain is gone…
I’m just an average fucked up middle age guy who, despite loving literature above everything else, still needs to leave the house sometimes and have normal interactions like face to face conversations with other people (remember those?)) to feel alive.
No wonder I never won a Pulitzer Prize.
July 5, 2022
After finishing The Netanyahus: An account of a minor and ultimately even negligible episode in the history of a very famous family, I wondered if Joshua Cohen redefined the possibilities and boundaries of historical fiction. Is The Netanyahus an historical farce; an historical comedy; or more likely, a blazingly original and weird mixture of pure fiction and slapstick built upon an actual event recounted to the author by none other than Professor Harold Bloom. Regardless of its classification, The Netanyahus masterfully combines point-on re-creation of American Jewish culture in the 1950s and 1960s with wry observations on American Jewish interpretations of Jewish history.
The Netanyahus tells the story of Ruvn (AKA Reuben) Blum, a professor of tax history in a small upstate New York college in which he’s the first Jew ever to step on campus. Professor Blum is assigned to shepherd Ben-Zion Netanyahu through his interview for a faculty post, since, of course, the only Jewish professor should accompany the only Jewish faculty applicant, although their fields don’t overlap in the least. Here’s a conversation between the history department chair and Blum: ”’Apparently one of the candidates is particularly promising. A Europeonist whose specialty is the Medieval era. . . Iberia, I think? Fifteenth century, was it? Anyway, we’d like to have your opinion.’ / ‘Mine?’ / ‘Your opinion in particular.’ / This was puzzling. He’d like to have my opinion of what? The Medieval Era? Which was the same as the Middle Ages? Which was the same as the Dark Ages? When it came to that era, I was less its expert than its citizen, its denizen, an illiterate peasant in the middling dark. I mean, I knew when the 15th century was, between the 14th and the 16th, but that was like saying I knew where the Sugar Pops were in the A&P, in the cereal aisle below the Cocoa Puffs and Cocoa Krispies.”. And here Netanyahu himself sums up the situation for Blum: ”’The History Department must decide upon a Jew and so enlists another Jew for help. Their own Jew. A Jew who is known to them. A Jew they at least partially trust. . . This is a venerable historical office. Usually inherited, a patrimony. El judio de corte, der Hofjude, the Court Jew. The protected Jew. The useful Jew to keep in your pocket. . .’” Following Netanyahu’s interview by the hiring committee, he offers his opinion to Blum: ”’You and the rest of the committee.’ He spat. ‘Morons, Imbeciles, Idiots. That’s the classification I remember, the trinity of defective mental categories. Not Father, Son, Holy Ghost, but Morons, Imbeciles, Idiots.’”
Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus contains many delights. My favorites are those passages in which Cohen directly channels Philip Roth, as when the ”who-shall-remain-nameless then-president of the American Historical Association . . . [commented to Blum] ‘Ah,’ he said, limply pressing my hand, ‘Blum, did you say? A Jewish historian?’” Then there’s this observation smacking of absolute authenticity: ”No one reading this, in the third millennium of Christendom, can have any idea — none at all — of what it meant to be a kid in 1960 encountering not just a TV but one in color. First off, in 1960, owning a TV wasn’t anti-intellectual, or some surrender to the hive-mind, but modern. Owning a color TV was more than that, it was fancy, it was elite, so much so that I was almost ashamed: it was a profligacy of Steinmetzian proportions.” And the warring in-laws, each representing radically different strands of American Jewry, and each despising the backgrounds and affectations of the other. Finally, Cohen treats us to Blum’s daughter’s unforgettable nose job and her sexual initiation.
The Netanyahus is worth reading and then rereading, only to discover more treasures within. 4.5 stars
The Netanyahus tells the story of Ruvn (AKA Reuben) Blum, a professor of tax history in a small upstate New York college in which he’s the first Jew ever to step on campus. Professor Blum is assigned to shepherd Ben-Zion Netanyahu through his interview for a faculty post, since, of course, the only Jewish professor should accompany the only Jewish faculty applicant, although their fields don’t overlap in the least. Here’s a conversation between the history department chair and Blum: ”’Apparently one of the candidates is particularly promising. A Europeonist whose specialty is the Medieval era. . . Iberia, I think? Fifteenth century, was it? Anyway, we’d like to have your opinion.’ / ‘Mine?’ / ‘Your opinion in particular.’ / This was puzzling. He’d like to have my opinion of what? The Medieval Era? Which was the same as the Middle Ages? Which was the same as the Dark Ages? When it came to that era, I was less its expert than its citizen, its denizen, an illiterate peasant in the middling dark. I mean, I knew when the 15th century was, between the 14th and the 16th, but that was like saying I knew where the Sugar Pops were in the A&P, in the cereal aisle below the Cocoa Puffs and Cocoa Krispies.”. And here Netanyahu himself sums up the situation for Blum: ”’The History Department must decide upon a Jew and so enlists another Jew for help. Their own Jew. A Jew who is known to them. A Jew they at least partially trust. . . This is a venerable historical office. Usually inherited, a patrimony. El judio de corte, der Hofjude, the Court Jew. The protected Jew. The useful Jew to keep in your pocket. . .’” Following Netanyahu’s interview by the hiring committee, he offers his opinion to Blum: ”’You and the rest of the committee.’ He spat. ‘Morons, Imbeciles, Idiots. That’s the classification I remember, the trinity of defective mental categories. Not Father, Son, Holy Ghost, but Morons, Imbeciles, Idiots.’”
Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus contains many delights. My favorites are those passages in which Cohen directly channels Philip Roth, as when the ”who-shall-remain-nameless then-president of the American Historical Association . . . [commented to Blum] ‘Ah,’ he said, limply pressing my hand, ‘Blum, did you say? A Jewish historian?’” Then there’s this observation smacking of absolute authenticity: ”No one reading this, in the third millennium of Christendom, can have any idea — none at all — of what it meant to be a kid in 1960 encountering not just a TV but one in color. First off, in 1960, owning a TV wasn’t anti-intellectual, or some surrender to the hive-mind, but modern. Owning a color TV was more than that, it was fancy, it was elite, so much so that I was almost ashamed: it was a profligacy of Steinmetzian proportions.” And the warring in-laws, each representing radically different strands of American Jewry, and each despising the backgrounds and affectations of the other. Finally, Cohen treats us to Blum’s daughter’s unforgettable nose job and her sexual initiation.
The Netanyahus is worth reading and then rereading, only to discover more treasures within. 4.5 stars
September 26, 2022
It is a rare thing for an author to be able to slide effortlessly between serious topics related to history, religion, statehood, assimilation and family politics - and riotous, borderline slapstick, hilarity.
Yes, this book features the family of the Benjamin Netanyahu, frequent prime minister of Israel. His father, mostly, but Bibi is there in a supporting role. The story is told by the fictional Reuben Blum, a stand-in for critic Harold Bloom, who shared an anecdote with Joshua Cohen that became the seed for this book.
Blum is a young professor at a college in a rural portion of western New York State. In 1959, as the first Jew on the faculty, he is asked to participate in the hiring committee of one Benzion Netanyahu, to act as a kind of cultural intermediary. Blum, desperate to assimilate, struggles to make sense of Benzion’s sole publication and his wildly divergent recommendation letters, while coping with his wife, daughter, parents, and in-laws, fellow faculty members, and the local population.
All of this leads up to the day of Benzion’s interview, when he arrives at Blum’s house with wife and three boys unexpectedly in tow. It is at this point that the humor, which has been bubbling dangerously all along, boils over the pot with disastrous results.
IMO, The Netanyahus is fully deserving of the Pulitzer Prize it won earlier this year. It’s a very Jewish book, but not only a Jewish book. The observations on assimilation alone, on the challenges of being outside the norm, have broad application. And the humor - well, that’s pretty much universal.
Aside #1: Although Harold Bloom’s story took place at Cornell, where he taught, Cohen sets his story in Chautauqua County, in the far west of the state on the shores of Lake Erie. A location where I lived for many years while my wife taught at the local state college. While the geography, weather and many place names were familiar, the schools were very different.
Aside #2: I listened to the audiobook, which was produced by Malcolm Gladwell’s Pushkin+, which creates (I gather) podcasts and audiobooks. The author was the narrator for most of the book, with one chapter read by David Duchovny and another by Ethan Herschenfeld. While listening I noticed what appeared to be periodic mispronunciations by Cohen. Since his erudition appears extensive, I couldn’t figure out whether I was mishearing, whether I didn’t understand the correct pronunciation myself (I actually double-checked on verdigris), or whether Cohen was staying in character as Blum, a striver who was more immersed in tax history than literature and languages. If anyone who has listened knows the answer or has an opinion, I’d be interested.
Aside #3: Thanks to Judith, whose review prompted me to try this marvelous reading experience!
Yes, this book features the family of the Benjamin Netanyahu, frequent prime minister of Israel. His father, mostly, but Bibi is there in a supporting role. The story is told by the fictional Reuben Blum, a stand-in for critic Harold Bloom, who shared an anecdote with Joshua Cohen that became the seed for this book.
Blum is a young professor at a college in a rural portion of western New York State. In 1959, as the first Jew on the faculty, he is asked to participate in the hiring committee of one Benzion Netanyahu, to act as a kind of cultural intermediary. Blum, desperate to assimilate, struggles to make sense of Benzion’s sole publication and his wildly divergent recommendation letters, while coping with his wife, daughter, parents, and in-laws, fellow faculty members, and the local population.
All of this leads up to the day of Benzion’s interview, when he arrives at Blum’s house with wife and three boys unexpectedly in tow. It is at this point that the humor, which has been bubbling dangerously all along, boils over the pot with disastrous results.
