Operation Shylock

by Philip Roth

  I was a victim, and I try to understand the victim. That is a broad, complicated expanse of life that I’ve been trying to deal with for thirty years now. I haven’t idealized the victims. I don’t think that in Badenheim 1939 there’s any idealization either. By the way, Badenheim is a rather real place, and spas like that were scattered all over Europe, shockingly petit bourgeois and idiotic in their formalities. Even as a child I saw how ridiculous they were.

  It is generally agreed, to this day, that Jews are deft, cunning, and sophisticated creatures, with the wisdom of the world stored up in them. But isn’t it fascinating to see how easy it was to fool the Jews? With the simplest, almost childish tricks they were gathered up in ghettos, starved for months, encouraged with false hopes, and finally sent to their death by train. That ingenuousness stood before my eyes while I was writing Badenheim. In that ingenuousness I found a kind of distillation of humanity. Their blindness and deafness, their obsessive preoccupation with themselves is an integral part of their ingenuousness. The murderers were practical, and they knew just what they wanted. The ingenuous person is always a shlimazl, a clownish victim of misfortune, never hearing the danger signals in time, getting mixed up, tangled up, and finally falling into the trap. Those weaknesses charmed me. I fell in love with them. The myth that the Jews run the world with their machinations turned out to be somewhat exaggerated.

  ROTH: Of all your translated books, Tzili depicts the harshest reality and the most extreme form of suffering. Tzili, the simplest child of a poor Jewish family, is left alone when her family flees the Nazi invasion. The novel recounts her horrendous adventures in surviving and her excruciating loneliness among the brutal peasants for whom she works. The book strikes me as a counterpart to Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird. Though less grotesque, Tzili portrays a fearful child in a world even bleaker and more barren than Kosinski’s, a child moving in isolation through a landscape as uncongenial to human life as any in Beckett’s Molloy.

  As a boy you wandered alone like Tzili after your escape, at age nine, from the camp. I’ve been wondering why, when you came to transform your own life in an unknown place, hiding out among the hostile peasants, you decided to imagine a girl as the survivor of this ordeal. And did it occur to you ever not to fictionalize this material but to present your experiences as you remember them, to write a survivor’s tale as direct, say, as Primo Levi’s depiction of his Auschwitz incarceration?

  APPELFELD: I have never written about things as they happened. All my works are indeed chapters from my most personal experience, but nevertheless they are not “the story of my life.” The things that happened to me in my life have already happened, they are already formed, and time has kneaded them and given them shape. To write things as they happened means to enslave oneself to memory, which is only a minor element in the creative process. To my mind, to create means to order, sort out and choose the words and the pace that fit the work. The materials are indeed materials from one’s life, but, ultimately, the creation is an independent creature.

  I tried several times to write “the story of my life” in the woods after I ran away from the camp. But all my efforts were in vain. I wanted to be faithful to reality and to what really happened. But the chronicle that emerged proved to be a weak scaffolding. The result was rather meager, an unconvincing imaginary tale. The things that are most true are easily falsified.

  Reality, as you know, is always stronger than the human imagination. Not only that, reality can permit itself to be unbelievable, inexplicable, out of all proportion. The created work, to my regret, cannot permit itself all that.

  The reality of the Holocaust surpassed any imagination. If I remained true to the facts, no one would believe me. But the moment I chose a girl, a little older than I was at that time, I removed “the story of my life” from the mighty grip of memory and gave it over to the creative laboratory. There memory is not the only proprietor. There one needs a causal explanation, a thread to tie things together. The exceptional is permissible only if it is part of an overall structure and contributes to an understanding of that structure. I had to remove those parts that were unbelievable from “the story of my life” and present a more credible version.

  When I wrote Tzili I was about forty years old. At that time I was interested in the possibilities of naiveness in art. Can there be a naive modern art? It seemed to me that without the naiveté still found among children and old people and, to some extent, in ourselves, the work of art would be flawed. I tried to correct that flaw. God knows how successful I was.

