Dead Herzls

From the author of The Netanyahus, a brilliantly dark prehistory of our violent present, and Joshua Cohens most important novel to date.

Theodor Herzl, novelist, journalist, playwright, and the father of political Zionism, was also the father to three children: Pauline, who died from her drug addictions; Hans, who converted to Christianity and committed suicide on the eve of his older sisters funeral; and Trude, the youngest, who perished in a Nazi camp. Only one of these Herzls had a child: Trudes son Stephen, a British Army captain who leapt to his death from a bridge in Atomic Age Washington DC, thus ending the Herzl line.

From the salons of imperial Vienna to the debauchery of interwar Paris, from Blitzed-out London to the final days of the British Mandate in Jerusalem, Dead Herzls tells this nearly-unknown saga as a continent-and-century-spanning fiction written with millennial compression, compassi