The Netanyahus

Joshua Cohen

• Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781913097608
• eBook ISBN: 9781913097615
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Corbin College, not-quite-upstate New York, winter1959-1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian—but notan historian of the Jews—is co-opted onto a hiringcommittee to review the application of an exiled Israelischolar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. WhenBenzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, familyunexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host, to guests who proceed to lay waste to his Americancomplacencies. Mixing fiction with non-fiction, thecampus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildlyinventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics—"An Account of A Minor and UltimatelyEven Negligible Episode in the History of a VeryFamous Family" that finds Joshua Cohen at the heightof his powers.

140

VIII.

This was the weather with which we began 1960: cold. All I wanted was to stay in my study, sitting in front of my typewriter atop my newly gained eight winter-break pounds, grading finals and trying to make some thoughts about antebellum deficits and debts. But unfortunately, I had a visitor coming. January is no friend to the social.

Judy went back to Corbindale High on Monday the 4th, but the college term didn’t start up again until Monday the 18th, when the snows started up again too, intensified through Tuesday, and by Wednesday had piled up to half-a-foot.

There was no point in shoveling except to rid myself of the headache I’d woken up with, so I bundled myself and, beginning curbside, did the dig, kick, scoop, dumping wide margins past the dead flowerbeds that lined the walk. By the time I got to the stoop, heaving, steaming, the curb was once again enrimed and I slunk inside to shower.

Coming downstairs flagrant with aftershave, the casement clock was chiming noon and I checked the window. The walkway was once again pure white.

In the kitchen, Edith had the knives out. Her apron strings cinched tight, she was wielding steel through cheeses, carving apples into broken swans.

“It’s bad out there. Maybe he’ll cancel?”

It was almost distressing, the size of the spread she’d put together. Who, after Christmas, could stand another calorie? Who had an appetite for anything, up to and including even banter? I wasn’t sure what Edith was trying to prove, or to whom: whether she was going overboard to prove her wifeliness or my, or my Department’s, unreasonable demands. There was 141a crudité tray, dainty bowls of brittles and marzipan from the Amish, and some jiggly pâtés from that strange gourmet Scandinavian chalet out on Route 394.

“‘Hosting guest prospectives at a faculty-residence is a time-honored Corbin tradition,’” I said, repeating what Dr. Morse had said to me, in a remark I was hoping would become a new private quip between Edith and myself. “Or was it ‘entertaining prospectives at a faculty-residence is a time-honored staple of Corbin hospitality’?”

Edith wasn’t smiling.

“When I came up here to interview, you know where they invited me? The cafeteria.”

I went to pick up some type of blistered cracker, but Edith turned and flashed a blade and I relented.

I sat in the den with a book on Jackson’s destruction of the national bank, mostly staring out the window at the white page of lawn. Every time I thought, I should get up once more and hoist the shovel, I’d hear a car come down Evergreen and get woozy.

I felt like Judy waiting for a date, except that Judy never waited by the window. She had the dignity to wait up in her room.

Conventional wisdom makes Andrew Jackson out to be a hick Indian-slayer whose backwoods buddies stormed the capital for his inauguration and trashed the White House, tromping their muddy boots across the damask and vomiting all over the flocked wallpaper. The truth, however, is that Jackson wanted to redeco-rate the executive mansion, but, lacking the funds, he invited guests he could count on to wreck the place and then in the hungover light of the next morning staggered over to Congress to beg for help with cleaning up the mess and buying new furniture, in a subterfuge 142reminiscent of Judy’s…

After Jackson’s censure by the Whigs, but before that crazy Englishman tried to kill him—that’s where I’d left off…my page bookmarked with Netanyahu’s sole communication with me prior to this visit, a “Merry Christmas” card:

Expect me on 20/1 by noon. Dr. Morse provided the address.

Yours, B. Netanyahu

P.S. Forgive the card.

His handwriting was pygmy, and the date wasn’t just written backward but its zero was slashed, as is the practice in Europe, where the women grow out their hair and go without underwear and the children all smoke and drink wine.