IMO, The Netanyahus is fully deserving of the Pulitzer Prize it won earlier this year. It’s a very Jewish book, but not only a Jewish book. The observations on assimilation alone, on the challenges of being outside the norm, have broad application. And the humor - well, that’s pretty much universal.
Aside #1: Although Harold Bloom’s story took place at Cornell, where he taught, Cohen sets his story in Chautauqua County, in the far west of the state on the shores of Lake Erie. A location where I lived for many years while my wife taught at the local state college. While the geography, weather and many place names were familiar, the schools were very different.
Aside #2: I listened to the audiobook, which was produced by Malcolm Gladwell’s Pushkin+, which creates (I gather) podcasts and audiobooks. The author was the narrator for most of the book, with one chapter read by David Duchovny and another by Ethan Herschenfeld. While listening I noticed what appeared to be periodic mispronunciations by Cohen. Since his erudition appears extensive, I couldn’t figure out whether I was mishearing, whether I didn’t understand the correct pronunciation myself (I actually double-checked on verdigris), or whether Cohen was staying in character as Blum, a striver who was more immersed in tax history than literature and languages. If anyone who has listened knows the answer or has an opinion, I’d be interested.
Aside #3: Thanks to Judith, whose review prompted me to try this marvelous reading experience!
January 31, 2023
But the past doesn’t have to be the future. That’s the point of something you aspire to.
This novel is a departure for Mr. Cohen. No trace of Cohen's early need ( see Witz) to dominate, to dazzle with action of vocabulary and metaphoric hijinks—leaving all anxious influences struck dumb in his wake. Perhaps a maturation, or an evolved sense of utility? I maintain an oblique curiosity about such matters. I have fashioned a series of dense, nearly impenetrable works, why don't I aim for something accessible, almost anecdotal? I read Cohen’s collected nonfiction a few months ago and marveled at his eye for detail and corresponding restraint. This novel continues this tendency. Such is a re-imagining of Bibi’s father and clan seeking academic employment in the New York of the early 1960s. The wife of the protagonist muses late in the novel about how passionate she and her husband were in younger years. I have no beliefs and I’m OK with it; I’m more than OK, I’m glad. . . I’m glad I’m getting older without convictions. . .
Perhaps it is rash to think the author has found a similar perch whether through resignation or some dialectic. I loved this novel, finding it a campus fiction with an apocalyptic promise. There are no spared barbs and regardless of whether the details are accurate there’s an agenda afoot.
This novel is a departure for Mr. Cohen. No trace of Cohen's early need ( see Witz) to dominate, to dazzle with action of vocabulary and metaphoric hijinks—leaving all anxious influences struck dumb in his wake. Perhaps a maturation, or an evolved sense of utility? I maintain an oblique curiosity about such matters. I have fashioned a series of dense, nearly impenetrable works, why don't I aim for something accessible, almost anecdotal? I read Cohen’s collected nonfiction a few months ago and marveled at his eye for detail and corresponding restraint. This novel continues this tendency. Such is a re-imagining of Bibi’s father and clan seeking academic employment in the New York of the early 1960s. The wife of the protagonist muses late in the novel about how passionate she and her husband were in younger years. I have no beliefs and I’m OK with it; I’m more than OK, I’m glad. . . I’m glad I’m getting older without convictions. . .
Perhaps it is rash to think the author has found a similar perch whether through resignation or some dialectic. I loved this novel, finding it a campus fiction with an apocalyptic promise. There are no spared barbs and regardless of whether the details are accurate there’s an agenda afoot.
January 9, 2023
There are several ways to look at this novel; I will take the simple approach. Ruben Blum is the sole Jewish professor at a small college in upper state New York. He has a very bright and manipulative daughter who is currently applying to colleges. Ruben’s wife, Edith, is limited by their location in what jobs or career she can pursue and is frustrated as a result. The story takes place in late 1959 to early 1960. The first half of the story focuses on the Blum’s. Ruben is assigned to a hiring committee; his department is pursuing a Jewish candidate, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, and feel they need a Jew on the committee to better understand the candidate and to make the candidate feel welcome. Ben-Zion, his wife Tzila and their three boys, including Benjamin, the middle child and future Prime Minister of Israel, travel to Corbin University so that Ben-Zion can interview for the position. The make-up of the Netanyahu family as portrayed is accurate and the general outline of the story is apparently accurate, as the author shares in the postscript, but in other ways the story has been highly fictionalized. You learn nothing about Benjamin at age 10 that would help you foresee his future, but you do gain an understanding of Benjamin’s father, Ben-Zion, and his goals, efforts and beliefs, which shed some light on Benjamin’s future career.
