Operation Shylock

by Philip Roth

  I waited for an answer. This was never the kind of partnership you had in mind. I needn’t have said that, but otherwise, I thought, in a predicament as ambiguously menacing as this, no one could have spoken much more adroitly. Nor had I been craven. I had said more or less what he wanted me to say while still saying what was more or less true.

  But when still no answer was forthcoming, I all at once lost whatever adroitness I may have had and announced in a voice no longer calm and steady, “Pipik, if you cannot forgive me, give me a sign that you’re there, that you’re here, that you hear me, that I am not talking to a wall!” Or, I thought, to someone even less forgiving than you and capable of a rebuke sterner even than your silence. “What do you require, burnt offerings? I will never again go near your girl, we’ll get you back your goddamn money—now say something! Speak!”

  And only then did I understand what he did require of me, not to mention understanding finally just how very maladroit I was with him and had been from the start, how unforgivably self-damaging a miscalculation it had been to deny this impostor the thing that any impostor covets and can least do without and that only I could meaningfully anoint him with. Only when I spoke my name as though I believed it was his name as well, only then would Pipik reveal himself and negotiations commence to propitiate his rage.

  “Philip,” I said.

  He did not answer.

  “Philip,” I said again, “I am not your enemy. I don’t want to be your enemy. I would like to establish cordial relations. I am nearly overcome by how this has turned out and, if it’s not too late, I’d like to be your friend.”

  Nothing. No one.

  “I was sardonic and unfeeling and I’m chastened,” I said. “It was not right to exalt myself and denigrate you by addressing you as I have. I should have called you by your name as you called me by mine. And from now on I will. I will. I am Philip Roth and you are Philip Roth, I am like you and you are like me, in name and not only in name. …”

  But he wasn’t buying it or else he wasn’t there.

  He wasn’t there. An hour later the door opened and into the classroom hobbled Smilesburger.

  “Good of you to wait,” he said. “Terribly sorry, but I was detained.”

  * It was Sheftel, by the way, who would have benefited from a bodyguard to protect him against attack. Perhaps my most unthinking mistake of all in Jerusalem was to have allowed myself to become convinced that at the culmination of this inflammatory trial, the violent rage of a wild Jewish avenger, if and when it should erupt, would be directed at a Gentile and not, as I initially thought, and as happened—and as even the least cynical of Jewish ironists could have foreseen—at another Jew.

  On December 1, 1988, during the funeral for Demjanjuk’s auxiliary Israeli lawyer—one who’d joined Sheftel, after Demjanjuk’s conviction, to help prepare the Supreme Court appeal and who mysteriously committed suicide only weeks later—Sheftel was approached by Yisroel Yehezkeli, a seventy-year-old Holocaust survivor and a frequent spectator at the Demjanjuk trial, who shouted at him, “Everything’s because of you,” and threw hydrochloric acid in the lawyer’s face. The acid completely destroyed the protective cover over the cornea of his left eye and Sheftel was virtually blind in that eye until he came to Boston some eight weeks later, where he underwent a cell transplant, a four-hour operation by a Harvard surgeon, that restored his sight. During Sheftel’s Boston sojourn and subsequent recovery, he was accompanied by John Demjanjuk, Jr., who acted as his nurse and chauffeur.

  As for Yisroel Yehezkeli, he was convicted of aggravated assault. He was sentenced by a Jerusalem judge, who found him “unrepentant,” and served three years in jail. The court psychiatrist’s report described the assailant as “not psychotic, although slightly paranoid.” Most of Yehezkeli’s family had been killed at Treblinka.

  10

  You Shall Not

  Hate Your Brother

  in Your Heart

  I was reading when he came in. To make it appear to whoever might be observing me that I was not yet incapacitated by fear or running wild with hallucination, that I was waiting as though for nothing more than my turn in the dental chair or at the barbershop, to force my attention to something other than the timorousness that kept me nailed warily to my seat—even more urgently, to focus on something other than the overbold boldness insistently charging me now to jump out the window—I had removed from my pockets the purported diaries of Leon Klinghoffer and shunted myself, with a huge mental effort, onto the verbal track.

