The Netanyahus : An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

By Joshua Cohen

New York Review Books/June, 2021

Reviewed by John Delacourt

September 5, 2021

Fathers and sons. As a theme in contemporary fiction, this particular intergenerational dynamic isn’t exactly having a cultural moment. Surveys show that only 20 percent of the fiction readership in Canada, the US and Britain is male, so that might have something to do with it.

Yet in contemporary politics, the complexities of father-son relationships insidiously thread their way through so many of the narratives of leadership. It’s like a phantom trope of the current campaign for the generation that can remember the first Trudeau era in Canada — and for Conservatives, for those who can remember John O’Toole or Doug Ford Senior from their time in office at Queen’s Park a generation ago. The stories that hold our attention are often about legacies, or tragic flaws that return as farcical vices, or the unfinished business of one generation that can play out as unfinished arguments that define so many partisan battles to this day.

Dreams From My Father was Barack Obama’s first book — perhaps the most honest title any male politician could coin for a memoir — and that work drew inspiration from a work of fiction too few people have read: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The quality of Obama’s writing is testament to one caution for anyone in public life, or any man who thinks novels are just for women; to forswear the reading of fiction is to risk becoming a fiction of oneself.

Which brings us to the former prime minister of Israel, and Joshua Cohen’s latest work, The Netanyahus. It is a mix of campus novel, historical fiction and not-quite-serious polemic on Zionism and its complexities, loosely inspired by the travails in academia of one Benzion Netanyahu, the real-life father of Bibi. Unless he’s feeling litigious in his current state of political exile, we can assume Cohen’s novel will not be on Bibi’s bedside table anytime soon. As a politician, Netanyahu fils is an interesting bunch of guys, but not one of them has ever seemed comfortable with irreverence or comic irony, which are the minor keys Cohen is playing throughout The Netanyahus.

For any author who is drawn to the current politics of identity playing out on campuses throughout North America, Benzion Netanyahu makes for an inspired, if provocative figure for comic invention. He was an academic who aligned himself with far-right Zionists led by the charismatic Ze’ev Jabotinsky, but he spent most of the formative years of the Jewish state in the US, where he taught at the now-defunct Dropsie college in Philadelphia, University of Denver and Cornell, but struggled to attain the kind of intellectual gravitas he felt was his due. The father’s influence on the son is the drama that hovers in the background of Cohen’s novel, and merely its implication strongly resonates throughout the narrative.

Yet Cohen does not insult his readers’ intelligence by resorting to a caricature of Benzion Netanyahu, which would strain that connective tissue to our own understanding of his son. In the elder Netanyahu’s efforts to be accorded some measure of intellectual legitimacy within the parochial groves of academe in 60s and 70s America, Cohen slyly sharpens his focus on the complexities of identity and statehood that shaped so much of the nation building efforts of Israel’s early years.

The comedy here is reminiscent of Vladimir Nabokov’s lesser-known campus novel, Pnin, where the quixotic obsessions of an academic exiled to rural America are contrasted with the staid, modest ambitions of the WASPish faculty.

Our perception of Benzion is filtered through the nebbish at the centre of the story. Ruben Blum is a professor of economic history at the fictional Corbin College, in western New York (modeled on Cornell, apparently). Blum has carved out a niche for himself among the goyim on the faculty by specializing in the history of taxation in America. The chair of the History department suggests he might have an “affinity” with a visiting candidate’s work, who has come to interview for an instructor’s position in medieval history. The chair asks Blum to be on the hiring committee — despite Blum’s insistence that he knows very little about Netanyahu’s research and area of specialization. The chair is perplexed; Netanyahu’s work is focused on Jewish assimilation in Europe; how could he not know about it? This is the same department chair who asks Blum to wear the Santa Claus costume for the Christmas party, because “it would free up the people who actually celebrate the holiday to enjoy themselves.” Blum awkwardly tries to accommodate in both instances, acutely aware of how alien he is to those wielding influence and power on the campus.

Like Netanyahu, Blum is an exotic among the locals, one of those rare birds with plumage that only blends in with the cosmopolitan climes and more rarefied cultural altitudes of New York City, where he was raised and educated. His hope for some sense of cultural affinity with Netanyahu evaporates in short order, though. The candidate quickly proves to be a difficult personality. He’s humourless, defensive and self-righteous, despite Blum’s efforts at softening his sharp edges while hosting him at home.

The comedy here is reminiscent of Vladimir Nabokov’s lesser-known campus novel, Pnin, where the quixotic obsessions of an academic exiled to rural America are contrasted with the staid, modest ambitions of the WASPish faculty, who take to the petty politics of status and advancement far more naturally than Blum and Netanyahu. The reader senses from Netanyahu’s arrival that his interview for the open position will be a slow-moving disaster, yet it is all in the telling, with Blum the well-meaning, mediating ally, helpless to stop it from happening.

The inspiration for this novel, if Cohen’s post-script is to be believed, comes from one of the author’s conversations with Harold Bloom, the legendary scholar, icon of bardolatry, critic and literary theorist known for The Anxiety of Influence, among other influential works of criticism. Bloom’s ruminations on the elder Netanyahu’s influence on his politician son centered on a very different kind of anxiety than Bloom’s Freudian read on poetic creation, however. Yet it proved to be a potent spark for Cohen’s light — yet deep — read on the legacy of a particular academic culture that came together in the early years of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Cohen has stated in a recent interview that The Netanyahus was written from a feeling of “valediction, a sense of saying goodbye to a certain generation or to a number of generations that memory collapses into a single generation…Bellow, Roth, Bloom — all the old Jewish intellectuals whose passing also represents the passing of a type of liberalism that isn’t in vogue anymore, or is maybe even demonized.” With its rich sense of comic irony and the light touch of a master stylist, the novel is also a fitting tribute to those writers Cohen can justifiably claim as his forebears with this work.

Policy Contributing Writer John Delacourt not only reads but writes fiction, including the novels Ocular Proof, Black Irises and Butterfly. He is Vice President and Group Leader of Hill + Knowlton public affairs practice in Ottawa.