This novel is very dry in places as it delves into and explains Ben-Zion's intellectual pursuits, but parts of the novel are hilarious. I realize the humor in this book can at times seem like a series of pratfalls: I was reminded of Chevy Chase’s Christmas Vacation. This type of humor is clearly not for everyone, but the scene where the Netanyahus meet the Blums and in particular where we observe the interactions between Ben-Zion and his wife Tzila had me chuckling and sometimes laughing out loud. Likewise, an earlier scene between Ruben and his mother-in-law, Sabine, was quite funny.
Prior to reading this novel I was very much aware of Benjamin Netanyahu and some of his history, but this novel motivated me to read more about him. I have always found Israeli politics confusing, and while this novel and my subsequent reading have not cleared up that confusion, they have certainly helped me understand some of the layers and complexity that were previously unknown to me.
This novel is very dry in places as it delves into and explains Ben-Zion's intellectual pursuits, but parts of the novel are hilarious. I realize the humor in this book can at times seem like a series of pratfalls: I was reminded of Chevy Chase’s Christmas Vacation. This type of humor is clearly not for everyone, but the scene where the Netanyahus meet the Blums and in particular where we observe the interactions between Ben-Zion and his wife Tzila had me chuckling and sometimes laughing out loud. Likewise, an earlier scene between Ruben and his mother-in-law, Sabine, was quite funny.
Prior to reading this novel I was very much aware of Benjamin Netanyahu and some of his history, but this novel motivated me to read more about him. I have always found Israeli politics confusing, and while this novel and my subsequent reading have not cleared up that confusion, they have certainly helped me understand some of the layers and complexity that were previously unknown to me.
May 12, 2021
The Netanyahus is a very clever book. It is clever in the words it uses (I had to look up several words as I read). But it is also clever in the conflicts it brings about, including in the reader’s head.
Our narrator is Ruben Blum. In an afterword, Cohen explains that the book is based on an anecdote told to him by Harold Bloom, the literary critic who died in 2019 and who called Cohen’s Book of Numbers one of the four best books by a Jewish-American novelist (I have no idea what the other 3 books are!). The similarity between Blum and Bloom is probably deliberate although Blum is not, I don’t think, supposed to actually be Bloom. From what I have read, however, it seems Cohen has stuck pretty much to the facts as he was told them for the rest of the story.
As the story begins, Ruben Blum and his family (wife Edith and daughter Judith) are living in upper New York state and trying fairly hard to fit themselves into the gentile culture around them. Judith hates her nose (and ends up taking fairly drastic action to do something about it). Ruben is asked to be part of the panel interviewing a candidate for a professorship at the college he works in. That candidate is Benzion Netanyahu and Ruben’s conflict in the book is that he has been asked to take part because he is Jewish. It’s a Catch-22 situation: if he recommends Netanyahu for the post it will be seen as Jewish favouritism, but, if he does not recommend him, it will be seen as trying to avoid the appearance of Jewish favouritism.
When Netanyahu arrives (unexpectedly bringing his family with him), a second conflict is set up. Benzion Netanyahu is a real historical figure known as a hardline Revisionist Zionist. His time with Ruben (attempting to fit in with the society around him by, effectively, hiding his Jewishness) is bound to bring tensions.
And once the Netanyahu family arrives, chaos comes with them. Several reviews refer to the book as “laugh out loud funny”, but there’s a discomfort to the comedy because the conflict set up for the reader is whether or not they should actually be laughing at this. I have to admit that I didn’t actually laugh out loud. Except when Ruben says “It’s not holy, it’s just a nice rug” which really did make me laugh. The book’s portrayal of the Netanyahu family as a walking disaster area feels awkward to read, but I imagine this is exactly what the author intended as he raises questions about how much a Jewish historian should be a representative of Jewish history (I borrowed that phrase from a review in the Financial Times).
I have mixed feelings at the end of the book. It is very well written but the farce elements were, for me, a bit off-putting. I did like the way the different conflicts were set up and explored in the book, though, so I find myself in favour of it overall.
Our narrator is Ruben Blum. In an afterword, Cohen explains that the book is based on an anecdote told to him by Harold Bloom, the literary critic who died in 2019 and who called Cohen’s Book of Numbers one of the four best books by a Jewish-American novelist (I have no idea what the other 3 books are!). The similarity between Blum and Bloom is probably deliberate although Blum is not, I don’t think, supposed to actually be Bloom. From what I have read, however, it seems Cohen has stuck pretty much to the facts as he was told them for the rest of the story.
As the story begins, Ruben Blum and his family (wife Edith and daughter Judith) are living in upper New York state and trying fairly hard to fit themselves into the gentile culture around them. Judith hates her nose (and ends up taking fairly drastic action to do something about it). Ruben is asked to be part of the panel interviewing a candidate for a professorship at the college he works in. That candidate is Benzion Netanyahu and Ruben’s conflict in the book is that he has been asked to take part because he is Jewish. It’s a Catch-22 situation: if he recommends Netanyahu for the post it will be seen as Jewish favouritism, but, if he does not recommend him, it will be seen as trying to avoid the appearance of Jewish favouritism.
