The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen — A Book Review

© Steven Boykey Sidley

This, surprisingly, is a novel, not a work of non-fiction about the past-Israeli president, Benjamin Netanyahu.

And it also has nothing to do with the current politics of Israel , but It has everything to do with a semi-fictional character named Ben-Zion Netanyahu, an Israeli historian, an academic, seeking a position at a US university called Corbin in upstate New York in the 1950s.

But It turns out that the real ex-Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu had a father who was an Israeli academic who sought a position at a US university, including Cornell in upstate New York. He was also named Ben-Zion Netanyahu, like our protagonist. And Corbin/Cornell. Get it?

Which is where fiction meets non-fiction on multiple levels in this most unusual, profound, very short (195 pages) and ultimately wonderful book.

Also Joshua Cohen, the author (41) is widely garlanded with awards and kudos, including being heralded as one of America’s best writers from everyone from the Wall St Journal to NPR to The New Yorker to Wired Magazine. If you haven’t heard of him, check out his Wiki page.

The plot is simple. Our first person narrator, Rubin Blum (whose real life alter ego is revealed in the afternotes to the book) is the only Jewish professor at Corbin University, at a time where anti-semitism had become quiet and insistent, rather than harsh and loud. For reasons which become clear later in the book, Blum is asked to help adjudicate the application of one Ben-Zion Netanyahu for a position at the university in the History Dept, which would make him the second Jewish academic, were he to be accepted.

And then surprisingly, the entire unruly Netanyahu clan arrives en masse at the Blum household, with Ben-Zion’s awful pushy wife Tzira, and three even more awful rude children (including the real/fictional 10 year-old Benjamin). And so unfolds the next 24 hours from academic panel interrogatory, to drinks reception, to public lecture.

The narrative alternates wildly from dense literary fiction — long-paragraphed disquisitions on all manner of matters, to uproariously funny depictions of dysfunctional family gatherings, to explorations and explanations and disputations of millenia of Jewish history, to the final explosive unforgettable comic/horror scene that wraps the book (really, this is one fictional scene which you will never forget).

This book will not find many readers, I fear. It is about what it means to be Jewish and secular and/or traditional in America and Israel, ground covered variously by Bernard Melumad, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, and more recently Jonathan Safran Foer. Being Jewish and its discontents and neuroses and ever present looking-over-the-shoulder even when nicely assimilated .

But it is an intellectual feast, occasionally milk-spurtingly hilarious, and noisily argued, as are so many novels by Jews about being Jewish a non-Jewish world.

So if you like the list of authors from a few paragraphs ago, this is definitely highly recommended — it further mines what is admittedly a very thin but rich vein in American literature.