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From the author of the 2022 Pulitzer winner The Netanyahus, one of the great comic epics of our time: the Last Jewish Novel about the Last Jew in the World. On Christmas Eve 1999, all the Jews in the world die in a strange, millennial plague, with the exception of the firstborn males, who are soon adopted by a cabal of powerful people in the American government. By the following Passover, however, only one is still alive: Benjamin Israelien; a kindly, innocent, ignorant man-child. As he finds himself transformed into an international superstar, Jewishness becomes all the rage: matzo-ball soup is in every bowl, sidelocks are hip; and the only truly Jewish Jew left is increasingly stigmatized for not being religious. Since his very existence exposes the illegitimacy of the newly converted, Israelien becomes the object of a worldwide hunt...Meanwhile, in the not-too-distant future of our own, "real" world, another last Jew-the last living Holocaust survivor-sits alone in a snowbound Manhattan, providing a final melancholy witness to his experiences in the form of the punch lines to half-remembered jokes.
About the author
Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. His books include the novels
Moving Kings, Book of Numbers, Witz, A Heaven of Others, and
Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto; the short fiction collection
Four New Messages, and the non-fiction collection
Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction. Called ‘a major American writer’ by the
New York Times, ‘maybe America’s greatest living writer’ by the
Washington Post, and ‘an extraordinary prose stylist, surely one of the most prodigious at work in American fiction today’ by the
New Yorker, Cohen was awarded Israel’s 2013 Matanel Prize for Jewish Writers, and in 2017 was named one of
Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. In 2022, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for
The Netanyahus. He lives in New York City.
Summary
From the author of the 2022 Pulitzer winner The Netanyahus, one of the great comic epics of our time: the Last Jewish Novel about the Last Jew in the World.
On Christmas Eve 1999, all the Jews in the world die in a strange, millennial plague, with the exception of the firstborn males, who are soon adopted by a cabal of powerful people in the American government. By the following Passover, however, only one is still alive: Benjamin Israelien; a kindly, innocent, ignorant man-child. As he finds himself transformed into an international superstar, Jewishness becomes all the rage: matzo-ball soup is in every bowl, sidelocks are hip; and the only truly Jewish Jew left is increasingly stigmatized for not being religious. Since his very existence exposes the illegitimacy of the newly converted, Israelien becomes the object of a worldwide hunt…
Meanwhile, in the not-too-distant future of our own, “real” world, another last Jew—the last living Holocaust survivor—sits alone in a snowbound Manhattan, providing a final melancholy witness to his experiences in the form of the punch lines to half-remembered jokes.
