At times immensely readable, at times a proper challenge - it can read more like an academic paper than a work of fiction - it’s difficult for me to fAt times immensely readable, at times a proper challenge - it can read more like an academic paper than a work of fiction - it’s difficult for me to form a coherent response to this book. I felt little emotional connection to it, and didn’t have much appetite for it, yet it certainly earned my regard and admiration. I read it with my Pulitzer Prize reading group, and probably wouldn’t have persisted with what felt like a task if that hadn’t been the case. It’s undeniably clever, but I constantly felt like I was missing the point or not quite in on the joke.
Let me give you a bit of the flavour of the writing, and this is an excerpt that I did understand:
Just about a decade prior to the autumn I am 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 hatred 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 proces, 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.
The narrator of the story is Ruben Blum, the first Jewish professor on the faculty of Corbindale College - a ‘sub-Ivy’ college in New York state. A former Bronx Jew, of Russian/Ukranian immigrant parents, Blum’s speciality is the history of American economics. His family is rounded out by wife Edith and teenage daughter Judy. During the school year of 1959/60, Blum is just getting a firmer toehold into the community; if asked, he claims that he would say that domestic life is ‘wonderful’, although he admits to himself (and confesses to the reader) that his wife is ‘bored’ and his daughter is ‘angry’. If Blum and his family represent the mid-century Jewish American experience - a state of semi-assimilation - then the Netanyahu family represent something far more intractable.
The first half of the book focuses on Ruben Blum, whilst the second half is given over to the visit of the Netanyahu family of the book’s title. (In the book’s Afterword - which Cohen titles ‘Credits & Extra Credit’ - it’s revealed that the Netanyahu visit is actually based on a real visit to an American university, as recounted to the author by the famous academic Harold Bloom. ) I won’t entirely spoil the narrative surprise, but let’s just say that the visit is intense, comic, absurd and grotesque. It has been proposed that Corbindale might hire Dr Netanyahu - and presumably because of their shared Jewishness, Blum is given the responsibility of vetting Netanyahu’s references and hosting him during his visit. Unexpectedly, he brings the family - wife Tzila and their three sons - with him.
I wasn’t sure, until the novel’s afterword, what was fact and was fiction. On reflection, it’s clear that the novel is attempting to elucidate how and why the United States became critical in the formation of the state of Israel. (At least that is one idea in the book, and there are plenty of others - most of them related to the Jewish experience, although Cohen is certainly very funny and knowledgeable about American academia.) The future Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu- the middle son of the Dr Netanyahu featured in this book - is characterised in this way by Cohen:
His reign, marked by the building of walls, the construction of settlements, and the normalisation of occupation and state violence against the Palestinians, represented the ultimate triumph of the formerly disgraced Revisionist vision promulgated by his father.
Reading this book was, in a way, a history lesson for me; but if anything, Cohen’s book is also (always?) a reminder that ‘history’ is just a construct shaped by the storyteller....more
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