Witz (Inscribed First Edition)

Cohen, Joshua

ISBN 10: 1564785882 / ISBN 13: 9781564785886

Published by Dalkey Archive, Champaign, 2010

About this Item

Champaign & London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2010. First edition. First printing. Softbound, a trade paperback original. Near Fine. A clean tight copy with some slight water damage to bottom edge, resulting to some slight warping to bottom of pages for second half of novel. INSCRIBED by author to prior owner on title page. A novel, the author's first major work.

Seller Inventory # Fiction-C-5

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Witz (Inscribed First Edition)
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive, Champaign
• Publication Date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1564785882
• ISBN 13: 9781564785886
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Near Fine
• Signed: Inscribed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

One of the great comic epics of our time: the Last Jewish Novel about the Last Jew in the World.

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.

About the Author

Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in New Jersey. He is the author of five books, including the novels Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, A Heaven of Others, and Witz. Cohen’s essays have appeared in The Forward, Nextbook, The Believer, and Harper’s. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.