Operation Shylock

by Philip Roth

  Nonetheless, I decided to skip breakfast at the hotel and to proceed immediately to the courtroom to be sure that Pipik was not there. I’d had no food at all since lunch with Aharon the previous noon, but I could pick up something at the coffee bar just off the entrance hall to the courtroom, and that would replenish me for now. I realized from the TV listings that the trial began much earlier in the day than I had thought, and I had to be there from the very first moment—I was bent on ousting him today, on supplanting him and taking charge completely; if necessary, I would sit in that courtroom through both the morning and the afternoon sessions so as to avert, before it could even get going, anything that he might still be plotting. Today Moishe Pipik was to be obliterated (if, by any chance, he hadn’t already been the night before). Today was the end of it: Wednesday, January 27, 1988 • Shevat 8, 5748 • Jomada Tani 9, 1408.

  Those were the dates printed in a row beneath the logo of the Post. 1988. 5748. 1408. Agreement on nothing but the last digit, dissension over everything, beginning with where to begin. It’s no wonder “Rabin Inspects Wall of Bloody Beatings” when the discrepancy between 5478 and 1408 is a matter not of decades or even of a few little centuries but of four thousand three hundred and forty years. The father is superseded by the rivalrous, triumphant firstborn—rejected, suppressed, persecuted, expelled, shunned, terrorized by the firstborn and reviled as the enemy—and then, having barely escaped extinction for the crime of being the father, resuscitates himself, revives and rises up to struggle bloodily over property rights with the second-born, who is raging with envy and the grievances of usurpation, neglect, and ravaged pride. 1988. 5748. 1408. The tragic story’s all in the numbers, the successor monotheists’ implacable feud with the ancient progenitor whose crime it is, whose sin it is, to have endured the most unspeakable devastation and still, somehow, to be in the way.

  The Jews are in the way.

  The moment I stepped out of the elevator, two teenagers, a boy and a girl, jumped up from where they were sitting in the lobby and came toward me, calling my name. The girl was redheaded, freckled, on the dumpy side, and she smiled shyly as she approached; the boy was my height, a skinny, very serious, oldish-seeming boy, cavern-faced and scholarly-looking, who, in his awkwardness, seemed to be climbing over a series of low fences to reach me. “Mr. Roth!” He spoke out in a strong voice a little loud for the lobby. “Mr. Roth! We are two students in the eleventh grade of Liyad Ha-nahar High School in the Jordan Valley. I am Tal.° This is Deborah.°”

  “Yes?”

  Deborah then stepped forward to greet me, speaking as though she were beginning a public address. “We are a group of high school students that has found your stories very provocative in our English class. We read ‘Eli, the Fanatic’ and ‘Defender of the Faith.’ Both created question marks about the state of the American Jew. We wonder if it would be possible for you to visit us. Here is a letter to you from our teacher.”

  “I’m in a hurry right now,” I said, accepting the envelope she handed me, which I saw was addressed in Hebrew. “I’ll read this and answer it as soon as I can.”

  “Our class sent you last week, all the students, each one, a letter to the hotel,” Deborah said. “When we received no answer the class voted to send Tal and me on the bus to make our offer directly. We’ll be delighted if you accept our class’s offer.”

  “I never got your class’s letters.” Because he had gotten them. Of course! I wondered what could possibly have constrained him from going out to their school and answering questions about his provocative stories. Too busy elsewhere? It horrified me to think about the invitations to speak he had received and accepted here if this was one he considered too inconsequential even to bother to decline. Schoolkids weren’t his style. No headlines in schoolkids. And no money. The schoolkids he left to me. I could hear him calming me down. “I wouldn’t dare to interfere in literary matters. I respect you too much as a writer for that.” And I needed calming down when I thought about him getting and opening the mail people thought they were addressing to me.

