Familien Netanyahu

Although this book is flawed in some ways as a novel, it's a really, really good book (thus 5 stars), and it's certainly a fitting time to read it. It is brilliant, hilarious, intense, and under all the humor, real pain flickers.

The narrator, Ruben Blum, is the lone Jew on the faculty of a fictional college in upstate New York in the late 1950s. Because he is the lone Jew he is asked to sit on a search committee that is interviewing Benzion Netanyahu (Bibi's dad) as a candidate for a faculty position in the history department. This is despite his expertise being in an entirely different area. The story is based very loosely on Netanyahu's real life faculty appointment at Cornell.

Netanyahu is a Zionist Jewish historian, and Blum a non-secular American Jew. Their relationship is symbolic of the conflict between Zionism and more the more progressive forms of Judaism in Jewish history. There is even a nearly 20 page history of Zionist Revisionism in the form of a reference letter for Netanyahu from a professor at Hebrew University.

The Blum family struggles with the unexpected arrival of Netanyahu's rambunctious family along with him. Because of a kerfuffle at the local inn, Ruben and his wife are forced to put them up in their own home, resulting in a wild scene with out of control children, spilled drinks, and permissive parents. The chaos seems to be the point -- it is the result of widely divergent worlds crashing together.

Cohen never resolves Ruben's dilemma. The messiness of the situation reflects the course of Jewish history and its relation to western Christian history, from which Jews have often been left out. There is so much to think about here, and so much that is relevant to the current situation in the Middle East. I highly recommend it.

For Ruben Blum, the main character of this novel, history is a nightmare from which he is trying to awake. A Jew in a WASPish college in New York state, his intention is to assimilate, become an inconspicuous Americanist and shed the cultural particularity of his Jewishness as unassumingly as he can. He is self-conscious, neurotic and in being so, extremely aware that he is as much a cliché as his parents and parents-in-law, who bring with them the the historical trauma of exile from the Judeocide and the centuries of bigotry, whether European or Russian that led up to it.

The Netanyahus is a reasonably entertaining comic novel. It's very smart, there's a lot of farce / big words and it would difficult to deny that the prose is often dazzling. Even though the proliferating sub-clauses don't quite grate towards the end, writing at such a pitch for ~250 pages has its pitfalls and its effect begins to fade through prolonged exposure. I don't think the entire work really approaches what it was like to encounter the abridged excerpt of the works' opening pages when they were first published in n+1.

The novel, like almost all American novels published after 2016, is a response to and meditation on the election of Donald Trump, with everything the family of Benjamin Netanyahu serving as the objective correlative of atavism, chauvinism, political extremism. As is the problem with many of the novels which have arisen out of this vibe shift, the emphasis falls on the rupture rather than the continuity. As the US supposedly 'lurched to the right' when Trump was elected, so Netanyahu's stint in office is, as Cohen writes in an afterword, 'marked by the building of walls, the construction of settlements, and the normalization of occupation and state violence against the Palestinians", as though this forms some kind of contrast with everything that's been marking the place since the Mandate period.

Everything up to that point, the siege mentality, the bitterness, fantasies and dream sequences in which Blum's neighbours, colleagues are cast as pogromists, could have been read as a working through of the siege mentality of Zionism from the inside and Cohen would have nothing for those trying to pull past the literary pyrotechnics but a shrug, the more fool you for seeking a straight answer. But in the non-fictive afterword he plays his hand, and doesn't go far enough.