Identity Politics
Although this novel is set in the 1950s, there is much that seems relevant to the politics of the year in which it was published. Self-identity as well as the identity impressed upon one by others is at the heart of the story. As the only Jewish member of the faculty at the American college at which he teaches the narrator, Ruben Blum, is inevitably identified by others primarily because of his Jewishness. But Blum’s self-identity is complicated by the temper of the times in which tension was ever-present among Jewish Americans to identify themselves as Americans first. The theme is placed front and center when Blum is chosen to host a visiting controversial scholar in his home simply because they are both Jewish. But the scholar threatens Blum’s self-image with his aggressive stance on how all Jewish people across the world should be zealous Zionists putting the newly founded state of Israel before the country they call home. The book resonates with the sharp divide between left and right in America in the 2020s in which one’s political views shape the construction of their identity both from the inside and the outside.
What is Historical Truth?
The narrator/protagonist of the novel is a historian. The visiting Jewish scholar is controversial because of his radical proposal that Jewishness transformed from a religious identity into a separate race directly as a result of the Spanish Inquisition. During his disastrous job interview at Blum’s college, the scholar insists that because they have suffered so much persecution and been forced from their homeland, the only power that Jewish people have enjoyed over the millennia is the power of interpretation and translation. Throughout the narrative of the book in various ways, the question of what is historical truth and what is historical interpretation are raised. Even this very book itself is part of this overall theme as it is a fictionalization of an actual historical event that took place in which future Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s controversial scholar father stayed with a famous historian while interviewing for a college position. The open question is how long it will take before the fictionalization of this event comes to be confused with the actual historical truth.
The Influence of Early Television
Although it is a minor theme within the expanse of the book, the analysis of the influence of television in its first decade or two looms large over present-day history. At the time of writing and publication, Benjamin Netanyahu’s movement toward hard-line autocratic rule as Israeli Prime Minister was in full bloom. Benjamin is just a small boy in the book and barely even qualifies as a minor character until the almost absurdist climax of the story. Benjamin is identified as an enormous fan of the Western television series, Bonanza. The narrator takes note of this as, writing from a future point and looking backward, he observes how Benjamin grows up—along with countless other politicians around the same age—to view the world through the Western genre’s black-and-white good guys versus bad guys zero-sum game which produces only winners and losers. His comments resonate with the geopolitics of the present day in which autocrats around the world were coming into power and the nationalistic sentiment was regaining a foothold among large sections of the population of those countries voting them into power.
