The Counterlife

by Philip Roth

  Aloft/El Al

  Dec. 11, 1978

  Dear Shuki,

  Stop calling me a normal Jew. There’s no such animal, and why should there be? How could the upshot of that history be normalcy? I’m as abnormal as you are. I’ve just become in my middle years one of the more subtle forms that the abnormality takes. Which brings me to my point—it’s entirely debatable as to whether in the halls of Congress it would be Lippman who would get them to scratching their heads over the three billion dollars, or whether it might not actually be you. It’s Lippman, after all, who is the unequivocal patriot and devout believer, whose morality is plain and unambiguous, whose rhetoric is righteous and readily accessible, and to whom a nation’s ideological agenda is hardly an object for sardonic scrutiny. Guys like Lippman are a great success in America, actually seem quite normal, are even sometimes elected President, whereas the guys like you that we’ve got are not regularly rewarded with congressional citations. As for the average taxpayer, he might not find a hypercritical, dissident journalist highly attuned to historical paradox and scathing in his judgment of the very country with which he remains deeply identified as sympathetic a figure as I do—nor is he at all likely to find him preferable to a Jewish General Patton whose monomaniac devotion to the narrowest nationalist cause may not be as alien to Kansas as you think. My writing about Shuki Elchanan instead of Mordecai Lippman is not going to do Israel any good in the Congress or among the voters, and you’re unrealistic to think so. It may also be unrealistic to think that even if I were inspired to fictionalize Agor, my story, read by my congressman, would thereby alter Jewish history. Fortunately (or unfortunately) for Jewish history, Congress does not depend upon prose narrative to figure out how to divvy up the take; the conception of the world held by 99% of the population, in Congress and out, owes a lot more—

  Here I noticed that the young man beside me had set his prayer book in his lap and was sitting half crumpled over, seemingly unable to take in enough air, and perspiring even more profusely than when I’d last looked at him. I thought that maybe he was suffering an epileptic seizure or having a heart attack, and so putting aside my answer to Shuki—my halfhearted defense against this crime I hadn’t even yet committed—I leaned across and asked him, “You all right? Excuse me, but do you need help?”

  “How ya’ doin’, Nathan?”

  “Pardon?”

  Pushing his hat brim an inch up from his face, he whispered, “I didn’t want to disturb a genius at work.”

  “My God,” I said, “it’s you.”

  “Yeah, it’s me all right.”

  The churning black eyes and the Jersey accent: it was Jimmy.

  “Lustig from the West Orange Lustigs. Ben-Joseph,” I said, “from the Diaspora Yeshivah.”

  “Formerly.”

  “You all right?”

  “I’m under a little pressure at the moment,” he confided.

  He leaned across his briefcase. “Can you keep a secret?” And then whispered directly into my ear, “I’m going to hijack the plane.”

  “Yes? All on your own?”

  “No, with you,” he whispered. “You scare the shit out of them with the grenade, I take charge with the pistol.”

  “Why the get-up, Jim?”

  “Because a yeshivah bucher they don’t check out the same way.” Taking my hand, he carried it across to his near coat pocket. Beneath the cloth I felt a hard oval object with a raised, ridged surface.

  Now how could that be? I’d never before seen security measures as thorough as those we’d had to submit to in order to board in Tel Aviv. First, all our luggage had been opened, one bag at a time, by plainclothes guards who were not shy about rummaging through every piece of dirty laundry. Then I was questioned at length by a brusque young woman about where I had been in Israel and where I was off to now, and when what I said seemed to have aroused her suspicion, she’d gone through my bag a second time before calling over a man with a walkie-talkie who interrogated me further and even less politely about the brevity of my stay and the places I’d been. They were so curious about my trip to Hebron and whom I had seen there that I was sorry I’d mentioned it. Only after I repeated for him what I’d told her about Henry and the ulpan at Agor—and explained again how I had got from Jerusalem to Agor and back—and only after the two of them had spoken together in Hebrew while I stood waiting in front of the open suitcase, whose contents had twice been turned upside down, was I allowed to close the bag and proceed the twenty feet to the counter where I was to check the bag directly onto the plane. My briefcase was inspected three times, by her first, a second time by a uniformed guard at the entrance to the departure area, and again as I was entering the lounge designated for the El Al London flight. Along with the other passengers, I was frisked from my armpits to my ankles and asked to pass through an electronic metal detector; and once inside the departure lounge, all the doors were sealed while we waited for the plane to begin loading. It was because of the time required for the meticulously thorough security check that passengers were requested to show up at Tel Aviv airport two hours before the plane’s scheduled departure.

  Whatever was in Jimmy’s pocket had to be a toy. Probably what I’d felt there was some kind of souvenir—a rock, a ball, maybe a piece of folk art. It could have been anything.

  “We’re in this together, Nathan.”

  “Are we?”

  “Don’t be afraid—it won’t hurt your image. If there’s no hitch and we hit the headlines, it’ll be the regeneration of the Jews, and a great shot in the arm to your Jewish standing. People will see how much you really care. It’ll turn world opinion completely around on the subject of Israel. Here.”

  He took a paper out of his pants pocket, unfolded it, and handed me a page raggedly torn from a composition book and covered with words scrawled with a ballpoint pen just about out of ink. Jimmy indicated to me that I should keep the page in my lap while I read it.