A car came chunking down Evergreen, chunking slow and near the curb, the better to look out for street numbers. We had a bronze 18 on the lintel out front and The Blums on our mailbox and the mailbox’s post wasn’t gussied up North-Pole-style…and our door was visibly unwreathed… Those are the directions that should’ve been given to Netanyahu: keep a look-out for the one house that isn’t Santa’s workshop.

The car was a desert-colored, rusted-out Ford of the 40s, ponton and streamlined and, it must be said, slick for its day, which, by the time it skidded down our street, had already long been over. It was one of the first model cars they started making after the wartime hiatus and one of the last model cars with a face. By which I mean the front of the thing, with its widespaced high-socketed headlight eyes and grille bullet-nose, was almost like a person. It came at you with this sweet stupid human look. This pitiable dependent look that almost made you forget that its maker was a Nazi. This specimen was especially poignant, because the face it presented was 143smashed. Its grille was missing and its dented chrome fender was half hanging off and kind of flicking the snow ahead of it like an impotent plow.

But maybe this wasn’t Netanyahu. For one, there were too many people inside. More than one person inside was too many. In Netanyahu’s card, he hadn’t mentioned coming up accompanied and yet this clown-car heading toward me appeared to be so crammed that—through my window and the car’s windscreen—it wasn’t clear to me how many passengers there were or what they were doing: fighting or getting dressed?

There was a fad at the time, especially popular among my students, of trying to figure out how many of them could fit into a phonebooth—for a while, this seemed to be among the most pressing concerns of the Eisenhower Era: “Will we obliterate the planet through thermonuclear war?” was right up there with, “How many co-eds can we stuff into this phonebooth, this clothes-closet, this refrigerator’s cardboard box?” Photographers and film-crews would show up wherever a stunt was staged and record its hormonal-hilarity for TV, film, and the pages of the yearbook. This persistent effort among my students to accommodate as many of their young bodies as possible into a single cramped space was as much an attempt to exorcise the age’s confusing combination of stifling conformity and unrestrained consumption as it was a rationale for sexual touching, in a sort of unconscious dress-rehearsal for the revolution to come: I’m not tit-grabbing for the sake of tit-grabbing, I’m just trying to set a new world-record…for how many of my friends I can fit into a package of Cracker Jack…

This cramming-craze had also made it to cars, especially to old Fords like the one outside, which was of a model that many students owned, handed down to them 144by their parents; and, as I was shrugging on my coat, I had the idea that Netanyahu had broken down somewhere and hitchhiked and some students picked him up…and then on the way to campus, the students had gotten into an accident…which would explain the Ford’s hood puffing Los Alamoses of popcorn-cloud smoke and its busted fender sagging as it rattled past the Dulles’ and stopped, blocking our driveway.

I stepped outside just in time to catch the car’s rear door opening and bodies pratfalling out—not clowns in full bozo regalia honking horns and juggling plates, but close enough: shearling-clad kids, one, two, three of them. It took me a moment to count three of them: small, medium, large. Their identical sheepskin coats, and, especially, their suddenly unconfined energy, made them seem more numerous. They were chasing each other between the sidewalk and street and tossing snow, as two larger, adult forms slid out from the front door, curbside. The doors on the far side must’ve been jammed. These two adults at first seemed indistinguishable and completely androgynous, as they were bundled up in bigger version sheepskins of what the little ones were wearing. Five identically furry toggle-clasped coats, hopefully bought in bulk at a substantial discount. As the kids fired-rilled around the car in a riot of snowballs thrown and dodged, one of the adults raised a hooded head to the sky and screamed out in that language that in my youth had been spoken by God. She—because the scream was a woman’s—must’ve been telling the kids to stop running and shut up already. This was my first encounter with the Netanyahus, the whole family: die ganze mishpocha.