  “First of all,” Tal was saying to me, “we would like to know how you live as a Jew in America, and how you have solved the conflicts you brought up in your stories. What’s with the ‘American dream’? From the story ‘Eli, the Fanatic’ it seems like the only way of being a Jew in America is being a fanatic. Is it the only way? What about making aliyah? In Israel, in our society, the religious fanatics are seen in a negative way. You talk about suffering—”

  Deborah saw my impatience with Tal’s on-the-spot inquiry and interrupted to tell me, softly now, quite charmingly in that very faintly off-ish English, “We have a beautiful school, near the Kinneret Lake, with a lot of trees, grass, and flowers. It’s a very beautiful place, under the Golan mountains. It is so beautiful it is considered to be Paradise. I think you would enjoy it.”

  “We were impressed,” Tal continued, “by the beautiful style of literature you write, but still not all of the problems were solved in our mind. The conflict between the Jewish identity and being a part of another nation, the situation in the West Bank and Gaza, and the problem of double loyalty as in the Pollard case and its influence on the American Jewish community—”

  I put a hand up to stop him. “I appreciate your interest. Right now I’ve got to be somewhere else. I’ll write your teacher.”

  But the boy had come from the Jordan Valley on a very early bus to Jerusalem and had waited nervously in the lobby for me to wake up and get started, and he wasn’t prepared, having gotten up his head of steam, to back off yet. “What comes first,” he asked me, “nationality or Jewish identity? Tell us about your identity crisis.”

  “Not right now.”

  “In Israel,” he said, “many youngsters have an identity crisis and make hozer b’tshuva without knowing what they are getting into—”

  A rather stern-looking, unsmiling man, very decorously—and, in this country, uncharacteristically—dressed in a dark double-breasted suit and tie, had been watching from a sofa only a few feet away as I tried to extricate myself and be on my way. He was seated with a briefcase in his lap, and now he came to his feet and, as he approached, addressed a few words to Deborah and Tal. I was surprised that he spoke Hebrew. From his looks as well as his dress I would have taken him for a northern European, a German, a Dutchman, a Dane. He spoke quietly but very authoritatively to the two teenagers, and when Tal responded, intemperately, in Hebrew, he listened without flinching until the boy was finished and only then did he turn his cast-iron face to me, to say, in English, and in an English accent, “Please, forgive their audacity and accept them and their questions as a token of the tremendous esteem in which you are held here. I am David Supposnik,° an antiquarian. My office is in Tel Aviv. I too have come to bother you.” He handed me a card that identified him as a dealer in old and rare books, German, English, Hebrew, and Yiddish.

  “The annual teaching of your story ‘Eli, the Fanatic’ is always an experience for the high school students,” Supposnik said. “Our pupils are mesmerized by Eli’s plight and identify wholly with his dilemma despite their innate contempt for all things fanatically religious.”

  “Yes,” agreed Deborah while Tal, resentful, remained silent.

  “Nothing would give the students greater pleasure than a visit from you. But they know it is unlikely and that is why this young man has seized the opportunity to interrogate you here and now.”

  “It’s not been the worst interrogation of my life,” I replied, “but I’m in a rush this morning.”

  “I’m sure that, if you could see your way, in response to his questions, to sending a collective reply to all the students in the class, that would be sufficient and they would be extremely flattered and grateful.”

  Deborah spoke up, obviously feeling as bullied as Tal did by the outsider’s unsought intervention. “But,” she said to me, pleadingly, “they would still prefer if you came.”

  “He has explained to you,” said Sup
posnik, no less brusque now with the girl than he’d been with the boy, “that he has business in Jerusalem. That is quite enough. A man cannot be in two places at one time.”

  “Goodbye,” I said, extending my hand, and it was shaken first by Deborah, then reluctantly by Tal before, finally, they turned and left.

  Who can’t be in two places at one time? Me? And who is this Supposnik and why has he forced those youngsters out of my life if not to force himself in?

  What I saw was a man with a long head, deep-set, smallish light-colored eyes, and a strongly molded forehead from which his light brown hair was combed straight back close to the skull—an officer type, a colonial officer who might have trained at Sandhurst and served here with the British during the Mandate. I would never have had him pegged as a dealer in rare Yiddish books.