  How pleased my teachers would be, I thought—reading, even here! But then this was not the first time, or the last, when, powerless before the uncertainty at hand, I looked to print to subjugate my fears and keep the world from coming apart. In I960, not a hundred yards from the Vatican walls, I had sat one evening in the empty waiting room of an unknown Italian doctor’s office reading a novel of Edith Wharton’s, while on the far side of the doctor’s door, my then wife underwent an illegal abortion. Once on a plane with a badly smoking engine, I had heard the pilot’s horrifyingly calm announcement as to how and where he planned to set down and had quickly told myself, “You just concentrate on Conrad,” and continued my reading of Nostromo, mordantly keeping at the back of my mind the thought that at least I would die as I’d lived. And two years after escaping Jerusalem unharmed, when I wound up one night an emergency patient in the coronary unit of New York Hospital, an oxygen tube in my nose and an array of doctors and nurses fastidiously monitoring my vital signs, I waited for a decision to be made about operating on my obstructed arteries while reading, not without some pleasure, the jokes in Bellow’s The Bellarosa Connection. The book you clutch while awaiting the worst is a book you may never be capable of summarizing coherently but whose clutching you never forget.

  When I was a small boy in my first classroom—I remembered this, sitting obediently as a middle-aged man in what I could not help thinking might be my last classroom—I had been transfixed by the alphabet as it appeared in white on a black frieze some six inches high that extended horizontally atop the blackboard, “Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee,” each letter exhibited there twice, in cursive script, parent and child, object and shadow, sound and echo, etc., etc. The twenty-six asymmetrical pairings suggested to an intelligent five-year-old every duality and correspondence a little mind could possibly conceive. Each was so variously interlocked and at odds, any two taken together so tantalizing in their faintly unharmonious apposition that, even if viewed as I, for one, first apprehended the alphabet frieze—as figures in profile, the way Nineveh’s low-relief sculptors depicted the royal lion hunt in 1000 B.C.—the procession marching immobilely toward the classroom door constituted an associative grab bag of inexhaustible proportions. And when it registered on me that the couples in this configuration—whose pictorial properties alone furnished such pure Rorschachish delight—each had a name of its own, mental delirium of the sweetest sort set in, as it might in anyone of any age. It only remained for me to be instructed in the secret of how these letters could be inveigled to become words for the ecstasy to be complete. There had been no pleasure so fortifying and none that so dynamically expanded the scope of consciousness since I’d learned to walk some fifteen hundred days before; and there would be nothing as remotely inspirational again until a stimulant no less potent than the force of language—the hazardous allurements of the flesh and the pecker’s irrepressible urge to squirt—overturned angelic childhood.

  So this explains why I happened to be reading when Smilesburger appeared. The alphabet is all there is to protect me; it’s what I was given instead of a gun.

  In September 1979, six years before he was thrown in his wheelchair over the side of the Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists, Klinghoffer and his wife were on a cruise ship bound for Israel. This is what I read of what he’d written in the leather-bound diary with the rickshaw, the elephant, the camel, the gondola, the airliner, and the passenger ship engraved in gold on its cover.

  9/5
>
  Weather clear

  Friday. Sunny

  Took tour through Greek port of Piraeus and city of Athens. Guide was excellent. The city of Athens is a modern bustling city. Lots of traffic. Went up to the Acropolis and saw all the ancient ruins. It was a well-guided and interesting tour. Got home about 2.30. Quarter of 4 on way to Haifa, Israel. A very interesting afternoon. Tonight was the night. After dinner there was a singer from Israel. Gave a performance. I was one of the judges for queen of the ship. It was all hilarious. What a night. To bed at 12.30.

  9/6 Sea calm

  Weather good

  Another pleasant day. Young Dr. and his wife going to Israel to look into opening a hospital with a group of French Jewish doctors in a large town in the south of Israel. In case something happens in France they will have a foot in Israel and an investment. Met many people, made a lot of friends in 7 days. They all loved Marilyn. She never looked so rested and pretty. Bed late. Up early. Ship to dock at Haifa tomorrow.