When Netanyahu arrives (unexpectedly bringing his family with him), a second conflict is set up. Benzion Netanyahu is a real historical figure known as a hardline Revisionist Zionist. His time with Ruben (attempting to fit in with the society around him by, effectively, hiding his Jewishness) is bound to bring tensions.
And once the Netanyahu family arrives, chaos comes with them. Several reviews refer to the book as “laugh out loud funny”, but there’s a discomfort to the comedy because the conflict set up for the reader is whether or not they should actually be laughing at this. I have to admit that I didn’t actually laugh out loud. Except when Ruben says “It’s not holy, it’s just a nice rug” which really did make me laugh. The book’s portrayal of the Netanyahu family as a walking disaster area feels awkward to read, but I imagine this is exactly what the author intended as he raises questions about how much a Jewish historian should be a representative of Jewish history (I borrowed that phrase from a review in the Financial Times).
I have mixed feelings at the end of the book. It is very well written but the farce elements were, for me, a bit off-putting. I did like the way the different conflicts were set up and explored in the book, though, so I find myself in favour of it overall.
May 12, 2022
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER: 2022
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Generally speaking, especially with the wins over the past ~2 decades, I can understand why a book was chosen for the Pulitzer Prize even if I didn't personally connect with or love the content, but this one truly has me scratching my head. Apparently this was supposed to be funny and "fun", which frankly has me concerned for anybody who could read this book and be amused--it was a slog and honestly pretty bleak. Dry, depressing, and I just didn't "get" the very weird blending of fiction and fact. Which I guess is supposed to be viewed as innovative, but I just thought it was kind of weird to just take somebody else's story and decide to tell it yourself but with a bunch of shit made up. Bizarre, and not in a good way.
===
Generally speaking, especially with the wins over the past ~2 decades, I can understand why a book was chosen for the Pulitzer Prize even if I didn't personally connect with or love the content, but this one truly has me scratching my head. Apparently this was supposed to be funny and "fun", which frankly has me concerned for anybody who could read this book and be amused--it was a slog and honestly pretty bleak. Dry, depressing, and I just didn't "get" the very weird blending of fiction and fact. Which I guess is supposed to be viewed as innovative, but I just thought it was kind of weird to just take somebody else's story and decide to tell it yourself but with a bunch of shit made up. Bizarre, and not in a good way.
May 17, 2022
I enjoyed this book very much. It tells of a Jewish American historian's struggles with antisemitism and his discoveries in history.
I highly recommend this book.
I highly recommend this book.
May 19, 2022
The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, this minor episode being based on the anecdote of Harold Bloom about meeting the Netanyahu family in the 50s.
In short: Ruben Blum, a historian who happens to be jewish, not a historian of Jews, gets a task to interview Ben-zion Netanyahu for the position in his small provincial college being the only other Jew there, the famous family arrives and mayhem ensues.
This is a novel about identity, Jewish identity to be precise.
Old world jews vs new world jews; American assimilating jews vs nationalists of Israel; Jews from the Bloodlands vs prosperous jews from Western Europe.
And all this is told with wit and sometimes mockery. Joshua Cohen doesn’t pull punches at Netanyahus, they come out as quite a bunch of chaotic ridiculous pushy whiny people, there's not munch sympathy here.
I wanted to read it the first time it came out, but after it won the Pulitzer, I took it as a sign. And I had a great time with it. Somehow the Pulitzer turns out to be the most fresh and interesting literary prize of all that I vaguely follow.
Just a few quotes I enjoyed:
And so my childhood was tugged between conflicting exceptionalisms, between the American condition of being able to choose and the Jewish condition of being chosen . . .
And so it might be more accurate to say that though Dr. Netanyahu was certainly a believer, he didn’t believe in an all-powerful God so much as he believed in the all-powerful goys, who were obviously more accountable and identifiable to academia than God was. Because unlike God, these kings, queens, ecclesiastics, and Jew-butchers who ruled the Jewish world had names and dates and places of residence and nationalities; they could be quoted with citation, marked by crosses and stars.
I might cite, in this regard, such luminaries and American patriots as Dr. Albert Einstein and Dr. Hannah Arendt. Do we hold against these folks a “gap” in their CVs between 1933 and 1945? Do we decide against them because their employment histories have “holes”? Of course not! That would be lunacy! And while the lacunae in Ben’s career are of a different nature, they’re not unrelated. Because while he himself didn’t suffer the European ordeal, he certainly did have to contend with less-than-ideal Palestinian conditions, from typewriter shortages and typewriter-ribbon rationing to Arab arsonists and biblioclasts who kept trying to torch the university archives. In other words, history came also to him.
