The Netanyahus

When I first saw the ridiculously long full title, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, it reminded me of David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. Similarities persist beyond the title. Just as connoisseurs may find traces of plum, licorice, black currant, and orange rind in a Bordeaux, critics have noted elements of Wallace, Pynchon, Philip Roth, and Woody Allen in this brilliant novel.

It’s no accident that Ruben Blum, the protagonist and narrator of this story, is known as Rube by those close to him. An educated, intelligent man, a professor of history, he is also a nebbish who, although aware of everything going on around him, is unable to control any of it. At one point, he thinks he hears his wife call him a Freier, a Yiddish word meaning pushover or dupe. The story is as much about other characters—his wife, his daughter, his parents, his wife’s parents, faculty members, and, of course, the Netanyahus, as it is about Rube. In a scant 250 pages, Cohen sketches their lives the way a talented artist can portray a scene with a few deft brushstrokes. Just as it’s difficult to pinpoint who the story is about, it’s hard to define what it’s about because of its many themes, plots and sub-plots. It’s a witty campus satire, a novel of ideas, an exploration of the American Jewish experience, a story about family and collegial relationships, and a lens for looking at past events to better see the present. Hovering somewhere between fiction and fact, it’s an intelligent, hilarious, sad, and thought-provoking book.

Cohen’s descriptive language (“… the icicle-throned statue of Mather Corbin, industrialist and eugenicist, whose verdigrised and weather-pocked head showed a splotchy phrenology of pigeon droppings”) is as impressive as his ease in expressing thoughts and feelings (“Teased, taunted, I’d turn the other cheek, hoping for the best, expecting the worst, and understanding throughout that though life was beset by troubles, no relief or revenge and surely no dignity would ever be had by complaining.”). He can skewer pedantic academic jargon while giving an utterance contextual sense (“This realization resulted in a firm distinction being made in Jewish culture between preservation and interpretation, which is the psychic adumbration of the trauma that results from a fanaticism of accuracy.”). His characters are so realistically drawn that you want to kick some of them once in a while for their perverse behavior. There is nothing extraneous, and the plot twists take you by surprise, although they make sense and are foreshadowed. It is masterfully written, engaging, witty, and precise.

“In the history department alone we had Baer, Koebner and Tcherikover, who together were fluent in something like 22 languages; Polak, who liked to say that he could read two books at once, one with each eye, and his mortal enemy Dinur, who liked to say that he could write two books at once, one with each hand, would jockey for lectures and office-supplies with Shelomo Dov Goitein, who was just starting on his project of deciphering the Cairo Genizah; it was a common occurrence to walk down the hall and meet the dusty figures of Leo Aryeh Mayer and Eleazar Sukenik, two archaeologists taking a break to consult the archives between their excavations of Jerusalem’s walls; it was a common occurrence to walk out for some air and have to hold the door for Martin Buber or Gershom Scholem (I once neglected to hold the door for Buber, who walked straight into it.)”

The gist could be conveyed in a bland sentence: The university had an impressive roster of scholars. But showing rather than telling, Cohen has us picturing this extraordinary assemblage of eccentric, squabbling sages as he blends scholarship (these are all historical figures) with humor, and at the same time develops the personality of a minor character and furthers the plot of the story. This sentence from a letter written to Rube doesn’t represent the book’s voice, but one of many different voices the author uses to tell the tale effectively.

At the cost exposing my own ignorance, I admit that I knew nothing of Joshua Cohen or this Pulizer-awarded novel, and it took me surprise. Before reading it, I listened to the audio book (read by the author) and didn’t see any blurbs or have any idea of what to expect. That might be the best way to approach any book for the first time. Without presenting any spoilers, I may have already said too much, because my comments arouse expectations. Nothing matches discovering something on one’s own, and I’ve spoiled that for you already. I know not everyone will share my high opinion of this novel; I read the inevitable one-star reviews on Amazon. Maybe my admiration is due to the fact that, like Rube, I’m a product of a middle-class Jewish family in the Bronx and a graduate of CCNY and there’s much I can relate to here, but I think there’s more to it than that.

Some readers, no doubt, will consider this book a mordant take on academia, or a cheap swipe at the Netanyahu family. For me, it’s about something much larger and more important, the question of identity. Rube, like Philip Roth’s protagonists, is obsessed with his dual identity of American and Jew, and the events in this story force him to try to come come to terms with it. If this sounds like a novel about and for Jews, the dilemma is shared by everyone in this country with a hyphenated identity—African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans—and even unhyphenated indigenous Americans and all Americans of European decent. Identity is a universal issue, not one affecting only minority populations, because we all have conflicting loyalties to family, friends, and those with whom we share nationality, race, gender and sexual orientation, vocation, age, political party, social and economic position, etc. Rube’s quandaries result less from how he perceives himself than from how he feels he is perceived by others.

As an American Jew, the past year has been an especially difficult one for me, seeing atrocities committed by my lantsmen, as it were, in Israel, against Palestinians, and also seeing Gentiles and Jews in this country, who are outraged by these actions, branded as antisemitic, based on a cynical and dangerous conflation of Judaism with revisionist Zionism. This issue has so consumed me that I wrote my own novel attempting to deal with it. I view Cohen’s book as the product of a similar struggle. In the bonkers yet effective argumentation of Benzion Netanyahu, we discern something of the ability of his son Bibi (and for that matter, that of our own dear leader) to lead people astray in much more consequential matters, and upend a relatively stable world order.