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

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis: Book 17 of 2022

I loved Perelandra by C.S. Lewis when I first read it almost forty years ago. I re-read it in the 90s, but have not re-read it in this century till now.  It certainly confirmed for me that one of the delights of re-reading in late life is finding so much of the book new and surprising.  From the moment the hero confronts the villain, all the action was new to me. 

The occasion for re-reading the book was the publication of a new book by my friend Jim Como about Perelandra titled:

Mystical Perelandra: My Lifelong Reading of C.S. Lewis and His Favorite Book. 

As the subtitle asserts, Perelandra was Lewis' favorite book among the 39 published during his lifetime--several more were published posthumously.  

My friend Cliff and I are driving from Darmstadt, Germany, to Copenhagen next month and plan to read Jim's book on the trip. We also agreed to re-read Perelandra before the trip.

In the book, Lewis imagines Venus as a beautiful world of floating islands.  The hero of the novel is Elwin Ransom, a philologist. He is sent to the world by angels to save the world, but not exactly knowing what to do.  For much of the beginning of the novel, Ransom swims the towering seas of Perelandra, then eats the beautiful and wildly varied fruit on the floating islands.

It is a world that is just beginning with its own green-skinned Adam and Eve.  At the opening of the novel there is no sin in the world.  Sin appears in the form of the physicist Edwin Rolles Weston. He invents a spaceship capable of interplanetary travel and flies to the unspoiled world with his soul already taken over by Satan.  By the middle of the novel the soul Weston is mostly gone from his body. Ransom starts referring to Weston as the Un-man. 

The end of the novel is a fist fight on land and in the sea that ends in an underground cavern with a bottomless pit of fire! It is a fun story that finally ends with the crowning of the King and Queen of the new world. After fifty pages of fast-paced fights and action, the final scene is stillness and formality.  

Although Perelandra  is a re-telling of the temptation story from the first book of the Hebrew Bible, the book is definitely not a Jewish story.  All of its theology is deeply and explicitly Christian.  

If you Google search Perelandra, the first and third links have nothing to do with the book.  The first is Perelandra Natural Food Center in Brooklyn, just south of the Brooklyn Bridge. The third is the Perelandra Center for Nature Research, Ltd. The unspoiled world of floating islands makes a much more vivid picture of natural perfection than the vague description in Genesis.  I emailed the store in Brooklyn to ask about the name and got the following reply:

Hi Neil,

Yes it is! The founder of the store was a big fan of that book.

Best,

Allison

First sixteen books of 2022:

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

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Flying to Kyiv from New York on February 24--The Flight Ended in Warsaw

Today at #RazomforUkriane, I worked with a Nikita.  He is a 36-year-old project manager for a U.S.-based utility company. As we assembled IFAKs (Individual First Aid Kits) he told me that on February 24 (The day the Russian Army invaded Ukraine) he was on a flight from New York to Kyiv. As the plane neared Ukraine it was diverted and landed in Warsaw.

"I was going to Kiev on Feb 24 to see Louis CK stand up concert which was supposed to be on February 25," he said. "I also do stand up comedy when I get a chance in my personal life and since war started we had a charity concert to raise funds which we sent to Ukraine." He has I also donated funds directly to people I know in Ukraine and other organizations.

Nikita spent the next week in Poland helping the refugees who began crossing the border into Poland within hours of the start of the war.  At one point he rented a car and drove refugees from the border to where they knew someone or wherever they wanted to go.  He helped with food and supplies, then returned to America and his job. 

He is 36 years old.  He emigrated to America from the Russian Federation in 2000 with his family when he was 14. "I am from Russia, but my heart is with Ukraine," he said.  "I have lots of friends in Ukraine and I love that country with all my heart and I don't support Russia in any way and I am 100% with the Ukraine."

Nikita makes Instagram videos in English and in Russian under the name: forced2disagree.  

"The videos are titled "Less is More" and are they are about people around the world," he said. "I tell a short story about a person that I personally met or know. And I can't wait to go to Ukraine and document many stories there and help in other ways as well."