Over Irish whiskey a few days later at the soon to be demolished Brooklyn bar Freddy’s, Mr. Cohen asked, “How’m I gonna convince people to read an 800-page book?” Especially one so drenched in death. “Dark comedy” seems an inadequate way to describe Witz. For all its gags, it was conceived with a singular aesthetic mission: to put an end to the novel of Jewish kitsch, Holocausts with happy endings. “The targets might be Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, Shalom Auslander,” Mr. Cohen told me. “When I started this book, I wanted to sleep with their wives. By the time I finished, I wanted to sleep with their mothers.
—“A Nice Jewish Boy’s Naughty Big Novel” by Christian Lorentzen, on Joshua Cohen’s forthcoming Witz