  Crisply, reading my mind, Supposnik said, “Who I am and what I want.”

  “Quickly, yes, if you don’t mind.”

  “In just fifteen minutes I can make everything clear.”

  “I don’t have fifteen minutes.”

  “Mr. Roth, I wish to enlist your talent in the struggle against anti-Semitism, a struggle to which I know you are not indifferent. The Demjanjuk trial is not irrelevant to my purpose. Is that not where you are hurrying off to?”

  “Is it?”

  “Sir, everybody in Israel knows what you are doing here.”

  Just then I saw George Ziad walk into the hotel and approach the front desk.

  “Please,” I said to Supposnik, “one moment.”

  At the desk, where George embraced me, I found he was at the same pitch of emotion as when I’d left him the evening before.

  “You’re all right,” he whispered. “I thought the worst.”

  “I’m fine.”

  He would not let me free myself. “They detained you? They questioned you? Did they beat you?”

  “They never detained me. Beat me? Of course not. It was all a big mistake. George, relax,” I told him but was only able to secure my release by pressing my fists against his shoulders until we were finally an arm’s length apart.

  The desk clerk, a young man who hadn’t been on duty when I’d checked in, said to me, “Good morning, Mr. Roth. How are things this morning?” Very jovially, he said to George, “This is no longer the lobby of the King David Hotel, it’s the rabbinical court of Rabbi Roth. All his fans won’t leave him alone. Every morning, they are lining up, the schoolchildren, the journalists, the politicians—we have had nothing like it,” he said, with a laugh, “since Sammy Davis, Jr., came to pray at the Wailing Wall.”

  “The comparison is too flattering,” I said. “You exaggerate my importance.”

  “Everyone in Israel wants to meet Mr. Roth,” the clerk said.

  Hooking my arm in his, I led George away from the desk and the desk clerk. “Is this the best place for you to be, this hotel?”

  “I had to come. The phone is no use here. Everything is tapped and taped and will turn up either at my trial or at yours.”

  “George, come off it. Nobody’s putting me on trial. Nobody beat me. That’s all ridiculous.”

  “This is a military state, established by force, maintained by force, committed to force and repression.”

  “Please, I don’t see it that way. Stop. Not now. No slogans. I’m your friend.”

  “Slogans? They didn’t demonstrate to you last night that this is a police state? They could have shot you, Philip, then and there, and blamed the Arab driver. These are the great specialists in assassination. That is no slogan, that is the truth. They train assassins for fascist governments all over the world. They have no compunctions about whom they murder. Opposition from a Jew is intolerable to them. They can murder a Jew they don’t like as easily as they murder one of us. They can and they do.”

  “Zee, Zee, you’re way over the top, man. The trouble last night was the driver, stopping and starting his car, flashing his light—it was a comedy of errors. The guy had to take a shit. He aroused the suspicion of this patrol. It all meant nothing, means nothing, was nothing.”

  “In Prague it means something to you, in Warsaw it means something to you—only here you, even you, fail to understand what it means. They are out to frighten you, Philip. They are out to scare you to death. What you are preaching here is anathema to them—you are challenging them at the very heart of their Zionist lie. You are the opposition. And the opposition they ‘neutralize.’”

  “Look,” I said, “talk coherently to me. This is not making sense. Let me get rid of this guy and then you and I will have to have a talk.”

  “Which guy? Who is he?”

  “An antiquarian from Tel Aviv. A rare-book dealer.”

  “You know him?”

  “No. He came here to see me.”

  All the while I explained, George looked boldly across the lobby to where Supposnik had taken a seat on the sofa, waiting for me to return.

  “He’s the police. He’s Shin Bet.”

  “George, you’re in a bad way. You’re overwrought and you’re going to explode. This is not the police.”

  “Philip, you are an innocent! I won’t have them brutalizing you, not you too!”

