COHEN, NOW THAT I think of it, had earlier shown some affinities with Roth. Roth sometimes turned his attention to Israel (The Counterlife, Operation Shylock), and Cohen has done so even more steadily (A Heaven of Others, Moving Kings, parts of Witz, and the novel under discussion). Roth wrote fiction about a doppelgänger with his very own name in Operation Shylock, and Cohen did so in Book of Numbers.
But the other affinity (besides the gift for painful family comedy, as noted in first installment) that particularly struck me here is that Cohen shows the same startling ability to make an argument that (I imagine) he does not agree with that Roth does with the Meir Kahane character in Counterlife. Ben-Zion Netanyahu’s lecture in Chapter 12, an unforgettable evocation of whatever the Jewish version of Afro-pessimism is, sounds undiluted and faithful to its models. And it plays for real stakes.
I can hardly think that Cohen really does, on some level, believe assimilation is tantamount to extinction. Come to think of it, though, who knows? It occurs to me that we could read the disappearance of Jewry in Witz as a dark fantasy about assimilation. I need to read the essay collection, I think.
However much of a Zionist Cohen is, though, I can hardly imagine him as cantankerously adamant as Ben-Zion Netanyahu is here…and yet while Cohen depicts the Netanyahus, father, mother, and sons, to be as unlikable a clan as you are going to meet this side of the Snopes, he gives its patriarch the dignity of a full-fledged, forceful argument in Chapter 12. Like Dostoevsky—and Roth—he believes in the art of fiction enough to let the other really speak.
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