The Netanyahus Literary Elements

Historical Fiction/Jewish American Novel

Corbindale, New York: 1959-1960. Recollected by narrator from the vantage point of the 21st century.

First-person narrative point of view through the perspective of Jewish historian Ruben Blum.

The tone of this novel is lightly ironic for the most part even as the mood turns progressive darker as the full extent of the ideology of Ben-Zion Netanyahu becomes clear.

Protagonist: Ruben Blum. Antagonist: Ben-Zion Netanyahu.

The conflict of the novel is dramatized through the relationship between Blum and Netanyahu, but this conflict is really a personification of interior conflicts within rigidly traditionalist Zionist and progressive Jewish-American ideologies within post-Holocaust Judaic culture of the 20th century.

The light tone and darker mood of the novel come together in a climactic clash which transforms into outright absurdism resulting from the Blum and Netanyahu parents returning home to interrupt the elder Netanyahu son and Blum’s teen daughter having sex.

The tonal shift toward absurdist humor which marks the climax is foreshadowed in the very first moments of the arrival of the Netanyahu family in a manner which is in conflict with the narrator’s expectations:” 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”

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The description of Ruben overhearing his daughter Judy watching a game show on television in another room alludes to the structural platform of Jeopardy!, which had not yet been developed at the time.

The entire narrative can be said, from one perspective, to be entirely directed toward just one singular paragraph in which imagery is everything: “The two rear police cruisers were parked at angles, inclined toward each other and shining crossing cones of light down the lane at a battered dumpster dug into a gigantic glacier stuck with a forest of dismantled Christmas trees, and huddled up against the metal wall was a shivering fat boy in pjs and his shivering stick-limbed older brother cupping prayerful hands over the cold stump of his penis.”

Ben-Zion Netanyahu’s extremely controversial interpretation of the ideological origin and stimulus behind the Spanish Inquisition is based upon an argument which moves Blum to question its paradoxical underpinning: “If so many Jews became Christians willingly, what need was there for an Inquisition?”

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“Academia” is a metonym used extensively throughout the to describe the multitudes who comprise the vast bureaucratic system of upper-level educational systems.

The Ford vehicle in which the Netanyahus arrive at the Blum house is personified by the narrator: “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…It came at you with this sweet stupid human look…This specimen was especially poignant, because the face it presented was smashed.”