Dead Herzls

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 Herzl

The 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.