From Joshua Cohen—winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize—comes one of the great comic epics of our time, newly restored in this definitive edition.
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 rapidly ascends to international fame, Jewishness becomes all the rage: matzo-ball soup is in every bowl, sidelocks are hip; while Israelien, the only truly Jewish Jew left, is increasingly stigmatized for refusing to perform his religion. Since his very existence exposes the illegitimacy of the newly converted, Israelien becomes a wanted man just as quickly as he had become a famous one.
Elsewhere, in the not-too-distant future of our own, “real” world, another last Jew—the last living Holocaust survivor—sits snowbound in his Manhattan apartment, telling jokes that he only half-remembers. A final, melancholy witness, attempting to find the punch line for a century.