As the wife wrangled the kids, the husband tugged back his hood to show the face I knew, or thought I knew, from the passport-size snapshot haphazardly 145glued to the upper-right-hand corner of his resume: he’d aged. He was about fifty years old then, his face a tough nut of vaguely Mongol features, tiny olive pit eyes and absolutely enormous and fleshy oyster-shell ears, strong nasolabial folds that I’m not going to call “smile lines” or “laugh lines,” because the mouth itself was humorless, tightlipped. His head was topped with a Bactrian camel’s two humps of hair, the dome risen between them a luminous egg of freckled baldness. The first words he addressed to me were, “Dr. Blum, I presume?”

“Pleased to meet you.”

“Dr. Ben-Zion Netanyahu.”

Yes, he insisted on using titles at first and, yes, he shook my hand without taking off his linty mitten. His accent was stronger than I’d expected; it was gritted, but later I had the impression he was purposefully stressing it: Ben-Zion.

“You can call me Ruben. Or Rube. Shalom.”

We were standing on snow over what might’ve been the sidewalk or the lawn, impossible to tell, and he pursed his lips and nodded thoughtfully, as if he didn’t recognize the salutation, or was resigning himself to it. “Shalom, Rube.”

I led the man up the powdered path to the house, followed by his wife and kids whom he hadn’t introduced yet.

It was only once they were up the stoop and inside that the stocky, quiffhaired wife said, “My name is Tzila,” but she said that while staring at her husband, who said to me, “Her name is Tzila, my wife,” and I stuck out my hand and Tzila took it and drew me to her and offered her cheek. I pecked it. She offered her other cheek. I pecked that too.

Her cheeks were cold.146

Edith, freshened, flashing teeth, came to greet us. “And Tzila, Ben-Zion, this is Edith,” and Edith said, “Oh lovely…you brought your children…what a nice surprise, Ruben didn’t mention children…here kids, let me take your coats…”

The kids and parents shed their identical skins and mittens and scarves and hats and, piling them, turned Edith into a coatrack.

“Would you mind”—her voice a muffled chirping from under the layers—“please taking off your shoes?”

But the parents had already passed over the interior mat without even wiping and on into the den, tracking snow across the wood, the parquet puddling with the melting runoff.

The boys burst out into screeching. Apparently, the tallest of the three had smuggled a snowball inside and was busy shoving it down wherever he could into the middle boy’s clothing, his shirt, his pants, inside the waistband of a wedgie.

Tzila reprimanded them in Hebrew, as the middle boy chased the oldest boy around the piano and the youngest boy howled. More snow went to water on the floor, shoeprints soaked into the faux arabesques of the faux Persian rug and Edith tried again, “Would you mind, please? Your shoes? I’m afraid we run a rather Asian household.”

Tzila said something again, something that sounded too terse to have been a translation, a single word impatiently and densely packed, tensed, declined, and gendered, and the boys all at once froze and plopped down where they stood, the two older boys on the rug, the youngest on the parquet, and started tugging at their overknotted laces. “You folks too, if you don’t mind,” Edith said to Tzila and Netanyahu, who looked 147quizzically at each other and then sat down on the Hide-A-Bed to take off their footwear as well.

No one in the family, I realized then, was wearing boots or galoshes or any type of shoe even remotely appropriate for winter: Netanyahu had bluchers, Tzila had flats, and the boys were in cheap canvas sneakers. Tzila’s stockings were soaked and one of Netanyahu’s socks had a hole and a big toe thrust through with a gnarled untrimmed nail.

Tzila handed her and her husband’s footwear to Edith, who went around collecting the boys’. As each handed his pair over, Tzila named them: the eldest Jonathan, the middle Benjamin, the youngest Iddo, and Edith said, “Thank you, Jonathan, thank you, Benjamin, thank you, Kiddo,” and Tzila said, “Iddo,” and Edith said, “Kiddo,” and the older boys giggled and wh...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• I.
• II.
• III.
• IV.
• V.
• VI.
• VII.
• VIII.
• IX.
• X.
• XI.
• XII.
• Credits & Extra Credit
• About the Author
• Copyright