The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

First off, this book won the Pulitzer Prize this past year, and from a number of reviews I have read, book critics think this is a masterly work and that the author is a genius. This is a story steeped in irony, sarcasm, and comic relief, and it is very likely that about half of it went unappreciated by me. This sort of humor is just not my jam. The subtitle gives you a hint about this book: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family. It stems from a conversation that the author had with Harold Bloom, and the book is dedicated to him. It fills out, in a fantastical imagining, the details of a story that the critic told Cohen about playing chaperone to Benzion Netanyahu, a Polish-born, Israel-based academic better known as Benjamin’s father, during a visit to Cornell. Bloom, defender of the western canon, becomes Ruben Blum, a specialist in American economic history at Corbin college in New York state. He is chosen, as the only Jewish faculty member, to host an obscure historian of late-medieval Spain – Netanyahu’s real speciality – who is coming for an interview. The prospective faculty member brings his wife and their three sons with him to the interview and they are wildly arrogant, inappropriate, and tone deaf to social niceties. The visit is a bit of a disaster, but the devil is in the details of course, and this is well worth reading.