  ___

  Dear Philip,

  I enraged you/you blitzed me. Every word I spoke—stupid/ wrong/unnatural. Had to be. Been dreading/dreaming this meeting since 1959. Saw your photo on Goodbye, Columbus/knew that my life would never be the same. Explained to everyone we were two different people/had no desire to be anyone but myself/wanted my fate/hoped your first book would be your last/wanted you to fail and disappear/thought constantly about your dying. IT WAS NOT WITHOUT RESISTANCE THAT I ACCEPTED MY ROLE: THE NAKED YOU/THE MESSIANIC YOU/THE SACRIFICIAL YOU. MY JEWISH PASSIONS SHIELDED BY NOTHING. MY JEWISH LOVING UNRESTRAINED.

  LET ME EXIST. Do not destroy me to preserve your good name. I AM YOUR GOOD NAME. I am only spending the renown you hoard. You hide yourself/in lonely rooms/country recluse/anonymous expatriate/garreted monk. Never spent it as you should/might/wouldn’t/couldn’t: IN BEHALF OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE. Please! Allow me to be the public instrument through which you express the love for the Jews/the hatred for their enemies/that is in every word you ever wrote. Without legal intervention.

  Judge me not by words but by the woman who bears this letter. To you I say everything stupidly. Judge me not by awkward words which falsify everything I feel/know. Around you I will never be a smith with words. See beyond words. I am not the writer/I am something else. I AM THE YOU THAT IS NOT WORDS.

  Yours,

  Philip Roth

  The immediate physical reality of her was so strong and exciting—and unsettling—that it was a little like sitting across a table from the moon. She was about thirty-five, a voluptuously healthy-looking creaturely female around whose firm, rosy neck it wouldn’t have been inappropriate to tie the county fair’s first-prize ribbon—this was a biological winner, this was somebody who was well. Her whitish blond hair was worn casually pinned in a tousled bun at the back of her head, and she had a wide mouth, the warm interior of which she showed you, like a happy, panting dog, even when she wasn’t speaking, as though she were taking your words in through her mouth, as though another’s words were not received by the brain but processed—once past the small, even, splendidly white teeth and the pink, perfect gums—by the whole, radiant, happy-go-lucky thing. Her vivacious alertness, even her powers of concentration, seemed situated in the vicinity of her jaws; her eyes, beautifully clear and strongly focused though they were, did not appear to reach anywhere like so deep into the terrific ubiquity of all that hereness. She had the substantial breasts and the large round behind of a much heavier, less sprightly woman—she might, in another life, have been a fecund wet nurse from the Polish hinterlands. In fact, she was an oncology nurse and he had met her five years earlier, when he was first a cancer patient in a Chicago hospital. Her name was Wanda Jane “Jinx” Possesski,° and she aroused in me the sort of yearnings excited by the thought of a luxuriously warm fur coat on a freezing winter day: specifically, a craving to be enwrapped.

  The woman by whom he wished to be judged was sitting across from me at a small table in the garden of the American Colony courtyard, beneath the charming arched windows of the old hotel. The violent morning rain squalls had subsided into little more than a sun shower while I was having lunch with Aharon, and now, at a few minutes before three, the sky was clear and the courtyard stones aglitter with light. It felt like a May afternoon, warm, breezy, lullingly serene, even though it was January of 1988 and we happened to be only a few hundred yards from where Israeli soldiers had teargass
ed a rock-throwing mob of young Arab boys just the day before. Demjanjuk was on trial for murdering close to a million Jews at Treblinka, Arabs were rising up against the Jewish authorities all over the Occupied Territories, and yet from where I was seated amid the lush shrubbery, between a lemon tree and an orange tree, the world could not have seemed any more enticing. Pleasant Arab waiters, singing little birds, a good cold beer—and this woman of his who evoked in me the illusion that nothing could be more durable than the perishable matter from which we are made.

