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Summary
Summary
WINNER OF THE 2022 PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION
2021 NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD WINNER
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2021
A WALL STREET JOURNAL BEST BOOK OF 2021
A KIRKUS BEST FICTION BOOK OF 2021
"Absorbing, delightful, hilarious, breathtaking and the best and most relevant novel I've read in what feels like forever." --Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The New York Times Book Review
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 nonfiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers.
Author Notes
Joshua Cohen is the author of Book of Numbers which has been shortlisted for the 2015 Bad S-x in Fiction Award.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Cohen's stinging comedy (after the collection Attention) explores Jewish identity and campus politics in a fictional imagining of the current Israeli prime minister's family and their time spent in the U.S. in the early 1960s. Dr. Ben-Zion Netanyahu, a controversial Israeli historian forced into exile for his views, lands at Corbin College in Corbindale, N.Y., a stand-in for Cornell. Narrating in a rich first person is Ruben Blum, a history professor emeritus at Corbin, who suffered numerous "limp-slung swings and rubber-gag arrows" during his tenure. In lieu of plot, Cohen makes hay of the culture clash between the Blums and the Netanyahus, among them "quiffhaired wife" Tzila and rambunctious sons Jonathan, Benjamin, and Iddo. Uncomfortable exchanges abound on campus after the boozy aftermath of one of Netanyahu's lectures. (Another professor describes him as "afflicted with the hubris of the wounded intelligentsia.") Cohen's writing is vibrant even when ruminating on esoteric details on Jewish identity theories. A juicy afterword titled "Credits and Extra Credit" elucidates the genesis of many of the novel's components, including Cohen's correspondence with Harold Bloom (revealed as an inspiration for Blum) and claims that "Bibi" inflated the importance of his father's work after becoming prime minister. This blistering portrait is great fun. (June)
Guardian Review
The first obligation, when turning to the work of the electrifying American writer Joshua Cohen, is to stress that he clearly is a genius. In his essays (Attention!) and stories (Four New Messages), and in novels such as Witz, Book of Numbers, Moving Kings and now The Netanyahus - a comic historical fantasia - a dizzying range of bookish learning and worldly knowhow is given rich, resourceful expression. Cohen, who turned 40 last September, has prompted all the desirable M-words (master, magus, major) as well as comparisons to Thomas Pynchon (justified) and David Foster Wallace (slightly lazy). While James Wood settles for calling him one of the most prodigious stylists at work in the US today, Nicole Krauss has flatly declared that nobody writing in English is more gifted. Cohen's new novel, a sidelong portrait of the Israeli prime minister's father, has its origins in admiration spurred by his earlier work. In May 2018, he received an email from Harold Bloom, the celebrated critic and longtime Yale professor, summoning him to Connecticut. The resulting encounter was transcribed in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Bloom later included Book of Numbers in his posthumously published account of 48 novels "to read and re-read". The Netanyahus is dedicated to Bloom's memory, and fills out a story that the critic told Cohen about playing chaperone to Benzion Netanyahu, a Polish-born, Israel-based academic better known as Benjamin's father, during a visit to Cornell. Fills out, and wildly fictionalises: Harold Bloom, defender of the western canon, becomes Ruben Blum, a specialist in American economic history at Corbin college in New York state. He is chosen, as the only Jewish faculty member, to host an obscure historian of late-medieval Spain - Netanyahu's real speciality - who is coming for an interview. It's a source of slight disappointment that Cohen didn't stick closer to the record. It would have been fascinating to see a writer of his erudition explain why a Jew from the Bronx, raised speaking Yiddish, devoted his considerable talent and even greater energy to the promotion of poetry and plays by English Protestants. In the final pages, an author figure with many resemblances to Cohen gives what seems a sincere account of his conversations with Bloom, explaining that he changed the details of the Netanyahu incident to protect the living, though it becomes clear that this passage, though presented as an afterword, is itself at least partly fabricated. (I know that Bloom never met WG Sebald and somewhat doubt that Cormac McCarthy used to phone him from the bathtub.) The bulk of the novel is given to Blum's wonderfully pedantic account of his Corbindale existence and the visit paid in January 1960 by the Netanyahu family - Benzion, his wife, and their three wild, ribald sons (Benjamin plays a minor though not unmemorable role in proceedings). This cold, inauspicious evening provides ample opportunity for Cohen's descriptive powers. Snow comes "hissing down like static from a world turned-off". Benzion is portrayed as "an uncompassed loner in the snowy wastes", the soles of his shoes flapping loose "like a horse's lips". With its tight time frame, loopy narrator, portrait of Jewish-American life against a semi-rural backdrop, and moments of cruel academic satire, The Netanyahus reads like an attempt, as delightful as it sounds, to cross-breed Roth's The Ghost Writer and Nabokov's Pale Fire. Yet the novel may also help to explain why Cohen doesn't possess a fame equal to his talent. The ebullience and hyper-fertility that accounts for his work's rare pleasures can produce an engulfing excess. This is a brisk, impudent, utterly immersive novel that also wants to answer questions about Jews and history (the past serving as a distraction from the pain of present realities), Jews and identity politics (and the amnesia of the current incarnation), Zionism and the US (and the conflicting forms of Jewish mutation after the Holocaust), the distinction between Rhenish and Russian immigrants, and the paradoxes of the diaspora. Of its dozen chapters, two are given to letters that Blum receives from academics about Benzion's career (one lasting 18 pages), and another two take the form of lectures that Benzion delivers on campus, one a kind of Bible class, the other a disquisition on his chosen field of study. Even with Blum as an affable mediating force, I didn't understand every current that the visit stirred up. There's a moment towards the end that seems to signal an alternative road - a focus that might serve better to conduct Cohen's awe-inspiring gifts, and yield a calmer kind of wisdom. It comes when Blum is walking with his wife towards the end of what he calls "that Netanyahu-day". "I'm sick and tired of hearing about Jews," she tells him. "I'm talking about the two of us."