The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family is the Winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year 10 out of 10

 The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family is the Winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year

10 out of 10

 

 

The title, tone of this remarkable, amusing, thought provoking, great, entertaining novel suggest that readers would find a lot to laugh about in the narrative and if that is true, the magnificent opus has a very serious, tragic side to it, which gives access to a fresco where we find much about the history, myths, beliefs of the Jewish people, albeit in a very compact form, and with the controversy that separates scholars from within the same community, with very different views on what has happened – most often, the chronicles have been written by monarchs and their subjects, who wished to falsify the facts…some of the fascinating things we find in The ‘Yahus’ would be ’Zion, a historical kingdom that in its destruction was transmuted into myth, becoming in the Diaspora a story that reigned supreme in the Jewish imagination for millennia…Zion was able to exist again with the founding of the modern state of Israel, the poetic returned to the practical…The first example in human civilization in which this happened, in which a story became real, it became a real country, with a real army, real services...of all the peoples, none is less historically minded, Jewish parents would rather their children become pediatricians or litigators than, say, the messiah...the idea that Jews and history are anathema to each other is one of the least radical of Jewish ideas, if we include Christianity and Marxism...think of the virgin birth’…we also find the incredible number of times and places from which the Jewish people have been expelled, from Spain to Hungary, from France to Austria…

 

The two spheres into which we move could not be more different from one another, in the first we have The Netanyahus visiting, because Doctor Ben Zion Netanyahu – son of Zion, and presumably the father of Benjamin aka Bibi, former and perhaps future Prime Minister of Israel – is a candidate and invited to lecture and be interviewed at the Corbin University, where he decides to bring his whole family, his overbearing – ‘mean’ to the owner of the inn in the small town, when she is told there are no adjacent rooms, she reacts with rage and cancels the existing reservation, for a single room, which had been made with the assumption that the guest would arrive alone and tells the owner to shove it up her tosh – wife, Tzila, and their three sons, Jonathan, the eldest, Benjamin, the middle, and Iddo the youngest.

It is such an extraordinary descent, that this reader was overwhelmed…we could imagine what happened to the historian Ruben Blum, who is the narrator of the story, his wife, Edith, and their teenage daughter, Judith, when they found themselves occupied by the invading family – indeed, the quote from Umberto Eco, who said that readers benefit from five thousand lives, as opposed to those who do not read and have the only one is appropriate, for we feel the trauma, exhaustion of the Blums, who take good care of their things, but see the visitors trampling with their shoes over the rugs, spill cocoa over the floor, arrest the dress from Edith, then summon Judith to baby sit the savages…

 

Nevertheless, the thesis that Doctor Netanyahu is presenting, however dogmatic it can seem to some – including a critic of his that sends a letter of condemnation, instead of a reference for the controversial candidate – does appear to change perspective, at least I believe his arguments, that look at the Catholic church and the Inquisition…the doctor is a specialist in the History of the Jews during the Middle Ages, specialized in the Iberian region, where the Inquisition has been organized by the monarchs and not by the church, thus being a ‘Political’ construct and not a religious one, with an absurd goal.

The Catholic Church had been supposed to spread the word of God and convert people to its faith and this has happened with many Jews – a figure of a few hundred thousand is given, which is immense in the circumstances – but once the Jews will have converted, The Inquisition starts persecuting and forcing them out, on racial arguments, not religious ones, because these people had changed their views, baptized, adopted all the paraphernalia of rituals, beliefs, only to find themselves excluded, because of prejudice, segregation, abuse, torture and eventually death, for all the most vile reasons…

 

Inquisitions a few, critical juncture, church into culling its flock, Dr. Netanyahu dedicated his career to proving this claim, his explanation dogmatic, as long as the Catholics required a people to hate, the Jews doomed to suffer, what the doctor called history was actually theology and facts were beliefs, he passed theology for history by divesting the divine of its responsibility for change and assigning it to mortals, vast stock of gentiles

‘Maybe that's just the Jew in me, Jews believe in the Flesh becoming Word, goys vice versa, former more natural, rational incarnation’- the novel has provides fantastic insight into incredible knowledge, but we also have a surreal visit and in the afterword, we find that the narrative is based on a real event, which was recalled by Harold Bloom, involving the real Netanyahu family, and we have a summary of what really would happen to them, after they had devastated the home of the iconic critic and luminary, Jonathan would become a hero, member of the Special Forces that would land in Entebbe, Uganda, to release the hostages, in one of the most famous and successful operations of its kind in history – actually, perhaps it is the most glorious and brave – and the only one to die in the fight…

 

The rest of the family would ‘benefit’ from this tragic heroism – they have been clearly traumatized by the loss also – and Bibi aka Benjamin Netanyahu, also called King of Israel by his supporters, has become the longest serving Prime Minister in the history of his country, the resume offered by Joshua Cohen is scathing, especially the paragraph that looks at what Bibi had done in his campaign against Yitzhak Rabin, the latter had negotiated a peace deal, and the frantic opponent talked about the dead PM, the allies staged funerals with the coffin of the PM and eventually, a fanatic that had attended the Netanyahu rallies would kill the man of peace, and this after the Security apparatus had warned Bibi that the threats to the life of Rabin were credible…in other words, we are left with the conclusion that the fiction is based on a very real story and at least one protagonist in it can become the next Prime Minister of Israel, yet again, for he leads a coalition that has a better chance to win in the upcoming elections than his opponents, and he has a very dark side…

 

I have always been interested in politics and did my share to try to improve things in my realm, as you can see here, in this article from Newsweek

http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/realini-in-newsweek-participant-in.html