  “But I’m fine. Stop this, please. Look, this is the texture of things over here. I don’t have to tell you that. There is rough stuff on the roads. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. There is a mix-up, all right, but that’s between you and me, I’m afraid. You are not responsible. If anyone is responsible, I am responsible. You and I have to have a talk. You’re confused about why I’m here. Something most unusual has been happening and I haven’t been at all clever dealing with it. I confused you and Anna yesterday—I acted very stupidly at your house. Unforgivably so. Let’s not talk now. You’ll come with me—I have to be at the Demjanjuk trial, you’ll come with me and in the taxi I’ll explain everything. This has all gotten out of hand and the fault is largely mine.”

  “Philip, while this court for Demjanjuk is carefully weighing evidence for the benefit of the world press, scrutinizing meticulously, with all kinds of experts, the handwriting and the photograph and the imprint of the paper clip and the age of the ink and the paper stock, while this charade of Israeli justice is being played out on the radio and the television and in the world press, the death penalty is being enacted all over the West Bank. Without experts. Without trials. Without justice. With live bullets. Against innocent people. Philip,” he said, speaking very quietly now, “there is somebody for you to talk to in Athens. There is somebody in Athens who believes in what you believe in and what you want to do. Somebody with money who believes in Diasporism for the Jews and justice for the Palestinians. There are people who can help you in Athens. They are Jews but they are our friends. We can arrange a meeting.”

  I am being recruited, I thought, recruited by George Ziad for the PLO.

  “Wait. Wait here,” I said. “We have to talk. Is it better for you to wait here or outside?”

  “No, here,” he said, smiling ruefully, “here it is positively ideal for me. They wouldn’t dare to beat an Arab in the lobby of the King David Hotel, not in front of all the liberal American Jews whose money props up their fascist regime. No, here I’m much safer than in my house in Ramallah.”

  I made the mistake then of returning to explain politely to Supposnik that he and I would not be able to continue our conversation. He did not give me a chance, however, to say even one word, but for ten minutes stood barely half a foot from my chest delivering his lecture entitled “Who I Am.” Each time I retreated an inch, preparatory to ducking away, he drew an inch closer to me, and I realized that short of shouting at him or striking him or streaking out of the lobby as fast as I could, I would have to hear him out. There was a commanding incongruousness about this Teutonically handsome Tel Aviv Jew who’d taught himself to speak English in the impeccable accent of the educated English upper class, and something also touchingly absurd about the bookish erudition of his hotel-lobby lecture and the pe
dantic donnish air with which it was so beautifully articulated. If I hadn’t felt that I was needed urgently elsewhere, I might have been more entertained than I was; in the circumstances, I was, in fact, far more entertained than I should have been, but this is a professional weakness and accounts for any number of my mistakes. I am a relentless collector of scripts. I stand around half-amazed by these audacious perspectives, I stand there excited, almost erotically, by these stories so unlike my own, I stand listening like a five-year-old to some stranger’s most fantastic tale as though it were the news of the week in review, stupidly I stand there enjoying all the pleasures of gullibility while I ought instead to be either wielding my great skepticism or running for my life. Half-amazed with Pipik, half-amazed with Jinx, and now this Shylock specialist whom half-amazing George Ziad had identified for me as a member of the Israeli secret police.

