Humor and Haunting
Rebecca Sacks
Rebecca Sacks, a writer living in Los Angeles, is the author of City of a Thousand Gates (HarperCollins, 2021).
BOOKS
The Netanyahus
Joshua Cohen
New York Review Books, 248 pages, $16.95
The Netanyahus are spilling out of a busted jalopy. It’s January 1960, and they are tumbling out of the car and into the snow, chasing one another into the house, their shoes tracking slush onto the carpets. Abba Benzion is unbuttoning his coat, his wife Tzila is yelling at the three boys who are throwing snowballs, and Bibi, a year younger than his motherland, is shoving a handful of snow down his brother Yoni’s pants.
So goes our introduction to the future (now former) prime minister in Joshua Cohen’s latest novel, The Netanyahus, a fictionalized account of a real encounter between the medievalist historian Benzion Netanyahu (born Benzion Mileikowsky in Poland) and the literary critic Harold Bloom. In Cohen’s comic novel, Harold Bloom becomes Ruben Blum, our narrator, a scholar of American history at a rural New York college called Corbin (a stand-in for Cornell University, where the real-life Benzion taught in the early 1970s). Sure, Blum’s parents are alarmed to find he’s moved from the Bronx to a town without a shul; and yes, his wife finds him spineless; and if you must know, his high-school aged daughter spends most of the book campaigning for a nose job. But Blum is making do as the only Jew in Corbindale until his WASPy department chair tasks him with assessing the potential hire Benzion Netanyahu, to whom he and his beleaguered wife must also play hosts. Blum is an Americanist (“I am a Jewish historian, but I am not an historian of the Jews,” he says); Netanyahu writes on the Spanish Inquisition and the Marranos. What do they have in common? Two Jews in a goyish hamlet, that’s what.
In this agile and lively novel—a kind of slapstick cerebral—Cohen offers an ideological debate on assimilation and Diaspora, brilliantly disguised as a campus novel in the grand tradition of Kingsley Amis. The chaotic disruption of university town decorum by the Netanyahu boys—ringleader Yoni (age 13), follower Bibi (10), and sniveling Iddo (7)—is a delight. Especially rich are the scenes with Professors Blum and Netanyahu trudging around campus—the Israeli pointing out the casual anti-Semitism at the college and Blum, who has privately had the same thoughts, countering every point. The height of hilarity may be when Prof. Netanyahu begins quoting rude Yiddish idioms to the Corbin Seminary reverend, who nods along, assuming it’s Biblical Hebrew. “To expect to learn anything from a man like this is to expect to have an egg from a cow,” Netanyahu blusters. Blum begs him (in Yiddish) to shut up. In effect, the arrival of another Jew makes Blum’s Jewishness visible—a dilemma that heightens as the Netanyahus’ antics compile.
As so often the case with great humor, a series of sore questions lurk beneath the hilarity. What does it mean to survive history? What is lost when we assimilate? What are the dangers of treating nationalism as religion? At a moment when many Israelis and Jews worldwide are asking ourselves how it is that we arrived at a place of such acute extremism and entrenched violence, this book deftly posits an argument that is gaining traction as the various papers of record publish (no doubt premature) political obituaries for Bibi: that the origin of the current moment has its roots in traits endemic to the Netanyahu family.
Such a possibility comes through with particular force in the novel’s fifth chapter, which consists of a letter to Blum from Professor Peretz Levavi of Jerusalem, who writes regarding Netanyahu’s candidacy for a professorship at Corbin. Levavi confesses he is conflicted: in his professional assessment, Netanyahu’s work does not merit an appointment. Yet he desperately hopes Netanyahu will get this job in New York (or for that matter anywhere abroad) because he fears the man’s influence in Israel will spell disaster for the country. And what is so objectionable about Benzion Netanyahu’s academic contributions? He recasts the Inquisition in the shadow of the Holocaust, suggesting that the Spaniards treated Jews not as a religion but as a race. To Netanyahu there is an eternal, interchangeable enemy of the Jews—the Spanish are the Assyrians are the Nazis are Amalek. All his scholarship leads to the same conclusion, says Levavi: the necessity of the State of Israel. This man seeks to “politicize the Jewish past,” the professor warns, “turning its traumas into propaganda.” What’s more, Levavi details Prof. Netanyahu’s real-life engagement with Revisionist Zionism, noted for its insistence on a “full” Israel stretching from river to sea and for its terrorist tactics, including bombings and assassinations.
“As so often the case with great humor, a series of sore questions lurk beneath the hilarity.”
At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Levavi concludes, the zealous Netanyahu’s bitterness was stoked by a failure to compete with the great exiled minds of Europe. Cohen’s descriptions of the World War Two-era campus have an intoxicating nostalgia to them: “it was a common occurrence to walk out for some air and have to hold the door for Martin Buber or Gershom Scholem.” These men had fled the disastrous margins of history to arrive at a city inscribed by millennia of Jewish longing. Cohen calls them “broken émigrés.”
Meanwhile, Netanyahu the elder is pushing for territorial maximalism, nationalization of the Holocaust, and the conflation of history and religion. All concessions to the indigenous Palestinians are crushed. When Norman Bentwich, real-life proponent of a bi-national Jewish-Arab state, is scheduled to give a lecture on the dangers of nationalism as religion, the Revisionists sulfur-bomb the event.
And yet, the Netanyahu tribe is appealing in contrast to the stilted and neurotic Blums. Drunk and dazed, Mrs. Blum marvels at the mother, Tzila Netanyahu, and her “bitch strength.” Through the figure of this unapologetic Israeli, the narrator Blum finds himself refuting his own commitment to becoming American: “Your life here is rich in possessions but poor in spirit.” And for what? You’ll always be a Jew to them. In the end, all options seem equally bleak.
There are some limitations to Cohen’s inquiry. References to Black Americans have the feel of late additional parentheticals inserted to preempt some anticipated criticism. There is no open reference to the Palestinian lives hanging in the balance of the ideological debates that wash over the novel. Cohen seems more concerned with what Diaspora and its alternatives have cost Jews than with those others we have subjugated as we become agents of history.
Still, this book, Cohen’s sixth novel, lives up to the promise of its material. Anyone raised on stories of the young and dashing commando Yoni Netanyahu, who died rescuing hostages from the Entebbe airport in 1976, will find these imaginings particularly intoxicating. Here Cohen is tugging at the roots of our modern Israeli mythologies. Bibi watches his elder brother’s every move. Yoni, bar mitzvah age when we meet him, is already charismatic, assured, and reckless. Early on, he alludes to seducing his babysitter. He wreaks havoc in the Blum household and by the end of the novel is running naked into the snowy dark. Everything that has happened and everything will happen is already happening as young Bibi chases after his brother into the night.
This article appears in Sources, Fall 2021
