Published: 1 June 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
US author discusses his novel ‘The Netanyahus,’ purportedly based on a real-life visit by Benzion Netanyahu (Bibi’s dad) to Cornell University in 1960
AS BENJAMIN NETANYAHU ascended the Israeli political ladder in the 1980s and ’90s, the world became increasingly aware of his historian father. But Benzion Netanyahu, who died in 2012 at age 102, had been active on both the academic and political scenes since long before Israeli independence in 1948.
Active, but not beloved or accepted even in his own camp – to the extent that he spent much of his adult life in exile in the United States, where his three sons grew up.
It is during the period when Benzion – a prophet who had failed to find honour in his own country and had little more success abroad – was wandering from one academic job to another that Joshua Cohen’s startling new novel The Netanyahus is set.
Narrated by (fictional) retired economic historian Ruben Blum, the book imagines a January 1960 visit by the real Benzion Netanyahu to the (equally fictitious) Corbin University, where he has applied for an opening on the academic faculty.
Blum, who is Corbin’s only Jewish professor, has been asked to host Netanyahu, who shows up in a borrowed and ancient automobile (“one of the last model cars with a face”) with his entire family in tow.
Cohen says in an afterword that his narrative was inspired by a real campus visit by Benzion Netanyahu, apparently to Cornell University, where in the ’70s the Israeli historian genuinely chaired the department of Semitic languages and literature.
In Cohen’s telling, Benzion has a chip on his shoulder the size of Gibraltar; his sons – Jonathan, 13, Benjamin, 10, and Iddo, 7 – are savages.
The visit has all the ingredients of a ’60s TV sitcom that makes you cringe and roll off the sofa laughing at the same time.
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Photo: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, with his father Benzion (Avi Ohayon/GPO)
