Veteran AF: May 30, 2022

Monday, May 30, 2022

The Netanyahus: A Funny Novel About A Job Interview Gone Very Wrong. Book 18 of 2022

A couple of weeks ago, I listened to an interview of American novelist Joshua Cohen on the Ha'aretz Weekly podcast. Host Allison Kaplan Sommer talked to Cohen about receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Ficton for his novel, and learning about the award while he was in Israel.

Of that coincidence, Cohen said, “If I thought that I was going to win the Pulitzer for a book called ‘The Netanyahus’ I would have to be crazy to want to be in Israel when that happened.” The interview occurred shortly after Cohen arrived in Israel for the Jerusalem International Book Forum and Writers Festival.

Cohen said he was still in shock that he had won the biggest literary prize in the United States for a novel “that has characters in it that most Americans can't pronounce their names.”

Its main character is the brilliant but embittered Professor Benzion Netanyahu, best-known today as the father of Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Benzion Netanyahu in the book (and in life) was a demanding, pushy, malcontent. Cohen said that as he was writing he “kept on thinking of the line in ‘The Big Lebowski’ where the Dude says to Walter: ‘You’re not wrong, you’re just an asshole.’ And that was Benzion Netanyahu."

The other main character, Bezion's opposite and foil, is Ruben Blum, the only Jewish faculty member in the fictional college in upstate New York where Netanyahu comes for a job talk. Blum is a too-willing-to-please stereotype of a Jewish professor. Cohen insists Blum is in no way based on the brilliant Harold Bloom whom Cohen was able to spend a lot of time with before he died in 2019. But it was Bloom's meeting Benzion and his family in the late 1950s that inspired the book.

Two of my favorite chapters are the letters Blum receives about Benzion Netanyahu. One is glowing to the point of radiance. The other is from an Israeli colleague and is the scathing letter we have all fantasized writing about a thoroughly terrible colleague.

The ending is lovely--the comedy reaches its slapstick peak, then the novel ends. The afterword explains the genesis of the novel and talks about the lives of all of the Netanyahus.

I read the novel in a few days. It is so much fun.

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By the way, the long title of the novel has an 18th Century length and feel:

The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family. (20 words)

An actual title of an18th Century novel:

Love And Madness. A Story Too True. In A Series Of Letters Between Parties Whose Names Would Perhaps Be Mentioned Were They Less Well Known Or Less Lamented. (27 words)

First seventeen books of 2022:

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen