Turning our attention to the winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, we look to the historical novel The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family by Joshua Cohen.
The book tells the story of how Jewish historian Ruben Blum, then working for fictional Corbin College in something just short of upstate New York, was wrangled into reviewing the application and working on the hiring committee for an exiled Israeli scholar whose specialty was the Spanish Inquisition. The early movement for the book presents challenges to Blum’s sense of place in relation to his wife, his daughter and both sets of the married couple’s parents in relation to the couple and their daughter.
Many pretensions and assumptions about the boundaries of living are challenged in this buildup. The challenges to these are raised an exponential level when employment candidate Benzion Netanyahu, originally of Warsaw, Poland brings his wife and sons for a day of interviews, lectures and being hosted in Corbin College’s community to determine fitness for the professorial position being contemplated for him. A comedy of disparate perspectives for Ruben Blum, his wife and child, Netanyahu, the family of Netanyahu, and those in charge of determining the fate of Netanyahu‘s candidacy provide a wild ride of how things so straightforward can turn challenging for the worldviews and senses of propriety for many.
That the book The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family mixes some sense of nonfiction into the philosophies for the elder Netanyahu that would inform parts of his son’s worldviews in political service underline the importance of the delivery that the comedic ambitions of the novel also present. The mortifying feelings of the emotional components are not to be lost, either, as the book lands with a satisfying blend of perspective sharing mixed with comedies of the personal kind. I grant the book The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family as written by Joshua Cohen 4.25-stars on a scale of 1-to-5.
Matt – Monday, November 21, 2022
Matt Lynn Digital 
One thought on “Joshua Cohen and the book ‘The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family’”