  “Who I am. I am one of the children, like your friend Appelfeld,” Supposnik told me. “We were one hundred thousand Jewish children in Europe, wandering. Who would take us in? Nobody. America? England? No one. After the Holocaust and the wandering, I decided to become a Jew. The ones who harmed me were the non-Jews, and the ones who helped me were the Jews. After this I loved the Jew and developed a hatred for the non-Jew. Who I am. Someone who has collected books in four languages for three decades now and who has read all his life the greatest of all English writers. Particularly when I was a young student at the Hebrew University, I studied the Shakespeare play that is second only to Hamlet in the number of times it has been performed on the London stage in the first half of the twentieth century. And in the very first line, the opening line of the third scene of the very first act, I came with a shock upon the three words with which Shylock introduced himself onto the world stage nearly four hundred years ago. Yes, for four hundred years now, Jewish people have lived in the shadow of this Shylock. In the modern world, the Jew has been perpetually on trial; still today the Jew is on trial, in the person of the Israeli—and this modern trial of the Jew, this trial which never ends, begins with the trial of Shylock. To the audiences of the world Shylock is the embodiment of the Jew in the way that Uncle Sam embodies for them the spirit of the United States. Only, in Shylock’s case, there is an overwhelming Shakespearean reality, a terrifying Shakespearean aliveness that your pasteboard Uncle Sam cannot begin to possess. I studied those three words by which the savage, repellent, and villainous Jew, deformed by hatred and revenge, entered as our doppelgänger into the consciousness of the enlightened West. Three words encompassing all that is hateful in the Jew, three words that have stigmatized the Jew through two Christian millennia and that determine the Jewish fate until this very day, and that only the greatest English writer of them all could have had the prescience to isolate and dramatize as he did. You remember Shylock’s opening line? You remember the three words? What Jew can forget them? What Christian can forgive them? ‘Three thousand ducats.’ Five blunt, unbeautiful English syllables and the stage Jew is elevated to its apogee by a genius, catapulted into eternal notoriety by ‘Three thousand ducats.’ The English actor who performed as Shylock for fifty years during the eighteenth century, the Shylock of his day, was a Mr. Charles Macklin. We are told that Mr. Macklin would mouth the two th’s and the two s’s in ‘Three thousand ducats’ with such oiliness that he instantaneously aroused, with just those three words, all of the audience’s hatred of Shylock’s race. ‘Th-th-th-three th-th-th-thous-s-s-sand ducats-s-s.’ When Mr. Macklin whetted his knife to carve from Antonio’s chest his pound of flesh, people in the pit fell unconscious—and this at the zenith of the Age of Reason. Admirable Macklin! The Victorian conception of Shylock, however—Shylock as a wronged Jew rightfully vengeful—the portrayal that descends through the Keans to Irving and into our century, is a vulgar sentimental offense not only against the genuine abhorrence of the Jew that animated Shakespeare and his era but to the long illustrious chronicle of European Jew-baiting. The hateful, hateable Jew whose artistic roots extend back to the Crucifixion pageants at York, whose endurance as the villain of history no less than of drama is unparalleled, the hook-nosed moneylender, the miserly, money-maddened, egotistical degenerate, the Jew who goes to synagogue to plan the murder of the virtuous Christian—this is Europe’s Jew, the Jew expelled in 1290 by the English, the Jew banished in 1492 by the Spanish, the Jew terrorized by Poles, butchered by Russians, incinerated by Germans, spurned by the British and the Americans while the furnaces roared at Treblinka. The vile Victorian varnish that sought to humanize the Jew, to dignify the Jew, has never deceived the enlightened European mind about the three thousand ducats, never has and never will. Who I am, Mr. Roth, is an antiquarian bookseller dwelling in the Mediterranean’s tiniest country—still considered too large by all the world—a bookish shopkeeper, a retiring bibliophile, nobody from nowhere, really, who has dreamed nonetheless, since his student days, an impresario’s dreams, at night in his bed envisioning himself impresario, producer, director, leading actor of Supposnik’s Anti-Semitic Theater Company. I dream of full houses and standing ovations, and of myself, hungry, dirty little Supposnik, one of the hundred thousand wandering children, enacting, in the unsentimental manner of Macklin, in the true spirit of Shakespeare, that chilling and ferocious Jew whose villainy flows inexorably from the innate corruption of his religion. Every winter touring the capitals of the civilized world with his Anti-Semitic Drama Festival, performing in repertory the great Jew-hating dramas of Europe, night after night the Austrian plays, the German plays, Marlowe and the other Elizabethans, and concluding always as star of the masterpiece that was to prophesy, in the expulsion of the unregenerate Jew Shylock from the harmonious universe of the angelic Christian Portia, the Hitlerian dream of a Judenrein Europe. Today a Shylockless Venice, tomorrow a Shylockless world. As the stage direction so succinctly puts it after Shylock has been robbed of his daughter, stripped of his wealth, and compelled to convert by his Christian betters: Exit Jew. This is who I am. Now for what I want. Here.”