by Cathryn Conroy (Dublin, Ohio): Maybe I just don’t get it? That was my initial thought (repeated a lot in my head) when I was reading this short Pulitzer Prize-winning (2022) book by Joshua Cohen.
But then—about one-third of the way through—it came together for me, and (I think) I got it. Or, at least, I started to get it.
Despite the title, this is not really about that famous (infamous?) Israeli family. It’s really about a man named Ruben Blum, a professor of history at the bucolic Corbin College, a small liberal arts college in not-quite upstate New York. When Blum is hired on the faculty in the late 1950s, he is the only Jewish professor in the college. And not only that, the Blums—wife Edith, who is a librarian at the college and daughter Judith, a senior at the local high school—are the only Jewish family in town.
It’s the very snowy and cold winter of 1959-1960. For various reasons, the Corbin College history department is forced, almost against its will, to hire a new professor, and the man applying for the job is Benzion Netanyahu. Because both men are Jewish, Rube is asked to serve on the hiring committee. During his extensive research of the candidate, Rube discovers some questionable and troubling facts about the man’s curriculum vitae.
But the story isn’t about Netanyahu’s interview (until suddenly it is). It’s about Rube, Edith, and Judy and their assimilation into this WASP town where Edith is bored and disconsolate, while Judy is angry at the move and feeling intense parental pressure to achieve and succeed. But when the Netanyahus show up—yes, the entire family, including the three sons (one of whom is Benjamin)—the book takes a humorous turn—as in laugh out loud funny—including a bit of dark comedy. Benzion, an obscure Israeli academic, feels stranded in the United States with no job, a half-finished history book on a topic no one understands or believes is true, a furious wife, and three wild young sons.
The book is a bit pretentious, quite long-winded, and overly verbose at times, making it sometimes feel like a slog. And then it shifts seemingly without warning to become a more compelling and interesting story. And sometimes a funny story. While some of it feels like a family sitcom gone terribly wrong, the novel is also a serious portrayal of modern Jewish history and the establishment of the state of Israel.
And end note: As bizarre and unlikely the premise, it turns out that it’s based on a real event when Benzion Netanyahu applied for a job at Yale interviewing with renowned literary critic and humanities professor Harold Bloom. Do take the time when you are finished with the novel to read the “Credits and Extra Credit” for elucidation on how the novel came to be.
