Ruben Blum is a professor of history at the fictional Corbin University in upstate New York. At the end of the 1950s, waiting for a tenure, walking on eggshells while shaving the walls, this specialist in American taxation was also the only Jewish professor at his university.
Describing himself as a “chronically anxious”, the narrator of the sixth novel by American Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus, or the account of an episode altogether minor, even downright negligible, in the history of a very famous family, is also haunted without appearing to be so by its own Jewishness. And under the air of an American “campus novel”, The Netanyahus quickly turns into a kind of return of the repressed.
The tone oscillates between catastrophe and burlesque. And if Ruben Blum is not tender towards himself, he spares no one either.
At the heart of the novel, Ruben Blum recalls that in January 1960 the head of his department asked him to evaluate a candidate for a professorship, Ben-Zion Netanyahu (“An exotic name, centuries old although also coming from the future”, he will think) during his visit to Corbin, on the pretext that this Netanyahu was one of “his own”.
It is the return despite himself of his Jewishness, laboriously kept at a distance since childhood and throughout his studies. “I felt like I was in control of my story; I blocked out the past, all those tired, old, forgotten cricket voices that had belonged to those basement rabbis a long time ago. »
What’s more, her 17-year-old daughter Judy is uncomfortable with her Jewishness, which she feels (heavy) carries in the middle of her face — in the form of her “Jewish nose,” which she considers too fat and slightly hunchbacked. Prelude to a delirious episode, featuring his paternal grandfather, a doorman and a surgical team from the local hospital.
However, Ruben is required to take charge of this academic specialist in the Inquisition, “trained in Israel, without a doctorate or published book, but with a history of incitement to terrorist violence”. Find the mistake. The conditions for a crisis are met even before the aspiring professor arrives with his wife and three turbulent sons, including Benjamin, known as “Bibi”, the future Israeli prime minister. The “Yahous” will make them see all the colors. Epic.
Born in 1980 in Atlantic City, assumed heir to Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, Joshua Cohen is one of the best American writers of the decade, says the magazine Granta. The novelist does not hide it: the character of the narrator is directly inspired by Harold Bloom (1930-2019), famous Jewish American critic and academic whom he knew at the end of his life (and to whom he dedicates the novel ), who under similar circumstances hosted the radical Zionist and his family at Yale in the late 1950s.
The Netanyahus, which leaves like a lion, stagnates a little in the middle, before taking off again – while its characters, them, crash –, raising heavy questions about memory and belonging in the process. Joshua Cohen, yes, is a kind of virtuoso with a keen intelligence and well-assimilated erudition, whose irony is corseted in dense sentences, full of twists and turns.