  9/7

  Haifa

  What excitement. Young and old alike. Many away on tours for as long as 40 days. Some longer. Ziv and wife for 3 months singing in America. Others just cruising. What expressions of joy to be home in their country. How they love Israel. Hotel Dan a beautiful place. Accommodations good.

  9/8

  Haifa to Tel Aviv

  The trip from Haifa to Tel Aviv over 11/2 hours. The roads modern. Traffic some parts heavy. Building going on all over. Houses. Factories. It is astonishing for a country born of war and living a war to be so vibrant. The soldiers all over the place with their full packs and rifles. Girls and boys alike. Booked for tours all over the place. We are tired. Worth the tiredness. Listening to radio in lovely room looking over the blue Mediterranean.

  9/8 W. sunny

  Tel Aviv

  Up at 7. Started to tour. Tel Aviv. Yaffo. Rehovoth. Ashdod. 50 kilometers around Tel Aviv. The activity. The building. The reclaiming of sand dunes and making towns and cities grow is astonishing. The old Arab city of Yaffo is being torn down and instead of slums that have existed for years a new city has been planned and is being erected.

  The Agricultural College, the Chaim Weizmann Institute is a garden spot in Rehovoth. Its beautiful buildings, its hall of learning, its surroundings are something to see. A busy delightful educational day and a new respect for the land born of war and still plagued.

  9/9 Sunny

  Tel Aviv

  Up at 5.45 to go to the Dead Sea. Sodom. Beersheba. Over the steep hills and down to the lowest spot on earth. What a day. 12 hours again. Terrific what is going on in this small country. Building. Roads. Irrigation. Planning and fighting. It was a very hard day but a rewarding one. Visited kibbutz at the end of the earth where young married families live in complete loneliness and unfriendly neighbors to build a land. Guts. Plain guts.

  9/10

  Jerusalem

  What a city. What activity. New roads. New factories. New housing. Thousands of tourists from all over. Jew and Gentile alike. Got here at 11 and went on tour. The shrine of the Holocaust. And my Marilyn broke down. I had tears in my eyes also. The city is a series of hills. New and old. The garden where Billy Rose’s art exhibit is. Also the museum is in the most beautiful setting. The museum is large, roomy, and full of art objects. Looking over the city from this site is grand. Supper. Walked the streets. To bed at 10.

  9/11 Thursday

  Looking at the hills of Jerusalem in the year 1979. It is a beautiful view. The geography is the same but with modern living, good roads, trucks, busses, cars, air conditioning to make life better. The climate here is cool at night, warm during the day except when the wind blows from the desert.

  9/12

  Sunny

  Went to the Old City of Jerusalem. Wailing Wall. Jesus tomb. David’s. Walked through narrow streets of the Arab quarter. Full of stores which are small stalls. Smells and dirt predominant. Our hotel was the border line between Israel and Jordan. The goings on in front of the W.W. were interesting. The constant praying. Bar Mitzvahs. Weddings. Etc. Got home at 1. Again tired after all touring. 21/2 hour tour, all walking. No cars in the Old City. Next Hadassah Hospital. The women of America should be proud of what their efforts have done. On the grounds there is a building that is used as a research center and houses pictures of Jews killed in Germany. Horrifying between resentment and tears that well up in your eyes. You wonder how a civilized Christian nation could allow a little pimp to lead them to such atrocities. Then on to where Herzl the founder of Zionism and his family were buried. Also a cemetery built on the hills of men who died in all the wars. Ages ranging from 13 to 79. All soldiers. Then to the Knesset, college, and other important centers of government and learning.

  This city is just beautiful. Full of history and wonders. All roads lead to Jerusalem not Rome. I am glad to have the opportunity to get here.

  9/13

  Shabbas and

  Rosh Hoshana

  It is 6 o’clock A.M. And from our room in the King David Hotel we have the most beautiful view, looking over the hills of Jerusalem. Just 500 yards away from our hotel was the Jordanian border where snipers stood in the ruins of the Old City and shot into the New City. There were 39 houses of worship there and the Arabs blew them all up in the last War. These people deserve all the help and praise of all of the Diaspora. The defenders of this country are 18 to 25. There are soldiers all over the city but inconspicuous. It is a modern city with all of the old ruins preserved. This is our final day in the city the Jews prayed to come back to for 2000 years and I can now understand why. I hope they never have to leave.