  All the while I read his dreadful letter she watched me as though she’d brought to the hotel directly from President Lincoln the original manuscript of the Gettysburg Address. The only reason I didn’t tell her, “This is as loony a piece of prose as I’ve ever received in my life,” and tear it into little pieces was because I didn’t want her to get up and go. I wanted to hear her talk, for one thing: it was my chance to find out more, only more lies perhaps, but then, enough lies, and maybe some truth would begin trickling through. And I wanted to hear her talk because of the beguilingly ambiguous timbre of her voice, which was harmonically a puzzle to me. The voice was like something you’ve gotten out of the freezer that’s taking its own sweet time to thaw: moist and spongy enough at the edges to eat, otherwise off-puttingly refrigerated down to its deep-frozen core. It was difficult to tell just how coarse she was, if there was a great deal going on in her or if maybe there was nothing at all and she was just a petty criminal’s obedient moll. Probably it was only my infatuation with the exciting fullness of such a female presence that led me to visualize a mist of innocence hanging over her bold carnality that might enable me to get somewhere. I folded the letter in thirds and slipped it into my inside pocket—what I should have done with his passport.

  “It’s incredible,” she said. “Overwhelming. You even read the same way.”

  “From left to right.”

  “Your facial expressions, the way you take everything in, even your clothes—it’s uncanny.”

  “But then everything is uncanny, is it not? Right down to our sharing the very same name.”

  “And,” she said, smiling widely, “the sarcasm, too.”

  “He tells me that I should judge him by the woman who bears his letter, but much as I’d like to, it’s hard, in my position, not to judge him by other things first.”

  “By what he’s undertaken. I know. It’s so gigantic for Jews. For Gentiles, too. I think for everyone. The lives he’ll save. The lives he’s saved.”

  “Already? Yes? Whose?”

  “Mine, for one.”

  “I thought it was you who was the nurse and he who was the patient—I thought you’d helped save him.”

  “I’m a recovering anti-Semite. I was saved by A-S.A.”

  “A-S.A.?”

  “Anti-Semites Anonymous. The recovery group Philip founded.”

  “It’s just one brainstorm after another with Philip,” I said. “He didn’t tell me about A-S.A.”

  “He didn’t tell you hardly anything. He couldn’t. He’s so in awe of you, he got all bottled up.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say bottled up. I’d say unbottled up almost to a fault.”

  “All I know is he came back in terrible shape. He’s still in bed. He says he disgraced himself. He came away thinking you hated him.”

  “Why on earth would I hate Philip?”

  “That’s why he wrote this letter.”

  “And sent you to act as his advocate.”

  “I’m not a big reader, Mr. Roth. I’m not a reader at all. When Philip was my patient I didn’t even know you existed, let alone that you were his look-alike. People are always mistaking him for you, everywhere we go—everywhere, everyone, except illiterate me. To me he was just the most intense person I’d ever met in my life. He still is. There’s no one like him.”

  “Except?” I said, tapping my chest.

  “I meant the way he’s set out to change the world.”

  “Well, he’s come to the right place for that. Every year they treat dozens of tourists here who go around thinking themselves the Messiah and exhorting mankind to repent. It’s a famous phenomenon at the mental-health center—local psychiatrists call it ‘Jerusalem syndrome.’ Most of them think they’re the Messiah or God, and the rest claim to be Satan. You got off easy with Philip.”

  But nothing I said, however disdainful or outright contemptuous of him, had any noticeable effect on the undampable conviction with which she continued extolling to me the achievements of this blatant fraud. Was it she suffering from that novel form of hysteria known as Jerusalem syndrome? The government psychiatrist who had entertained me with a witty exposition on the subject a few years back had told me that there are also Christians they find wandering out in the desert who believe themselves to be John the Baptist. I thought: his harbinger, Jinx the Baptist, mouthpiece for the Messiah in whom she’s discovered salvation and the exalted purpose of her life. “The Jews,” she said, staring straight out at me with her terribly gullible eyes, “are all he thinks about. Night and day, since his cancer, his life has been dedicated to the Jews.”

