Somehow, I'd never heard of Joshua Cohen until The New Yorker published "My Camp," his highly nuanced short story about the response of a prize-winning, Jewish American author to the October 7 massacre. I recommended it to every reader I knew well (and some I didn't, including a former colleague in the Bloomberg administration now responsible for the thankless task of running my alma mater).
Of course, the title of Cohen's own, 2022 Pulitzer-prize winning novel isn't exactly a siren call: The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family. Who wants to spend more time with a power-mad, morally compromised, right-wing gas bag who already has already dominated the quagmire of Middle East politics longer than any other Israeli?
Little did I know that Bibi barely appears, except as a peeping tom tween, the middle child of his academic father, Benzion, who is seeking an appointment at at American college in upstate New York during the late 1950s. The chair of the history department has assigned Ruben Blum, the only Jew on the faculty, to serve on a committee that will vet Netanyahu, a task he resents because his area of expertise is American taxation. Believe it or not, slapstick hilarity ensues, particularly when Blum's in-laws visit and the Netanyahu family crashes with the beleaguered professor. This is one sensationally funny book, right up there with the best of Philip Roth.
The set-up, inspired by something that really happened, enables Cohen to depict several variations of American Judaism and to explore the history of Zionism in a way that elucidates current Israeli politics. A shattering discussion about fairness that occurs between Ruben's father-in-law, a Holocaust survivor, and his idealistic granddaughter, who has written an earnest essay about the topic for her college application, left this conflicted peacenik nodding in agreement with the old man's thesis given the current state of our own country.
There's no denying it: people really are tribal, although Cohen himself remains firmly in the humanist camp.
No comments:
Post a Comment