Blum and Bloom
This novel is entirely based upon a single anecdote shared by noted professor and literary critic Harold Bloom about actually meeting Ben-Zion Netanyahu under much the same circumstances as presented in the book. Ironically, even though the author has much more access to the real-life facts associated with Bloom, he chooses to fictionalize him into a main character named Ruben spelling his named Blum (though pronounced identically). The real irony here is that while just the opposite is the case with Netanyahu, the author insists adhering much more rigidly to facts.
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
This novel was awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. There is a level of irony associated with this decision. By the time the award was announced, The Netanyahus had already developed something of notorious reputation among the general reading public for creating confusion and producing questions over just how much of the novel is truly fiction and how much is factual. The answers to these questions can only serve to intensify the confusion because while individual events are clearly—even absurdly—fictional, long stretches of the narrative involving the Ben-Zion Netanyahu read like a biography or even a scholarly paper.
Benjamin
Any novel with this title published in the 2020’s cannot but immediately create some assumption among the public that it is going to prominently feature Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s most controversial Prime Minister of the 21st century. And, indeed, those readers are not disappointed at that basic level. Some may be disappointed, however, that the opportunities for political satire are severely limited as the single-most famous of the Netanyahus is reduced to an appearance as a not-terribly-interesting ten-year-old kid.
Ruben Blum, Jewish Historian
Very early on, the first-person narrator, Ruben Blum, shares an anecdote about a purposely unnamed former president of the American Historical Association meeting him at a symposium and responding, “Blum, did you say? A Jewish historian?” Among the many silent implications in that response is the assumption the term "Jewish historian” translates into a person studying the history of the Jewish people. The irony within this assumption is that Blum is a “Jewish historian” in the sense of being a Jewish person who study history, in his case—adding another layer of irony to the anti-Semitism assumption—of American economic history.
Ben-Zion’s Ironic Sensibility
Ben-Zion Netanyahu is immediately critical of all things American right from the time Blum meets him. This could be in part because he simply fails to understand the basic systemic operations of the country. The concept of America as melting pot has consistently proven to be right on the nose: all foreign cultures arriving here are melted together to become a flavorless glop called American. The pressure to assimilate or isolate on those immigrants arriving here means everything that was foreign remains foreign. Ben-Zion is profoundly confused on the issue because he gets everything ironically reversed from the foundation up:
“This, to Netanyahu’s mind, was why America was so crucial: it was the only country in the world in which all foreign affairs were primarily domestic; the only country in the world in which—by dint of its immigrant demography and democratic system—the foreign did not exist.”
