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"Corbin College, not-quite-upstate New York, winter 1959-1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian-but not an historian of the Jews-is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host, to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixing fiction with non-fiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics-"An Account of A Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family" that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers"--… (more)
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This is my first book by Joshua Cohen. When I started looking into him I saw a number of comments indicating he is the new David Foster Wallace. I see what the commenters
Apparently Harold Bloom told Cohen the story of his meeting with Bibi Netanyahu's father, and from that story this book arose. After a lifetime in NYC our MC Ruben Blum (everyone calls him "Rube") has taken a job at an upstate New York college where he is the only Jew, (faculty, staff or student.) His parents and his in-laws behave like he has moved to a place where Western civilization can no longer be glimpsed. It is the 60's and the women's movement has not yet hit Ithaca (yeah, it is Cornell, though in the book it is "Corbin") so Rube's wife is pressed into the role of faculty wife-sidekick despite her intelligence and education . Rube's daughter misses the city but makes the effort to fit in with the cool kids in bucolic Corbin and in doing so she fully embraces all things goyish. Ruben is up for tenure so despite being aware of the many issues he is not rocking any boats. When the history department decides to vet a candidate for a newly opened tenure track spot somehow Benzion Netanyahu (Bibi's father) ends up on their radar. Because he is Jewish Ruben finds himself on the welcome committee for the Netanyahu clan and hijinks ensue.
The book is a deep dive into Zionism and both Jewish identity and Jewish-American identity (they are different things, really.) These are complicated issues that most of the Jewish people I know deal with. Earlier I quoted Larry David, and when reading this I kept thinking of a scene from Curb your Enthusiasm where Susie Essman and Larry David are yelling at each other "you're a jewface" "I'm a jewface? No you're a jewface." (Its a really great episode.) For many Jewish Americans there are elements of old school Jewishness that make us squirm. The yelling, the hondeling, the conspicuous displays of spending power, the presumption, the pushiness. That is not me, (well I am loud, that is true) and though (unlike Ruben) I have no desire to not be identified as Jewish I am really bothered when I see that sort of behavior from Jewish people because I know people are going to make the same assumptions about me. Side note: It really did feel like Ruben's goal was to fully assimilate. He was like Ralph Lauren (nee Lifshitz) - the Jew trying to be waspier than the wasps. Ruben's last line in the book truly encapsulates this, and it made me bark a laugh on the train so suddenly that the woman next to me skootched away from me. So yes, we reject this stuff, and we can make fun of it, but we also have to reckon with what makes us Jewish if we are so set on distancing ourselves from that real part of our culture. This is hard stuff! Anyway, Cohen goes there, and I laughed a lot on recognition and admiration, but also, I learned a lot. There is a bunch of information on the Spanish Inquisition that was enlightening to say the least. And did I mention it was funny? (The book was funny, not the Inquisition. The Inquisition was not funny, other than as interpreted by Mel Brooks.)
So why did I start by saying this is a 4.5 and not a 5? There are some problems. I mentioned the Jonathan Lethem connection in my head, and in part that is because both Lethem and Cohen are really really pretentious. I am not a person who is put off by preening displays of intellect. Believe me when I say my life would be miserable if I was one of those people because I am surrounded by that pretty much all the time. And if I am being honest I can occasionally be one of those people (though I am not half as smart or informed as Cohen or Lethem so I have less material to work with.) Still, I was a little put off by the pretension, the casual assumption that the reader was well versed enough in the differing approaches to and definitions of Zionism and the last 600 years of European history and the entrenched behaviors of Ivy faculty that no elucidation would be necessary. And perhaps paradoxically because Cohen is so broad in his references he can be downright pedantic when it comes to discussing things Jewish. I felt sometimes like he was in my head telling me why my opinions on Zionism and my "performance" of Jewishness were all wrong -- like he was picking away at all my factual and emotional truths and finding them ridiculous. I felt lectured to in parts, and that wasn't great. Overall though, this is genius. I am not sure it will resonate with non-Jews, but I am guessing if you enjoy Bellow and Roth, and especially if you like Jonathan Lethem it will work for you.
One of the funniest points of the book is an offhanded but funny note of a church called the "Church of the Assumption" - how often we assume! And how often we are wrong - or right!
Parts of this book were hard to read and required some history into actual Jewish history, but there were parts that were laugh-out-loud. Especially Ruben's personal family life and that of his parents and his wife's parents - representing both extremes of Jewishness. This just might be one that I would want to read again.