Just about a decade prior to the autumn I’m recalling, the State of Israel was founded. In that minuscule country halfway across the globe, displaced and refugee Jews were busy reinventing themselves into a single people, united by the hatreds and subjugations of contrary regimes, in a mass-process of solidarity aroused by gross antagonism. Simultaneously, a kindred mass-process was occurring here in America, where Jews were busy being deinvented, or uninvented, or assimilated, by democracy and market-forces, intermarriage and miscegenation. Regardless of where they were and the specific nature and direction of the process, however, it remains an incontrovertible fact that nearly all of the world’s Jews were involved at midcentury in becoming something else; and that at this point of transformation, the old internal differences between them—of former citizenship and class, to say nothing of language and degree of religious observance—became for a brief moment more palpable than ever, giving one last death-rattle gasp.
Love is generally a one-to-one affair and mortal, but hatreds tend toward immortal typologies, with each change of identity becoming translated into more relevant terms, so that the Old World distinctions between my Ukrainian/Russian Jewish parents and Edith’s Rhenish Jewish parents became, in the New World, secularized rivalries between the Bronx and Manhattan, the Grand Concourse and Upper Broadway; mass-transit v. Cadillacs; no days off v. Lorelei vacations and half the year in Florida.
The earliest Zionist Congresses were split between these polar-opposite positions—between the “political” “evolutionary” Zionism of the West, and the “practical” “revolutionary” Zionism of the East, whose disagreements centered on geography and method: the questions of whether a land or the land should be negotiated for or seized.
According to the son’s Revisionist obituaries, Rabbi Mileikowsky died not of any of the chronic diseases that he was afflicted with but from grief that men so dedicated to the cause of Jewish statehood would be so harshly treated.
No student, however brilliant, would be forgiven this behavior, and Netanyahu was only brilliant by foreign standards—a statement I make with due respect. At any American institution, he would have been “a star,” but please remember that historical circumstances have conspired to hold Israel to a higher standard. Each year Netanyahu was at Hebrew University, new refugees streamed in, until, on the eve of the Second World War, the school was a monstrous teeming haven of the best faculties of Europe, all jostling each other for prestige. In the History Department alone we had Baer, Koebner, and Tcherikover, who together were fluent in something like 22 languages;
Tell me how, in this atmosphere where everyone was a world-historical genius in Tanakh, Talmud, Kabbalah, Hasidut, cuneiform, modal logic, matter, anti-matter, and quantum dynamics; where everyone had a theorem named after them and field-defining publications translated into Esperanto and a dragon’s hoard of advanced degrees from the universities of Berlin, Munich, Paris, Basel, Zurich, Vienna, Petersburg, and Moscow—tell me how, in these conditions, a position could be found for an Israeli-educated malcontent with no PhD and no book and a history of inciting terrorist violence?
The world is full of real events, real things, which have been lost in their destruction and are only remembered as having existed in written history. But Zion, because it was remembered not as written history but as interpretable story, was able to exist again in actuality, with the founding of the modern state of Israel. With the establishment of Israel, the poetic was returned to the practical. This is the first example ever in human civilization in which this happened—in which a story became real; it became a real country with a real army, real essential services, real treaties and real trade pacts, real supply chains and real sewage. Now that Israel exists, however, the days of the Bible tales are finished and the true history of my people can finally begin and if any Jewish Question still remains to be answered it’s whether my people have the ability or appetite to tell the difference.”
Both my daughter and Netanyahu were natural overactors whose best roles were in assigning the blame they deserved to others, and demanding to be applauded for it, and pitying themselves when they weren’t.
In short: Ruben Blum, a historian who happens to be jewish, not a historian of Jews, gets a task to interview Ben-zion Netanyahu for the position in his small provincial college being the only other Jew there, the famous family arrives and mayhem ensues.
This is a novel about identity, Jewish identity to be precise.
Old world jews vs new world jews; American assimilating jews vs nationalists of Israel; Jews from the Bloodlands vs prosperous jews from Western Europe.
And all this is told with wit and sometimes mockery. Joshua Cohen doesn’t pull punches at Netanyahus, they come out as quite a bunch of chaotic ridiculous pushy whiny people, there's not munch sympathy here.
I wanted to read it the first time it came out, but after it won the Pulitzer, I took it as a sign. And I had a great time with it. Somehow the Pulitzer turns out to be the most fresh and interesting literary prize of all that I vaguely follow.
Just a few quotes I enjoyed:
And so my childhood was tugged between conflicting exceptionalisms, between the American condition of being able to choose and the Jewish condition of being chosen . . .
And so it might be more accurate to say that though Dr. Netanyahu was certainly a believer, he didn’t believe in an all-powerful God so much as he believed in the all-powerful goys, who were obviously more accountable and identifiable to academia than God was. Because unlike God, these kings, queens, ecclesiastics, and Jew-butchers who ruled the Jewish world had names and dates and places of residence and nationalities; they could be quoted with citation, marked by crosses and stars.