  “And you,” I asked, “who believe in him so—are you now a Jew lover too?”

  But I could not seem to say anything to impair her buoyancy, and for the first time I wondered if perhaps she was afloat on dope, if both of them were, and if that accounted for everything, including the very soulful smile my sharp words had evoked—if behind the audacious mystery of these two there was nothing but a pound of good pot.

  “Philip lover, yes; Jew lover, no. Uh-uh. All Jinx can love, and it’s plenty for her, is no longer hating Jews, no longer blaming Jews, no longer detesting Jews on sight. No, I can’t say that Jinx Possesski is a lover of Jews or that Jinx Possesski ever will be. What I can say—okay?—is what I said: I’m a recovering anti-Semite.”

  “And what’s that like?” I asked, thinking now that there was something not entirely unbelievable about her words and that I could do no better than to be still and listen.

  “Oh, it’s a story.”

  “How long are you in recovery?”

  “Almost five years. I was poisoned by it. A lot, I think now, had to do with the job. I don’t blame the job, I blame Jinx—but still, there’s one thing about a cancer hospital: the pain is just something that you can’t imagine. When someone’s in pain, you almost want to run out of the room, screaming to get the pain medication. People have no idea, they really and truly have no idea, what it is like to have pain like that. Their pain is so outrageous, and everyone is afraid of dying. There’s a lot of failure in cancer—you know, it’s not a maternity ward. On a maternity ward, I might never have found out the truth about myself. It might never have happened to me. You want to hear all this?”

  “If you want to tell me,” I said. What I wanted to hear was why she loved this fraud.

  “I got drawn into people’s suffering,” she said. “I couldn’t help it. If they cry, I hold their hand, I hug them—if they cry, I cry. I hug them, they hug me—to me there’s no way not to. It’s like you were their savior. Jinx could do no wrong. But I can’t be their savior. And that got to me after a while.” The nonsensically happy look slipped suddenly from Jinx’s face and she was convulsed by a rush of tenderness that left her for a moment unable to go on. “These patients …” she said, her voice completely deiced now and as soft through and through as a small child’s, “… they look at you with those eyes. …” The magnitude of the emotions she was reckoning with took me by surprise. If this is an act, then she’s Sarah Bernhardt. “They look at you with those eyes, they’re so wide open—and they grab, they grab—and I give, but I can’t give them life. … After a while,” she went on, the emotion subsiding into something sad and rueful, “I was just helping people to die. Make you more comfortable. Give you more pain medication. Give you a back massage. Turn you a certain way. Anything. I did a lot for patients. I always went one beyond the medical thing. ‘You wanna play cards, you wanna smok
e a little marijuana?’ The patients were the only thing that meant anything to me. After a day when maybe three people died, you bagged the last person—‘This is it,’ you say, ‘I’m fuckin’ tired of puttin’ a fuckin’ tag on someone’s toe!’” How violently the moods wavered! One little word was enough to turn her around—and the little word in this case was it. “This is it,” and she was as radiant with a crude, bold, coarse forcefulness as she had been stricken just the minute before by all that anguishing heartache. What there was to subject her to him I still couldn’t say, but what might subordinate a man to her I had no difficulty perceiving: everything existed in such generous portions. Not since I had last read Strindberg could I remember having run across such a tantalizing layer cake of female excitement. The desire I then suppressed—to reach out and cup her breast—was only in part the urge men have perpetually to suppress when the fire is suddenly lit in a public place: beneath the soft, plump mass of breast I wanted to feel, against my palm, the power of that heart.