  I was reading when Smilesburger came in, and I was also writing, making notes—while I went probingly through each plodding page of the diaries—for the introduction that Supposnik claimed would expedite Klinghoffer’s American and European publication. What else was I to do? What else do I know how to do? It was not even in my hands. The thoughts began to drift in a bit at a time and I began groping both to disentangle them and to piece them together—an inherent activity, a perpetual need, especially under the pressure of strong emotions like fear. I wrote not on the back of the American Colony bill, where I’d already recorded the mysterious Hebrew words chalked up on the blackboard, but in the dozen or so unused pages at the tail end of the red diary. I had nothing else on which to record anything of any length, and gradually, when the old habituated state of mind firmly took root and, as a protest perhaps against this inscrutable semicaptivity, I found myself working step by step into the familiar abyss, the initial shock of appending one’s own profane handwriting to the handwriting of a murdered martyr—the transgressive feelings of a good citizen vandalizing, if not exactly a sacred work, certainly a not insignificant archival curio—gave way before an absurdly schoolboyish assessment of my situation: I had been brutally abducted and carted off to this classroom specifically for this purpose and would not be freed until a serious introduction, with the correct Jewish outlook, was satisfactorily composed and handed in.

  Here are the impressions I had begun to elaborate when Smilesburger made his wily appearance and loquaciously announced why in fact I was there. As I would learn by the time he was done with me, two thousand words countenancing Klinghoffer’s humanity was the least the situation demanded.

  The terrific ordinariness of these entries. The very reasonable ordinariness of K. A wife he’s proud of. Friends he loves to be with. A little money in his pocket to take a cruise. To do what he wants to do in his own artless way. The very embodiment, these diaries, of Jewish “normalization.”

  An ordinary person who purely by accident gets caught in the historical struggle. A life annotated by history in the last place you expect history to intervene. On a cruise, which is out of history in every way.

  The cruise. Nothing could be safer. The floating lockup. You go nowhere. It’s a circle. A lot of movement but no progress. Life suspended. A ritual of in-betweenness. All the time in the world. Insulated, like
a moon shot. Travel within their own environment. With old friends. Don’t have to learn any languages. Don’t have to worry about new foods. In neutral territory, the protected trip. But there is no neutral territory. “You, Klinghoffer, of the Diaspora,” crows the militant Zionist, “even at the point where you thought you were most safe, you weren’t. You were a Jew: not even on a cruise is a Jew on a cruise.” The Zionist preys on the Jewish urge for normalcy anywhere but in Fortress Israel.

  The shrewdness of the PLO: they will always figure out the way to worm their way into the tranquilizing fantasy of the Jew. The PLO too denies the plausibility of Jewish safety other than armed to the teeth.

  You read K.’s diaries with the whole design in mind, as you read the diary of A.F. You know he’s going to die and how, and so you read it through the ending back. You know he’s going to be pushed over the side, so all these boring thoughts he has—which are the sum total of everybody’s existence—take on a brutal eloquence and K. is suddenly a living soul whose subject is the bliss of life.

  Would Jews without enemies be just as boring as everybody else? These diaries suggest as much. What makes extraordinary all the harmless banality is the bullet in the head.

  Without the Gestapo and the PLO, these two Jewish writers (A.F. and L.K.) would be unpublished and unknown; without the Gestapo and the PLO any number of Jewish writers would be, if not necessarily unknown, completely unlike the writers they are.

  In idiom, interests, mental rhythms, diaries like K.’s and A.F.’s confirm the same glaring pathos: one, that Jews are ordinary; two, that they are denied ordinary lives. Ordinariness, blessed, humdrum, dazzling ordinariness, it’s there in every observation, every sentiment, every thought. The center of the Jewish dream, what feeds the fervor both of Zionism and Diasporism: the way Jews would be people if they could forget they were Jews. Ordinariness. Blandness. Uneventful monotony. Unembattled existence. The repetitious security of one’s own little cruise. But this is not to be. The incredible drama of being a Jew.