I might cite, in this regard, such luminaries and American patriots as Dr. Albert Einstein and Dr. Hannah Arendt. Do we hold against these folks a “gap” in their CVs between 1933 and 1945? Do we decide against them because their employment histories have “holes”? Of course not! That would be lunacy! And while the lacunae in Ben’s career are of a different nature, they’re not unrelated. Because while he himself didn’t suffer the European ordeal, he certainly did have to contend with less-than-ideal Palestinian conditions, from typewriter shortages and typewriter-ribbon rationing to Arab arsonists and biblioclasts who kept trying to torch the university archives. In other words, history came also to him.
Just about a decade prior to the autumn I’m recalling, the State of Israel was founded. In that minuscule country halfway across the globe, displaced and refugee Jews were busy reinventing themselves into a single people, united by the hatreds and subjugations of contrary regimes, in a mass-process of solidarity aroused by gross antagonism. Simultaneously, a kindred mass-process was occurring here in America, where Jews were busy being deinvented, or uninvented, or assimilated, by democracy and market-forces, intermarriage and miscegenation. Regardless of where they were and the specific nature and direction of the process, however, it remains an incontrovertible fact that nearly all of the world’s Jews were involved at midcentury in becoming something else; and that at this point of transformation, the old internal differences between them—of former citizenship and class, to say nothing of language and degree of religious observance—became for a brief moment more palpable than ever, giving one last death-rattle gasp.
Love is generally a one-to-one affair and mortal, but hatreds tend toward immortal typologies, with each change of identity becoming translated into more relevant terms, so that the Old World distinctions between my Ukrainian/Russian Jewish parents and Edith’s Rhenish Jewish parents became, in the New World, secularized rivalries between the Bronx and Manhattan, the Grand Concourse and Upper Broadway; mass-transit v. Cadillacs; no days off v. Lorelei vacations and half the year in Florida.
The earliest Zionist Congresses were split between these polar-opposite positions—between the “political” “evolutionary” Zionism of the West, and the “practical” “revolutionary” Zionism of the East, whose disagreements centered on geography and method: the questions of whether a land or the land should be negotiated for or seized.
According to the son’s Revisionist obituaries, Rabbi Mileikowsky died not of any of the chronic diseases that he was afflicted with but from grief that men so dedicated to the cause of Jewish statehood would be so harshly treated.
No student, however brilliant, would be forgiven this behavior, and Netanyahu was only brilliant by foreign standards—a statement I make with due respect. At any American institution, he would have been “a star,” but please remember that historical circumstances have conspired to hold Israel to a higher standard. Each year Netanyahu was at Hebrew University, new refugees streamed in, until, on the eve of the Second World War, the school was a monstrous teeming haven of the best faculties of Europe, all jostling each other for prestige. In the History Department alone we had Baer, Koebner, and Tcherikover, who together were fluent in something like 22 languages;
Tell me how, in this atmosphere where everyone was a world-historical genius in Tanakh, Talmud, Kabbalah, Hasidut, cuneiform, modal logic, matter, anti-matter, and quantum dynamics; where everyone had a theorem named after them and field-defining publications translated into Esperanto and a dragon’s hoard of advanced degrees from the universities of Berlin, Munich, Paris, Basel, Zurich, Vienna, Petersburg, and Moscow—tell me how, in these conditions, a position could be found for an Israeli-educated malcontent with no PhD and no book and a history of inciting terrorist violence?
The world is full of real events, real things, which have been lost in their destruction and are only remembered as having existed in written history. But Zion, because it was remembered not as written history but as interpretable story, was able to exist again in actuality, with the founding of the modern state of Israel. With the establishment of Israel, the poetic was returned to the practical. This is the first example ever in human civilization in which this happened—in which a story became real; it became a real country with a real army, real essential services, real treaties and real trade pacts, real supply chains and real sewage. Now that Israel exists, however, the days of the Bible tales are finished and the true history of my people can finally begin and if any Jewish Question still remains to be answered it’s whether my people have the ability or appetite to tell the difference.”
Both my daughter and Netanyahu were natural overactors whose best roles were in assigning the blame they deserved to others, and demanding to be applauded for it, and pitying themselves when they weren’t.
April 4, 2024
I was all over this. Cohen has been on my radar for a while, and, for many months, I’ve had a copy of The Netanyahus sitting, waiting patiently, somewhere down in the thick of the big pile of “bought-on-a-whim-and-soon-to-be-read” books that I keep in my flat. However, having purchased it ages ago, I hadn’t touched it since. I had it in my head that it was going to be an intensely dense book — a sort of Thomas Pynchon for the new era — and, even though I was intrigued, my trepidation outweighed my curiosity. This misconception was mostly instigated by the tone of the reviews I‘d read of Cohen’s previous and much longer novel, Book of Numbers, which had been brought to my attention, last summer, by Harold Bloom’s The Bright Book of Life. Bloom, himself, said that Cohen is “a difficult writer and is likely to become even more difficult” and that “Book of Numbers is difficult enough and has to call upon invention to palliate readers having an arduous experience”. I’ll remind you that these were the thoughts of a man who had Moby-Dick committed to memory, and who, I am informed, could read 1,000 pages an hour, so perhaps you’ll agree that my concerns about the inaccessibility of Cohen’s latest book weren’t entirely without cause. The clear message was that Cohen was going to be no fluffy, cosy soft toy of an author. I found myself picturing him as a kind of superhuman hyper-being with a pen, too clever to concern himself with my basic requirements for entertainment.
