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 finds himself transformed into an international superstar, Jewishness becomes all the rage: matzo-ball soup is in every bowl, sidelocks are hip; and the only truly Jewish Jew left is increasingly stigmatized for not being religious. Since his very existence exposes the illegitimacy of the newly converted, Israelien becomes the object of a worldwide hunt...
Meanwhile, in the not-too-distant future of our own, “real” world, another last Jew―the last living Holocaust survivor―sits alone in a snowbound Manhattan, providing a final melancholy witness to his experiences in the form of the punch lines to half-remembered jokes.
"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)
