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

Ben-Zion Netanyahu was an Israeli historian, son of rabbi and Zionist activist Nathan Netanyahu (né Mileikowsky), and the father of Israeli politician and multiple-times Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu. The Ben-Zion character in the novel parallels the real-life Benzion, but he is strictly to be viewed as a fictional character in the novel because the real-life events are blurred by time, distance, and explicit fictionalization of the story by the author.

Ben-Zion is the novel’s primary antagonist but also deuteragonist. He is also Ruben Blum’s antithesis. His form of Jewishness literally antagonizes Ruben’s definition of his own. Ben-Zion and his family (his wife and three sons) offer not only another definition of Jewishness, but they also raise the question of what it means to be an American. He fulfills Jewish stereotypes while also maintaining his own personality and characteristics that make him a dynamic character rather than a stock character. He fulfills Jewish stereotypes of miserly behavior by his denial of fault in damage to the car he borrowed from Rabbi Edelman, his boss and colleague in Philadelphia, because he does not want to have to pay for the damages. Later on, Ben-Zion presses Ruben to make sure he will be paid for the lecture he is to give that evening.

Ben-Zion was born in Poland as Ben-Zion Mileikowsky. His father was a perambulatory rabbi. He moved to Israel before it became a state. He is small in stature, bald, and with “hooded steppe eyes” (215), makes the appearance of having little money based on his threadbare clothing, and his character is meant to represent various Jewish stereotypes. He is prideful, eloquent, political, and a fierce proponent of Zionism. He is a top member of the New Zionist Organization, a revisionist type of Zionism that expounds the need for military force in creating and maintaining the state of Israel.

Edith Blum is a secondary and flat character. She is there to support Ruben Blum’s narration. She is the quintessential Jewish American housewife. The role of the American wife and mother in 1950s, especially in suburban America, was strictly defined, and in fulfilling that role many women were not only bored but felt misrepresented and unappreciated, and these traits can be seen in Edith. Thus, the character of Edith serves as one of the criticisms of American culture found in the book. Edith is more fully assimilated into American culture and society than Ruben—she was raised Jewish, but her parents were not orthodox/practicing the way his were, though she can speak Yiddish, at least enough to communicate with her husband when it’s convenient. Because of her more secular background, she does not suffer from the existential crisis of Jewishness that preoccupies Ruben so much and underlies the novel.

Her interaction and reception of the Netanyahus is much more in line with the way a typical American would deal with the cultural misunderstandings she encounters when meeting them. Her judgement of Tzila has nothing to do with her or Tzila’s Jewishness but with their cultural expectations of one another. Tzila and Ben-Zion come from a culture that requests the host to provide more for their guests than an American host is prepared, or even willing, to provide. Moreover, her reaction to her daughter having sex with the oldest boy has little to do with Puritanism and more with the cultural expectations of the teenaged American girl in the 1950s.

Tzila is another secondary character, and she is Edith’s antithesis. There is very little to discover about the historical Tzila (Zila) Netanyahu (née Segal) other than she was born in 1912 in Petach Tikva, a small town near Tel Aviv. This fact makes Tzila the most Jewish of all the characters, other than her sons, because she is a Palestinian Jew, not a member of the Diaspora.

The fictional Tzila shares these same facts with the historical ones and perhaps explains her, from the perspectives of Europeans and Americans, more liberal treatment of sex, religion, and the relationship between host and guest. From the Blum’s American perspective, she embodies the stereotype of the Jewish Mother, and as such represents this stereotype and its contrast to the American Jewishness of the Blums in the novel.

Judy is senior in high school. She is a high achiever, getting straight As in school and is in line to graduate valedictorian. Though Judy’s parents and grandparents are Jewish, her parents are less Jewish (culturally and religiously) than either set of grandparents, and she is the least Jewish of all. In fact, the only thing Judy finds to identify herself as Jewish is her nose, and the rest of her is just a stereotypical American teenage girl.

For Judy, her nose works both on an aesthetic and symbolic level. Like many teenagers, Judy is vain and worried about how others perceive her. She worries that her nose is “too long, too big, too bumpy” (45). Subconsciously, however, her nose is also representative of her Jewish ancestry and heritage, with which she does not identify. Thus, in her opinion, her nose marks her as Other, an outsider, and with its transformation through plastic surgery, she will be able to fully blend and assimilate with American culture and society.