“Runs on elec­tric prose that races head­long through its pages… A haunt­ing and provoca­tive tour de force.” — Kirkus (starred review)

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.