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 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. 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, compassion, grace, and even wit. A classical tragedy as well as a poignant psychological case 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.
