Photo: Marion Ettlinger.

At 248 pages, Joshua Cohen’s latest novel, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, is slim by his standards. His 2010 comic novel Witz comes to 824 pages. Book of Numbers is just shy of 600. Beyond page count, there is an instantly recognizable intensity to Cohen’s writing, and in this respect, too, The Netanyahus is a bit of an outlier, for it unfolds with the ease of an anecdote, a comic—if cautionary—tale.  

Published in the U.S. this week by New York Review Books, the novel follows a series of events surrounding a job talk in 1960 by the conservative religious historian Benzion Netanyahu at a small college in upstate New York. The narrator is the liberal economic historian Ruben Blum, who is assigned to take charge of Netanyahu’s campus visit, despite not knowing his work, because he is the only Jewish member of the faculty. Netanyahu unexpectedly brings his family along, and their encounter with Blum’s family is about equal parts farcical and disturbing. There are a few other plot points and some significant digressions, including two inserted letters and a fully delivered speech. But all of it comes together in a kind of playful package that I found more congenial—or differently congenial—than Cohen’s previous work.

In the afterword, we learn that the novel is based on real-life events told to Cohen by the literary scholar Harold Bloom, toward the end of Bloom’s life. Ruben Blum is a stand-in for Harold, the Blooms really hosted the Netanyahus, and so on. How much of the rest is true is unclear, for out of Bloom’s anecdote Cohen has crafted a story about two Jewish families half a century ago that is also an inquiry into the religious and political tenets upon which Netanyahu’s son—the famous Benjamin—would later reshape modern Israel. The result is a surprising hybrid, a learned and investigative novel that retains some of the feeling of a story shared by friends. Over and over, Cohen reconfigures the space between artifice and autobiography, between irony and earnestness, between what’s made up and what’s real, and how each of those modes offers its own understanding.

Cohen is the author of six novels, four story collections, and Attention, a collection of essays and criticism. I met him more than a decade ago, when I was the associate director of Dalkey Archive Press, and he and I hustled around New York promoting Witz. We became friends, and have grown as friends, mostly by talking about books we like. We also both spent part of our distant pasts working as musicians on cruise ships, and I would like to think that over the years we’ve quietly bonded over the fact that neither of us ever brings that up.

I interviewed Cohen by email in May and early June 2021. I told him ahead of time that I wanted to discuss Judaism as subject matter, the use of nonnarrative material in a narrative work, and varieties of comedy and irony, in that order.

INTERVIEWER

When Book of Numbers came out, in 2015, you told me you were done writing “Jewish books.” You’d written Witz, a very Jewish book, then Four New Messages was not a particularly Jewish book, nor was Book of Numbers. But later you wrote Moving Kings, an arguably very Jewish book, and now The Netanyahus, inarguably Jewish. Maybe this is a question about subject matter in general, the things we return to, but I’m interested in why you feel drawn back to this one.

COHEN

You know about the covering cherub? God dwelled in the holy of holies in the Temple in Jerusalem, and because God can’t be experienced directly—because direct experience of God will destroy a mortal—a cherub, or actually two cherubs in some accounts, was employed to hang out there, covering the presence of God with its wings. This was originally in Ezekiel, and though I’m sure I encountered it there at some point in my life, I only really noticed the cherub because of Harold Bloom, whose writing about it didn’t come from the Hebrew either, but from Milton and Blake. It was Milton and Blake who’d turned this cherub singular and associated it with Satan—the angel that covers God, that covers for God and, made overproud because of the privilege, falls. Bloom turned the covering cherub into the artist, the writer, who absorbs the divine light and filters it for the rest and, in doing so, suffers. Why am I bringing this up? Because it’s beautiful, in its cracked romantic way, but also because the process by which this beauty came to me is a model. Here is a figure from what I might call my tradition—Ezekiel, which I had to read at school—that hadn’t meant anything to me until, once Miltonized and Blaked, it Bloomed. This is typical, I think. We don’t know what pasts we have until other traditions absorb and filter them—in this case, a pair of English poets acting as covering cherubs for cherubic Harold. And now here I am, cherubing for you—telling you that after every book I finish, I declare myself “done.” (Mrs. Geller, my fifth-grade teacher of Bloomian proportions, used to remind me, “Turkey is done, a person is finished.”) After Four New Messages, I was “done” with technology, but then I wrote Book of Numbers. After Moving Kings, I was “done” with the Jews, but then I wrote The Netanyahus. At this point, I think declaring myself “done” means “I’ll have another.” Read More