Dead Herzls. A Novel

From the Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Netanyahus, a virtuoso new novel, a haunting epic of decline and fall, about the doomed family of Theodor HerzlThe father of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was a journalist, playwright, and novelist, as well as a figure of immense fame and influence in his own brief lifetime. But he was also the father of three flesh-and-blood children: Pauline, who died from her drug addictions; Hans, who converted to Christianity and committed suicide on the eve of his older sister's funeral; and Trude, the youngest, who perished in a Nazi camp.
Only one of these Herzls had a child: Trude's son Stephen, a British Army captain who leapt to his death from a bridge in Atomic Age Washington DC, thus ending the Herzl line-the family coming apart catastrophically even as Herzl's ideas took root in the world and flourished. Dead Herzls tells this previously nearly unknown saga as a continent-and-century-spanning fiction written with millennial compression, compassion, grace, and somehow even wit.
From the salons of imperial Vienna to the debauched cabarets of interwar Paris, from Blitzed-out London to the final days of the British Mandate in Jerusalem, the orphaned Herzl children careen through history, ideology, borders, and languages, their broken lives a shattered mirror full of unexpected reflections for our own time. A classical tragedy and a poignant psychological study of how the familial becomes the political, it is Joshua Cohen's most important novel to date, and a brilliantly dark prehistory of our violent present.