A dear friend gave me this book for chirstmas. I didn’t know anything about it all, and I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I loved it.
Corbin College, not-quite-upstate New York, winter 1959-1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian – but not an historian of the Jews – is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host, to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixing fiction with non-fiction, the campus novel with the lecture, THE NETANYAHUS is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics – ‘An Account of A Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Incident in the History of a Very Famous Family’ that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers.
It’s first person narration (which I always like) and the language is rich, I had to stop and look words up all the time. Also, I was intrigued by jewish history; was the Spanish Inquisition lead by the monarchy and not the church to reduce the power of the nobles? I even looked on Wikipedia to find out how Israel was formed after World War Two.
A review