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Description

Corbin College, not-quite-upstate New York, winter 1959-1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian—but not an historian of the Jews—is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host, to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixing fiction with non-fiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics—“An Account of A Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family” that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers.

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Interesting house guests

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rhitc
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2021-07-05
The author is a celebrated American journalist turned writer who does not have an MFA and has expressed his disdain for the degree. He writes mainly speculative fiction. Legendary critic Harold Bloom rated Book of Numbers (2015) one of the four best books by Jewish writers in America. It went over my head.
Premise
Benzion Netanyahu, father of Binyamin (aka Bibi), Israel’s longest serving PM, and Yonatan, the Israeli commando who was the only casualty of the terrorist hostage rescue operation at Entebbe in 1976, was an Israeli historian and passionate Zionist who served as Professor of History at Cornell in the early 1960s.
Plot
Ruben Blum, a historian and the only Jew on the teaching staff at Corbin, a fictional liberal arts college in upstate New York in the winter of 1959-1960, is coopted onto the hiring committee tasked with assessing the employment application of an exiled Israeli scholar named Benzion Netanyahu, who specialises in the Spanish Inquisition. Our boy must also accommodate the applicant and his family in his own home for the duration of his stay. Suffice it to say, the Netanyahus are challenging house guests.
Writing
First person narrative by Ruben, which is at times reminiscent of Philip Roth, and at others of Woody Allen, but above all relentlessly evocative of time, place, and American Jewish culture.
Bottom line
Described by the author as ‘An Account of A Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Incident in the History of a Very Famous Family,’ this is Cohen’s best novel IMHO. Not just because it’s his shortest either, although that helped. That having been said, those among you who are not fans of Jewish humour should probably give it a miss.