The Last Jew — Yoram Kaniuk

“A layered, sweeping panorama of 20th Century Jewish life and identity.” -- Publishers Weekly
 
Yoram Kaniuk has been hailed as “one of the most innovative, brilliant novelists in the Western World,” and The Last Jew is his exhilarating masterwork (The New York Times).
 
Like Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Last Jew is a sweeping saga that captures the troubled history and culture of an entire people through the prism of one family. From the chilling opening scene of a soldier returning home in a fog of battle trauma, the novel moves backward through time and across continents until Kaniuk has succeeded in bringing to life the twentieth century's most unsettling legacy: the anxieties of modern Europe, which begat the Holocaust, and in turn the birth of Israel and the swirling cauldron that is the Middle East. With the unforgettable character of Ebenezer Schneerson -- the eponymous last Jew -- at its center, Kaniuk weaves an ingenious tapestry of Jewish identity that is alternately tragic, absurd, enigmatic, and heartbreaking.
 
“A true work of art, free from emotional manipulations.” -- The Washington Post