By Emily Burack, Alma via JTA
NEW YORK — Joshua Cohen’s novel, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, imagines one disastrous night in the winter of 1959-60 when Benzion Netanyahu, the historian and father of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, interviews for a teaching position at a fictional college in upstate New York.
L-R: Benzion Netanyahu, sons Benjamin and Jonathan, his wife, Tzila.
Selected to be Benzion’s guide to campus, and put on the hiring committee, is the one Jewish man in the history department: Ruben Blum, our narrator.
It’s a mix of fiction and nonfiction — the elder Netanyahu was, indeed, a professor of history, and spent time in America including at the University of Denver. In an author’s note at the end, Cohen writes that the book was inspired by Professor Harold Bloom’s story of Netanyahu interviewing at Cornell.
“I like the words ‘minor’ and ‘negligible,’” Cohen says. “Whenever it says minor and negligible, I say, ‘well, that’s where the truth is.’”
In May, before Israel would again erupt in conflict and Benjamin Netanyahu would be replaced by his former chief of staff, Cohen and I chatted about all things Benzion Netanyahu.
In the “Credits & Extra Credit” chapter, you note that this story of Benzion Netanyahu was one of the last stories Harold Bloom ever told you. What struck you most about the story when you first heard it?
Cohen: When Harold was asked about the top 10 stories of his life, this was not anywhere near the top. Harold — it’s hard to talk about him in the past tense, because he was such an alive figure. Just reading a sentence of his brings him back. Beyond his sort of famous — or infamous — reputation as a scholar, a critic, a writer, a hermetic gnostic, but also as a popularizer, he was also a wonderful storyteller.
This aspect of his career was never really put on onto the page. He never wrote a memoir. He never really told stories on the page in the same way that he told them in person. And he had so many stories!
This one was a very, very minor one that he sort of offered in passing, noting some overlap between himself and Benzion Netanyahu.
I asked him to tell me the story, and then I asked him to tell me it again, and tell me it again. Every time he told it, certain details changed, certain things get moved around, and so it felt ripe for fictionalization.
This encounter with history was among the most interesting to me, from a political standpoint, which is not necessarily the way I think Harold thought about it. I don’t think you think about personal relationships, or these personal encounters you have, in a political way. I don’t think he had that distance.
Where do you find the line between fact and fiction? How do you blur the two?
Slowly. I had permission to do what I would, but at the same time, part of that permission from certain parties has to do with putting certain limits in places. The history that I was interested in was the sort of the pre-history of the Netanyahu family and the history of Benzion Netanyahu in Palestine, and then in New York and suburban Philadelphia. How did he get here? Why? Why was the family here for so long? What was his career like at The Hebrew University? What was that atmosphere? What was the Jabotinsky circle like?
Certainly, there are a number of histories of these circles. But the truth is that Benzion Netanyahu, despite his middle son’s sort of beatification or canonization, was a figure who doesn’t actually figure into many of the histories of the period. So, it was about tracking down some older professors who still had some memories. A lot of this was an academic game of telephone.
The subheading of your book is “An Account of A Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family.”
Do you really believe this is a minor and negligible episode, or do you think it is a key to understanding Benjamin Netanyahu as we know him today?
I don’t [think] the book’s only intention is to talk about Netanyahu today. I mean, I don’t even know what Netanyahu is today. It’s that paradox: The more that’s written about someone, the less you can get a handle on him.
I wanted to write something about the identity politics and the campus politics that are around us. There’s a lot in Benzion Netanyahu that’s really about the tribalism that happens when these large ethnic or racial collectives collapse — these empires collapse, and they collapse into tribalism. Benzion saw it in Poland, where he was from, after WWI.
The lesson you take from that is: When you can’t have legitimacy as a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian empire, or a free Poland, you’re inexorably attracted to a group that will define you, identify you, take you in, and provide for you. This idea of who are your people? Who is your tribe? Who are your alliances?
These questions have really come back to us in a strange American context. I wanted to look at these roots of these ethnic politics and racial politics.
I also wanted to explore what it meant to be left out of history. With Benzion Netanyahu, there was this seething resentment of a person who had “deserved more” and thought that he should have had a role in the early state and he was a man born to lead.
But, during the most important decade in modern Jewish history, when the state of Israel is being founded and Jews are being slaughtered in Europe, he’s in America. There is a certain kind of return of the repressed when the father who is kept out of history raises the son.
A lot of these were the questions that were stirred up under Trump, and the idea of writing about these things directly was somewhere between boring and too difficult. So I felt like this “minor negligible event” had all of these possibilities.
If the Netanyahus did read your novel, what do you imagine their reaction would be, or what do you hope their reaction would be?
Talking about someone’s parents, about someone’s father, is difficult. In a way, you surrender some of that privacy when you become prime minister, and certainly when you become the type of prime minister he is.
I would hope that I presented a lot of Benzion Netanyahu’s ideas accurately. I think his character is something that his two living sons would be critical of. I wouldn’t know about Iddo [youngest Netanyahu son], but Bibi — his self-presentation is so manipulative. He fluently comes in and out of this American style. Yet, he’s at such pains when he’s home to bury the American side of him.
And then when he’s here, he code switches in this very virtuosic way. It’s fair to ask: What is American about this family? What is, and what continues to be, American in his confusion of ideologies? What is this ethno-nationalism that was incubated in an American space? Because I think it could only really have grown like that in America.
While I saw a lot of Bibi in Benzion Netanyahu, I also see a lot of myself, of novelists in general, in him. Here was a man who lived in relative comfort in America, for whom every moment was an emergency.
Every morning when he woke up, the world was burning. A man who — in a free society that wasn’t try to kill him — had the freedom to live in a bubble of his own panic, and had to create the panic that his society was not providing for him. To me, that was a pretty good illustration of what it feels like to be an American novelist.
