The Netanyahus

Summary

Some parts a campus novel, another a new journalism text, Cohen’s novel follows a professor, Ruben Blum (modelled at least superficially on Harold Bloom) at a small college in upstate New York, as he is forced to serve as emissary for a prospective employee to the school. He is currently the only Jew in the faculty, and he was chosen for the position (of emissary) because the visiting professor is also Jewish, the father of eventual prime minister of Israel, Ben-Zion Netanyahu. What follows is an absurdist day of of imposition by the entire Netanyahu clan on the Blums, culminating in the mother and father Blum and mother and father Netanyahu walking in on one of the older Netanyahus (not Benjamin) sleeping with Judy Blum.

Quotes

The complete calmness, the complete comfortability, the totally untroubled capacity to relax inside of one’s own blanched-dry dermal girdle that comes from being swaddled in money, bonds, and stock certificates from birth, a patrimony honed at Groton, Yale, and Harvard. (14)

I just love this sentence, its assonance, its flow, its condemnation of entitled elites. Blanched-dry dermal girdle is very DFW-esque, and the flow and lilt feels Joycean. A sentence like this is why I want to read more of Joshua Cohen.

It was the differences in history that got to me the most. The history in my regular schooling was all about progress, a world that brightened with the Enlightenment and steadily improved; a world that would continue to improve illimitably, so long as every country kept trying to be more like America and America kept trying to be more like itself. The past was merely the process by which the present was attained, and the present merely the most current stage of the American superlative, to be overtaken by tomorrow’s liberation and capital’s spread, until the ultimate transfiguration of world history into world democracy. This meliorist account knew no bounds. Like the country itself, it could only grow; it could never end; it was open, expansive, exhilarating. (30-31)

And so my childhood was tugged between conflicting exceptionalisms, between the American condition of being able to choose and the Jewish condition of being chosen … (32)

This wasn’t the usual preparation of an academic evaluator, but closer to a self-evaluation, and the first time in my life I’d ever looked back and compared who I’d been with who I’d become. I was a tenure-track historian and an active participant in secular American life sneaking around in the attic-mind of an obscure Israeli academic like I was one of the antique Jews he wrote about, a convert forcibly returned to the faith I’d left and too consumed by internal turmoil to notice the hour, until—jolted by the chatter of amatory birds —I’d turn and tug aside the curtain and outside the window was morning. (42)

Regardless of where they were and the specific nature and direction of the process, however, it remains an incontrovertible fact that nearly all of the world’s Jews were involved at midcentury in becoming something else; and that at this point of transformation, the old internal differences between them—of former citizenship and class, to say nothing of language and degree of religious observance—became for a brief moment more palpable than ever, giving one last death-rattle gasp. (51)

[W]as this theater, or was this Judaism? (71)

When a family conflict is related to a stranger, I often wonder whom it hurts more, the family or the stranger. (84)

He was an historian who was left out of history, the spawn of a frustrated rabbi-diplomat who himself had been written out of the annals of the State. (92)

If the American empire couldn’t persuade allegiance to democracy over origin, it would fail. He said that while staring at me, unblinking: It would fail. He might even have been pointing at me: You will. What was true for Europe at the emergence of Zionism will one day be true for America too, once assimilation is revealed as a fraud, or once it’s revealed that the country contains nothing to assimilate to—no core, no connate heart—not just for the Jews, but for everyone. This, at least, was his implication, the text behind the text of his lecture, which he continued to speak to me with his hooded steppe eyes even after his prepared remarks were finished and he was making his acknowledgments and bowing to the light, deferential, and relieved applause: This is what I think of America—nothing. This is what I think of American Jews—nothing. Your democracy, your inclusivity, your exceptionalism—nothing. Your chances for survival—none at all. You, Ruben Blum, are out of history; you’re over and finished; in only a generation or two the memory of who your people were will be dead, and America won’t give your unrecognizable descendants anything real with which to replace the sense of peoplehood it took from them; the boredom of your wife—who’s tearing her program up into little white paper pills she’d like to swallow like Percodan— isn’t merely boredom with you or her work or with the insufficiency of options for educated women in this country; it’s more like a sense of having not lived fully in a consequential time; and the craziness of your daughter isn’t just the craziness of an adolescent abducted from the city to the country and put under too much pressure to achieve and succeed; it’s more like a raging resentment that nothing she can find to do in her life holds any meaning for her and every challenge that’s been thrust at her—from what college to choose to what career to have—is small, compared to the challenges that my boys, for example—whom she’s been condemned to babysit—will one day have to deal with, such as how to make a new people in a new land forge a living history.

Thoughts

This is a really compelling book. Sentences are fantastic, flow like white water rapids with their own momentum and heft. Thematically, it is in the same tradition of “jewish man forced to confront his own story by way of another man” of Roth and Bellow and Malamud. But, if those guys did post-postmodernism. There’s a lot about history, both personal and historical, and what fashions a man – his culture’s history, or his own. Netanyahu is for Blum that reminder of his historical provenance. There’s a great bit on page 140 where Ben-Zion, when confronted with Ruben’s daughters name, Judy, gives the whole Jewish history of that name claiming it stems from the name of God, only for Ruben to correct his account by saying she was named for her grandmother, the wife of a grain merchant.

What does it mean to have a history but to be ahistorical?

Vocab

• horripilated
• crapulous
• labent
• midden
• eschatology
• peripatetic
• lucubration
• arcana