However, a few days ago, while looking for something short to read between instalments of In Search of Lost Time, I did finally pull The Netanyahus out from the middle of my big pile. Opening it up, I was immediately pleased to discover that the reality was quite different to what I’d been led to expect: My experience was that Cohen is an astonishingly readable writer. In fact, given the intellectual intensity of his writing, I feel like he has no right to be as glossily readable as he is. Furthermore, The Netanyahus’s addictive, conversational readability is just one of the many things about it that keep making you ask: How is this guy doing this?
By about 40 pages in, I was convinced that the hype surrounding Cohen is, indeed, entirely justified. There was one paragraph which, in particular, made that specific penny drop. It starts on page 40 with “It was the differences with history that got me the most”, and ends on page 42 with “carnage was the Jewish destiny and those of us who didn’t survive could at least be sure that those who did would interpret our deaths as foreordained and sacrificial”. It’s too long to quote in full, but, in its proper context, I thought it an almighty piece of writing, and the fireworks kept on coming from there.
The whole book is essentially one big gag — right up to its deliberate punch line of a final sentence —; however, it reads as the kind of comedy which is truer to human interaction than a lot of the monochrome works of dramatic fiction which we tend to exalt. It covers a whole range of serious, and touchy subjects, but I felt like it never tries to overreach, nor is it overtly one-sided, and the comedic aspects are used to lighten the seriousness of the ideas.
I was initially tempted to go with five stars, but, in the end, I’ve decided to stick with four and a half (mostly because I’d like to reserve my five for when I read something of Cohen’s that is a bit more substantial and because you don’t get no 3.18 average rating on Goodreads by being Mr. Chips — and, yes, I’m weirdly proud of my low average). I would like to say, mind you, that I think this is one of the best new books I’ve read in ages. It’s a worthy tribute to Harold Bloom and I like to imagine that he would have enjoyed it. He would, no doubt, have said something like: “It is a misfortune that my own transformation into Ruben Blum is neither as large nor as complex a creation as the respawning of Benzion Netanyahu — whose intellectual magnitude and canonically unpleasant irascibility piteously defeats Blum’s ingratiating mediocrity — but my commitment to aesthetic merit and invention impedes me from criticising Cohen’s choice”. Almost brings a tear to the eye.
However, a few days ago, while looking for something short to read between instalments of In Search of Lost Time, I did finally pull The Netanyahus out from the middle of my big pile. Opening it up, I was immediately pleased to discover that the reality was quite different to what I’d been led to expect: My experience was that Cohen is an astonishingly readable writer. In fact, given the intellectual intensity of his writing, I feel like he has no right to be as glossily readable as he is. Furthermore, The Netanyahus’s addictive, conversational readability is just one of the many things about it that keep making you ask: How is this guy doing this?
By about 40 pages in, I was convinced that the hype surrounding Cohen is, indeed, entirely justified. There was one paragraph which, in particular, made that specific penny drop. It starts on page 40 with “It was the differences with history that got me the most”, and ends on page 42 with “carnage was the Jewish destiny and those of us who didn’t survive could at least be sure that those who did would interpret our deaths as foreordained and sacrificial”. It’s too long to quote in full, but, in its proper context, I thought it an almighty piece of writing, and the fireworks kept on coming from there.
The whole book is essentially one big gag — right up to its deliberate punch line of a final sentence —; however, it reads as the kind of comedy which is truer to human interaction than a lot of the monochrome works of dramatic fiction which we tend to exalt. It covers a whole range of serious, and touchy subjects, but I felt like it never tries to overreach, nor is it overtly one-sided, and the comedic aspects are used to lighten the seriousness of the ideas.
I was initially tempted to go with five stars, but, in the end, I’ve decided to stick with four and a half (mostly because I’d like to reserve my five for when I read something of Cohen’s that is a bit more substantial and because you don’t get no 3.18 average rating on Goodreads by being Mr. Chips — and, yes, I’m weirdly proud of my low average). I would like to say, mind you, that I think this is one of the best new books I’ve read in ages. It’s a worthy tribute to Harold Bloom and I like to imagine that he would have enjoyed it. He would, no doubt, have said something like: “It is a misfortune that my own transformation into Ruben Blum is neither as large nor as complex a creation as the respawning of Benzion Netanyahu — whose intellectual magnitude and canonically unpleasant irascibility piteously defeats Blum’s ingratiating mediocrity — but my commitment to aesthetic merit and invention impedes me from criticising Cohen’s choice”. Almost brings a tear to the eye.
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