The complete title of this book, which won the Pulitzer Award for fiction (2021) is, The Netenyahus :An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family.
Few highlights right there. For most of the world, the first person who comes to mind when the title of the book is mentioned is the former Israeli Premier. Then the full title - why is it minor, and even negligible. How many of these minor and even negligible incidents make a not so minor impact on the minds of the party who experience it ? For our narrator Rubel Blum, him being asked to play Santa at the Christmas party is to highlight that as a Jew he doesn't celebrate Christmas, which is a not subtle - yet negligible reminder of his ethnic origins. Rube being asked to host, and assess, Benzion Netenyahu's suitability for the post is also on ethnic lines, as at the time Rube was the only Jew in the fictional University. His, and his wife's golf club membership applications being repeatedly being misplaced stinks of someone not really wanting them around. But mind this was the 1950s in update New York. Much has changed since then. But has it ?
Pearl Jam has a song called WMA (White Male American), in which Vedder laments that "Police stopped my brother, again" - this was back in 1993, because his brother's skin colour was different. 32 years after, maybe things have improved. But few years after the Obama regime I was aghast to see the US president claiming that a question raised to him by a journalist of Indian origin, dismissed on the grounds that he couldn't understand a word that was being said, and that too in the presence of the Indian Prime Minister. Things are the same elsewhere. In Colombo, Sri Lanka, where I am from, social media is circulating a post by a man, who claims that the Police harassed him at 3:30 am near the main Railway station, as to what he was doing about at that time, and whether he was a Gay seeking favours, when all the man was doing was returning home after his work at US working hours. The other - when he or she is a little different - cannot be let alone is still the default stance of many, regrettably.
But this book is much more than the highlighting of victim-hood. Well, actually it is all about highlighting of victim-hood, but where new interpretations are made which question the very attempt of assimilation by those who believe it whole heartedly. This is the essential quality of the book which made an impact on me. Our narrator Rube lives down his Jew origins in modern secular America, and he dismisses the negligible incidents of the Santa role or the missing Golf Club applications. But then comes a scholar seeking a position in Rube's university, who he finds has fixated on the hatred against Jews, and argues that there was no difference between Spanish inquisition against Jews converted to Catholicism in 1490, and what happened in 1940!
After a lecture that Benzion N. delivers, our narrator has these thoughts which question everything that he believes in, and on which he has built his life on - even at the cost of distancing himself from his extended families, and their unmistakable stressing on their Jewishness.
"This would even be true with America, where everyone if they're asked who they are answers Irish, or Italian, or preposterously three-quarters Scottish, half-Belgian Dutch, and at most one-drop Mexican black, anything but American. 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 Jews, but for everyone."
The book was published in 2021, and now in 2025, I hope the percentage that questions assimilation hasn't increased.
But these troubling thoughts are interspersed with a lot of satire, and comedy. So, although the politics, and their relevance of it today is sadly true, the book is a delightful, hilarious, yet pretentious affair, which can hold its own for the heady mix. To top it all off, we then learn that Harold Bloom once had to host Benzion Netanyahu (and his family), which included the future prime minister back when he was just a kid. To say that the whole visit was chaotic, is it to put it mildly, and this is the cornerstone for the novel. Bloom has mentioned this to Cohen, and Cohen has fictionalized - and then some - and here we have this gem of a book!
Rating: ****1/2
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