The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family

A quote from the revisionist Zionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and also the book’s epigraph, represents the overall theme of the novel, namely the juxtaposition of a Zionist/Israeli Jewish person with one from the Diaspora: “Eliminate the Diaspora or the Diaspora will eliminate you.” In the case of the novel, the Diaspora is limited to the American Jewish person. The quote addresses the need for Jewish people in general to form a unified nation, culture, and society, otherwise the dream of Zion will remain elusive. Though Jabotinsky died in 1940, and the Jewish state of Israel was created in 1948, the Jewish Diaspora remains because not all Jewish people immigrated to the new nation of Israel, the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people. The setting of the novel is 1959-1960, so the nation of Israel is barely a decade old during the story. The state is still in a precarious situation economically, militarily, and politically. Most of the massive influx of Jewish immigrants came from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Many American Jewish people, even staunch supporters of Zionism, were reluctant to give up their comfort, affluence, and security in the United States and move to the great experiment of Israel. The issues are personified in the persons of Ruben Blum and Ben-Zion Netanyahu.

The Diaspora has existed for millennia, but the Jewish population never found such security outside of their homeland before the creation of the United States. Antisemitism continued to exist, but there were never any laws that strictly forbade Jewish people from living a life equal to any other American. Moreover, there was finally a government that would protect them from others. Nevertheless, the strict laws of Judaism and the long history of subjugation, exile, prejudice, and brutality continued to weigh heavily on the Jewish people as a whole. Ruben Blum discusses much of this in his opening chapters about his own childhood. He notes how his rabbinical teachers would contradict the history and cultural lessons he had in school: “I had the crazy suspicion that the rabbis had somehow been in class with men […] just so they knew exactly what to contradict and rail against […]” (40). Furthermore, those rabbis taught him that “America was synonymous with goyishe history […] it was the newest incarnation of Rome, Athens, Babylon, Egypt–Mitzraim” (41). However, Ruben was keenly aware of the contradictions inherent in these teachings, and as his life progressed and he served in the Army and went to school, he became more convinced that America was never going to turn on him or other Jewish people. Nevertheless, he continued to doubt and feel like an outsider. When Ben-Zion Netanyahu enters the scene, his personification of Jewishness and his understanding of Jewish history causes Ruben to reconsider his own definition of what it means to be Jewish.

Ben-Zion, like Ruben, is secular despite his father being a rabbi. Unlike Ruben, however, Ben-Zion did not grow up in the safety and security of the US. He was born in Poland, and his father moved the family to British Mandatory Palestine in 1920, when Ben-Zion was only 10 years old. Thus, he returned to the ancestral homeland before it became a nation for the Jewish people and grew up in Israel. His wife Tzila was born in Israel, as were his younger sons (Jonathan was born in New York). Whatever an Israeli Jewish person might be, Ben-Zion was one, and he often comes into conflict with the Jewish people of the Diaspora he encounters. Dr. Prof. Peretz Levavi, aka Peter Lügner, a colleague from Hebrew University is so put off by Ben-Zion’s personality that he writes a letter of discommendation to Ruben spelling out Ben-Zion’s eccentricities as an historian and Jewish person, specifically, he’s too violent and revolutionist. Despite these warnings, however, Ruben meets “the son of Zion” (36). It is in this vein that Ben-Zion causes the most disturbance within Ruben. Ruben sees him as a literal son of Zion and therefore more Jewish than himself. Ben-Zion foregoes the comforts and wealth of life in the United States for the Jewish cause in Israel. He had more than one opportunity to remain in the US, and his views and opinions of Corbin University do not favor the notion that he desperately wants a job so he can stay in the US. Moreover, Ben-Zion’s interpretation of the Spanish Inquisition, which he uses as evidence that the denotation of Jew is more racial than religious and further strengthens the argument for a nation of Jewish people in Israel, forces Ruben to question his own understanding of Jewishness. After entering adulthood, Ruben had done his utmost to place his Jewishness in the unmovable past, focusing on his career and being and identifying as an American rather than Jewish.

At the end of the novel, the line between American Jewish and Israeli Jewish people remains divided. Ruben denies Ben-Zion his Jewish identity by telling the sheriff the Netanyahus are Turkish; Edith has realized how little she cares about causes (including the Jewish cause): “I don’t believe in anything anymore […] and I’m OK with it” (220); and Judy is being raised without any traditional Jewish upbringing and has removed the last vestige of Jewishness from her (her nose). Of the Ruben family, Ruben is the only one who still identifies as Jewish, though he points out in the opening paragraphs of the book that “[s]oon enough, though, I guess I’ll be historical. By which I mean I’ll die and become history myself” (11), suggesting that the Jewishness in his family will die with him. This brings the novel back to Jabotinsky’s quotation. The Diaspora will eliminate the Jew by fading into the host culture and society. In other words, the argument is that an American Jew will one day cease to be a Jew and become just another American.