  “You know,” she was saying, “I’m sick and tired of turning someone over and thinking that this is not going to affect me! ‘Tag ’em and wrap’em. Have you tagged them and wrapped them yet? Tag ’em and wrap ’em up.’ ‘No, because the family hasn’t come yet. Get the fuckin’ family here so we can tag ’em and wrap ’em, and get the hell out of here!’ I OD’d on death, Mr. Roth. Because,” and again she could not speak, so felled was she by these memories “… because there was too much death. It was too much dying, you know? And I just couldn’t handle myself. I turned on the Jews. The Jewish doctors. Their wives. Their kids. And they were good doctors. Excellent doctors, excellent surgeons. But I’d see the photographs framed on their desks, the kids with tennis rackets, the wives by the pool, I’d hear them on the phone, making dates for the evening like nobody on the floor was dying—planning for their tennis, their vacations, their trips to London and Paris, ‘We’re staying at the Ritz, we’re eating at the Schmitz, we’re going to back up a truck and empty out Gucci’s,’ and I’d freak out, man, I’d go off on a real anti-Semitic binge. I worked on the gastric floor—stomach-liver-pancreatic floor. Two other nurses about the same age, and it was like an infection that went from me to them. At our nursing station, which was great, we had the greatest music, a lot of rock ’n’ roll, and we gave each other a tremendous amount of support, but we were all, like, calling in sick a lot, and I was yakking and yakking about the Jews more and more. We were all young there, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five—five days a week, and you worked overtime and every night you stayed late. You stayed late because these people were so sick, and I’d think about those Jewish doctors home with their wives and their kids—even when I was away from the floor, it wouldn’t leave me. I was on fire with it. The Jews, the Jews. When we’d work evenings, all three of us together, we’d get home, smoke a joint, definitely smoke a joint—couldn’t wait to roll it. We made piña coladas. Anything. All night. If we didn’t drink at home we’d get dressed up or throw our makeup on and go out, Near North, Rush Street, the scene. Go to all the bars. Sometimes you met people and you went on dates and you fucked—okay?—but not really as an outlet. The outlet for the dying was pot. The outlet for the dying was the Jews. With me anti-Semitism was in the family. Is it hereditary, environmental, or strictly a moral flaw? A topic of discussion at A-S.A. meetings. The answer? We don’t care why we have it, we are here to admit that we have it and help each other get rid of it. But in me I think I had it for all the reasons you can. My father hated them, to begin with. A boiler engineer in Ohio. I heard it growing up but it was like wallpaper, it never meant a thing before I was a cancer nurse. But once I started—okay?—I couldn’t stop. Their money. Their wives. Those women, those faces of theirs—those hideous Jewish faces. Their kids. Their clothes. Their voices. You name it. But mostly the look, the Jewish look. It didn’t stop. I didn’t stop. It got to the point that the resident, this one doctor, Kaplan, he didn’t like to look you in the eyes that much—he would say something about a patient and all I saw were those Jewish lips. He was a young guy but already he had the underslung jaw like the old Jews get, and the long ears, and those real liver lips—the whole bit that I couldn’t stand. That’s how I went berserk. That’s when I hit bottom. He was scared because he was not used to giving so much pain medication. He was scared the patient would suffer respiratory arrest and die. But she was a woman my age—so young, so young. She had cancer that went everywhere. And she was just in so much pain. She was in so much pain. Mr. Roth, a terrific amount of pain.” And the tears were streaming onto her face, the mascara running, and the impulse I now suppressed was not to palpate her large, warm breast or to measure the warlike strength of the heart beneath but to take her two hands from the tabletop and enclose them in mine, those transgressive, tabooless nurse’s hands, so deceptively clean and innocent-seeming, that had nonetheless been everywhere, swathing, spraying, washing, wiping, freely touching everywhere, handling everything, open wounds, drainage bags, every running orifice, as naturally as a cat pawing a mouse. “I had to get out of cancer. I didn’t want to be a cancer nurse. I just wanted to be a nurse, anything. I was screaming at him, at Kaplan, at those fucking Jew lips, ‘You better fucking give us the pain medication we need! Or we are going to get the attending and he’s going to be pissed off at you for waking him up! Get it! Get it now!’ You know,” she said, surprisingly childishly. “You know? You know?”