By Joshua Cohen
Introduction by the author
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.
ISBN: 9781628976595
Publication Date: 8/4/26
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.
Reviews
"The sort of postmodern epic that arrives like a comet about once every decade, like Infinite Jest or Gravity's Rainbow. Like any epic, it defies summary and overflows with puns, allusions, digressions, authorial sleights of hand and structural gags-in the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, James Joyce, Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne." —New York Observer
“Reversing and resisting what Cohen sees as the contemporary Jewish novel’s tendency to market the past as a ‘fashion,’ with ‘minorities overcoming obstacles,’ this novel is a linguistic extravaganza that negates reader expectations… Witz is a brave and artful attempt to explore and explode the limits of the sentence.”—Stephen Burn, The New York Times
"In this ambitious novel, Benjamin Israelien—born full grown, bearded, and wearing glasses—is the last living Jew, a national celebrity and Messiah-like great hope for an America terrified of losing God’s grace. In more than eight hundred pages of dense, often self-amused prose, he tours in a big revival show, visits Holocaust sites (“Whateverwitz” in “Polandland”), and even makes a brief sojourn in space with a tentacled alien named Doktor Froid. “Witz,” as Cohen explains, means “joke,” and the novel overflows with puns, allusions, and Borscht Belt zingers, in an incantatory modernist style." —New Yorker
“The art of Witz is in the delivery. JC’s prose has a breathless rhythm and endless associations, e.g. wombs, ovens, babies, bread, incineration. He can’t get the words out fast enough, such genius, so talented he is, ‘poo poo poo.’” —Jeffra Hays, Dactyl Review
“Cohen’s sentences cascade on and on, with clause after clause snaking down the page. Then a lone period allows you a rest and the next sentence attacks a sensory assault. If I had to compare Witz to anything it would be to the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.” —Johnathan Frederick Post, The Millions
“A reminder of the serious import of the literary novel, the novel as linguistic artefact.” —TLS
“The kind of ambitious, intelligent novel of ideas that will demand your full attention for 824 pages and repay you by rewiring your cerebral cortex in a fundamental way.” —The Stranger
“Entertaining, adventurous and delightfully absurd.” —Time Out New York
“A compelling… primal plea for a return of a tradition to its messy, marginal, but living roots.” —BN Review
“The great lyrical sweeps of Cohen’s writing must be applauded.” —Library Journal
“[Cohen] reminds us what literature is: the self-conscious representation of the word using language.” —Forward
“Cohen packs whole histories and destructions, maps and traditions, into single sentences. He employs lists, codes, and invented syntax with the sure hand of a visionary, his prowess and passion further emboldened by a boundless sense of scope.” —Believer
Biographical Information
Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic City. His books include the novels The Netanyahus, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Moving Kings, Book of Numbers, Witz, A Heaven of Others, and Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto; the short-fiction collection Four New Messages, and the nonfiction collection Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction.