As a reminder, here is the scale I use when reviewing books.
***** An extraordinary book: one of my Top 15 all-time favorites
**** An outstanding book: highly recommended
*** A good book: worth the read
** An OK read, but you'd be better off finding something else
* Not worth the read; avoid at all costs
I can't remember ever reading a book about Jews and Israel, let alone two. Those aren't topics that usually interest me. However, with the recent genocide in Gaza, I've been interested in researching a bit of the historical background of Israel and Palestine and I stumbled into these two novels which are, if nothing else, fairly interesting.
The Netanyahus, by Joshua Cohen (**** is my rating, but if you aren't familiar with American Jewish culture, its constant references to that culture may make the book tough to figure out.)
This book, which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Literature, is one of the more extraordinary books I have read recently. It's about a Jewish professor of history from New York City who suddenly finds himself working at a small college in upstate New York, where he and his wife and daughter are the only Jews in the community.
The novel is set in 1959-1960 and focuses on the professor, Ruben Blum, and his disconnection from his Jewish heritage made even more acute by his isolation at Corbin University. The plot revolves around the job he has been given by the head of the History Department to lead the search committee for a new joint faculty position in religion and history. He's been given this task because the main candidate is a Jewish scholar named Benzion Netanyahu and Ruben is the only Jew at the University, so he's given the job by default.
When digging through Benzion's scholarship Ruben discovers something interesting. Benzion is a radical, extreme Zionist whose scholarship is highly controversial and outside the mainstream. Benzion argues that Jewish history is a continuous series of holocausts and the only way to break this cycle of tragedy is through an aggressive Zionism where the outside world is constantly and actively combatted. It's much more detailed and complicated than this, but that's the basic idea.
The novel really should be titled "Ruben Blum" as it is more an examination of Blum's disconnection from his Jewish heritage, the subtle Antisemitism present in America, and the struggles of raising a new generation of Jews in an increasingly secular world.
The Netanyahu family doesn't enter the book directly until well past the midpoint when Professor Netanyahu arrives at his job interview in a broken down old car with his wife and three young sons in tow, much to the surprise of Professor Blum who was only expecting the Professor. A series a comic disasters ensue as the Professor and his wife and daughter must house the entire Netanyahu family in their home. The Netanyahus are the houseguests from hell, and middle son Benjamin (who is the child who eventually becomes the Prime Minister of Israel) is particularly bratty and poorly behaved. Well, the whole Netanyahu family is a disaster actually. And the novel ends with the most dreadful job interview ever, an illicit sexual encounter between the oldest Netanyahu son and Blum's daughter, a blizzard, and the necessity for police involvement.
This novel is fascinating, as it is completely fictitious (based on a small anecdote the author learned from one of his professors who had hosted Benzion Netanyahu for a job interview at his university decades ago), yet everything in it is also historically accurate. Benzion Netanyahu was indeed a radical Zionist whose extreme ideas helped formulate modern Israel and whose ideology had a direct impact on his middle son, Benjamin, the future prime minister. The current Gaza catastrophe is much more easy to understand from the current Prime Minister's perspective, because his approach mirrors exactly that of his father's, both in the novel and in real life. Benzion Netanyahu, though he died several years ago, at the age of 102, was the great architect of his son's paranoid and extreme mindset that has led to the horrible Gazan tragedy we are experiencing today and the novel shows how this has taken place, though it was written a few years before today's terrible events unfolded.
The book is filled with lots of challenging cultural references to those who might be unfamiliar with small town American and U.S. Jewish culture. But from my perspective, I understand why this book was the recipient of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize, because it illuminates the present with an extended anecdote from the past that is extraordinarily wise and rather humorous too. It's also a poignant picture of an American Jew's challenging struggle to somehow both overcome his heritage yet somehow simultaneously maintain it in his life. Finally, I appreciated the call to reject all forms of nationalistic extremism in the last chapter, but clearly few people listen to that sort of sentiment.
I think The Netanyahus is a great novel, but I just can't recommend it to most folks, as it requires so much insider knowledge to appreciate. However, I would strongly recommend Googling "The New Republic: Origin Story for the Netanyahus" which is a review of the novel in The New Republic. It captures everything you would need to know about the book and is filled with fantastic insight, much deeper than what I provide here.
All the Rivers, by Dorit Rubinyan (before October 7, I would have rated this book more favorably, but the plot seems so improbable now. I suppose ** 1/2 would be a reasonable rating, though maybe higher would be more fair. I guess the book's heart is in the right place.)
The romance novel isn't my favorite genre and I seldom read books in this area. My mother borrowed this book from the bookmobile that stops by her senior apartment complex once a month and asked me to return it to the Spokane County Library before it became overdue. So, I took advantage of the four days before the due date to read the book myself before returning it.
All the Rivers is set in New York City in 2002-2003 and chronicles the romance of Liat, an Israeli woman who has received an academic fellowship and is studying in NYC, and Hilmi, a Palestinian photographer who has escaped the troubles on the West Bank and is working odd jobs to survive while he tries to start up a photography career in the U.S.
Of course, the cross-cultural troubles that arise when two people from different societies engaged in conflict try to unite is the centerpiece of the novel.
Eventually, both Liat and Hilmi leave New York and return to Israel/Palestine and a tragic ending is what results. The romance seems improbable, but with the events of today, I don't see how this novel could take place and it now seems like an impossibility of the highest magnitude. But, the novel does contain insight about the perceptions and the harsh bigotry of Israelis when they learn the Palestinian identity of Liat's lover.
This novel is also noteworthy because it won the 2015 Bernstein Prize, a Jewish literary award. After publication, the Israeli Ministry of Education ruled that the book could be not used in Israeli public schools. I guess it was an affront to the government that a Palestinian man was portrayed as fully human and as a person worthy of love.
All the Rivers, does provide moments of cultural insight and the romance is somewhat endearing, but ultimately it's an exercise in hopelessness as Israel has fallen too far to allow love to take place outside its narrow circle of chosen people.
* * *
And soon, I will provide very brief reviews of the remainder of the books I have read the past two months to close out the year.
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