I'll bow to the NYT here for an explanatory summary: "The Netanyahus is a generational campus novel, an unyielding academic lecture, a rigorous meditation on Jewish identity, an exhaustive meditation on Jewish-American identity, a polemic on Zionism, a history lesson. It is an infuriating, frustrating, pretentious piece of work — and also absorbing, delightful, hilarious, breathtaking and the best and most relevant novel I’ve read in what feels like forever."
Ruben Blum, a professor at a Cornell-like college is asked to take around a potential candidate as he visits for the interview. Why Blum?...because he's "one of yours ". Blum has no idea the chaos that the visit will cause to his wife and especially his daughter whose quest for a nose job will not soon be forgotten.
I enjoyed the novel and the interview I listened to later where the author explains the genesis for the project. He's a good writer, no doubt, and I'll have to explore his other work.
Lines:
The fire had the same problem as the family: a lack of oxygen.
Why did the Church restore to Judaism the very converts it had just spent the better part of the Crusades trying to obtain, according to Dr. Netanyahu? Because the converts were bad Catholics? No, not all of them. Or because they were too good at being Catholic? No, not all of them either. Rather, the reason was because: as long as the Catholics still required a people to hate, the Jews had to remain a people doomed to suffer.
the economist who couldn’t make money (a figure as common as the historian who couldn’t make history)
“Of course, poorer families never had that option; I bet that’s why your parents always shared and their parents before them. But my parents slept separately, as did their parents. They could afford two beds and back in Germany they even maintained separate bedrooms. I think they thought of it as French, but the reasoning behind it was English, Victorian in a way, which for a German “Of course, poorer families never had that option; I bet that’s why your parents always shared and their parents before them. But my parents slept separately, as did their parents. They could afford two beds and back in Germany they even maintained separate bedrooms. I think they thought of it as French, but the reasoning behind it was English, Victorian in a way, which for a German
that Jackson wanted to redecorate the executive mansion, but, lacking the funds, he invited guests he could count on to wreck the place and then in the hungover light of the next morning staggered over to Congress to beg for help with cleaning up the mess and buying new furniture, in a subterfuge reminiscent of Judy’s
He was about fifty years old then, his face a tough nut of vaguely Mongol features, tiny olive pit eyes and absolutely enormous and fleshy oyster-shell ears, strong nasolabial folds that I’m not going to call “smile lines” or “laugh lines,” because the mouth itself was humorless, tightlipped.
And anyway, when I put on my galoshes, blew a kiss to Edith she refused to lasso in, and left the hacienda amid the giddyups and crack of gunshots, the association I had was with the father himself, Ben-Zion, and frankly with visiting lecturers and guest professors of all kinds, those solitary marksmen who wander as strangers from town to town, itinerant in habit, itinerant in mind, burning with the need to live down their pasts and prove their strength to the cruel and hostile locals.
This is the line of transmission. In other words, God’s words were written down in the Torah, which you call the Bible, or the Scriptures, or the Old Testament, which precedes what you call the New Testament in the books you put in the bedside drawers of your inns. The Torah is interpreted in the Mishna. The Mishna is commented upon in the Gemara. The Mishna and the Gemara together make the Talmud. Are you with me? Do you understand what I’m telling you, which my father told me, which his father told him? There is an unbroken line of descent, when the word of God enters history.”
The Spanish Inquisition was founded to provide a way out of this bind, and a justification for converso-oppression…. but the genius of the Spanish Inquisition was to insist it was a race.
I absolutely loved this novel. So much that I already have another Joshua Cohen novel (MOVING KINGS) on my must-read list. Very, very highly recommended.
- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER
I am always ready to admit my frustration with books that are "based on history" ie, present real people in real-ish situations and write around it. I hate this, especially when featuring living people or their immediate descendants. It is fake history, there are no standards, and often presents a negative image (which may or may not be accurate--but there are no sources!!). So, much of this story annoyed me. BUT--the sections that can truly be considered a "campus novel" were hilarious. The politics of departments, the infighting in class schedules and the ownership of subjects were absolutely hilarious. I truly laughed, especially in the section where Blum explains that though his history department has a reputation as being progressive ahead of its time in that it focused less on Europe, it wasn't because of any anti-colonial belief. It was because the chair. wants to be the only Europeanist in the department. Europe was his, and he would not hire anyone who might compete with him. This is so hilariously believable AND it is also hilariously believable that that would get twisted into the department being ahead of its time (when really it was the opposite--old WASP can;t tolerate any "competition").
So--this evened out for me. Good audio production, hilarious and infuriating sections.
It's funny at times, with lots of discussion about anti-semitism, history, Jewish identity in the US and Israel.