  FORGET REMEMBERING!

  I demand of the Israeli government the immediate closing and dismantling of Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s Museum and Remembrance Hall of the Holocaust. I demand this in the name of the Jewish future. THE JEWISH FUTURE IS NOW. We must put persecution behind us forever. Never must we utter the name “Nazi” again, but instead strike it from our memory forever. No longer are we a people with an agonizing wound and a hideous scar. We have wandered nearly forty years in the wilderness of our great grief. Now is the time to stop paying tribute to that monster’s memory with our Halls of Remembrance! Henceforth and forever his name shall cease to be associated with the unscarred and unscarable Land of Israel!

  ISRAEL NEEDS NO HITLERS FOR THE RIGHT TO BE ISRAEL!

  JEWS NEED NO NAZIS TO BE THE REMARKABLE JEWISH PEOPLE!

  ZIONISM WITHOUT AUSCHWITZ!

  JUDAISM WITHOUT VICTIMS!

  THE PAST IS PAST! WE LIVE!

  “The statement for the press,” he said, “once we’re on German soil.”

  “You know,” I said, handing it back to him, “the security people riding these planes probably haven’t got a great sense of humor. You could wind up in trouble screwing around like this. They could be anywhere, and they’re armed. Why don’t you can it?”

  “What happens to me doesn’t matter, Nathan. How can I care about myself when I have penetrated to the core of the last Jewish problem? We are torturing ourselves with memories! With masochism! And torturing goyisch mankind! The key to Israel’s survival is no more Yad Vashems! No more Remembrance Halls of the Holocaust! Now what we have to suffer is the loss of our suffering! Otherwise, Nathan—and here is my prophecy as written in the Five Books of Jimmy—otherwise they will annihilate the State of Israel in order to annihilate its Jewish conscience! We have reminded them enough, we have reminded ourselves enough—we must forget!”

  He was no longer whispering, and it was I who had to tell him, “Not so loud, please.” Then I said, very clearly, “I really don’t want anything to do with this.”

&nbs
p; “Israel is their prosecutor, the Jew is their judge! In his heart every goy knows—because every goy in his heart is a little Eichmann. This is why in the papers, at the U.N., everywhere, they all rush to make Israel the villain. This is now the club they use on the Jews—you the prosecutor, you the judge, you shall be judged, judged in every infraction to the millionth degree! This is the hatred that we keep alive by commemorating their crime at Yad Vashem. Dismantle Yad Vashem! No more masochism to make Jews crazy—no more sadism to stoke goy hate! Only then, then, are we free to run wild with the impunity of everybody else! Free to be as gloriously guilty as they are!”

  “Calm down, for Christ’s sake. Where’d you get the idea to dress up like this?”

  “From none other than Menachem Begin!”

  “Yes? You’re in touch with Begin too?”

  “I wish I could be. If I could only get it into his head—Menachem, Menachem, no more remembering! No, I only emulate the great Menachem—this is how he hid from the British in his terrorist days. Disguised as a rabbi in a synagogue! The outfit I got from him, and the big idea itself I owe to you! Forget! Forget! Forget! Every idea I ever had, I got from reading your books!”

  I had decided it was about time to change my seat again, when Jimmy, having glanced out the window—as though to see if we were rolling into Times Square—took hold of my arm and announced, “On German soil we abandon the Holocaust! Land in Munich and leave the nightmare where it began! Jews without a Holocaust will be Jews without enemies! Jews who are not judges will be Jews who are not judged—Jews left alone at long last to live! Ten minutes more and we rewrite our future! Five more minutes and the Jewish people are saved!”

  “You’re going to save them on your own—I’m moving to another seat. And my recommendation to you, my friend, is that when we land you get yourself some help.”

  “Oh, is it really?” He opened the briefcase from which he’d been taking his candy bars and dropped the prayer book inside. He didn’t, however, extract his hand. “You ain’t going anywhere. Finger’s on the trigger, Nathan. That’s all the help I need.”

  “Enough, Jim. You’re over the top.”

  “When I tell you take the grenade, you do just that—only that. Very covertly, out of my pocket and into yours. You step into the aisle, nonchalant you walk to where first class begins, I show my pistol, you take out the grenade, and then we both of us start to shout, ‘No more Jewish suffering! An end to Jewish victims!’”

  “Just Jewish clowning from here on out—making a plaything of history.”

  “Undoing history. Thirty seconds.”

  I sat quietly back thinking it was best to humor him until the performance was over and then to change my seat. Recalling the wording of his “press release,” I thought there was obviously a brain there, even some thought; on the other hand, I couldn’t quite believe that there was some principle connecting his transformation of the Wailing Wall into deep center field at Jerusalem Giants Stadium with this fervent petition for the demolition of the Jerusalem memorial to the Holocaust. The powerful emotional impulses in this boy to desanctify the holiest shrines of Jewish sorrow—to create a museum of his own that says “Forget!”—finally didn’t strike me as having evolved from anything coherent. No, these weren’t symbolic acts of cultural iconoclasm challenging the hold on the Jewish heart of its gravest memories so much as a manic excursion into meaningless Dadaism by a wandering, homeless yeshivah yippie, a one-man band high on grass (and his own adrenaline), a character a little like one of those young Americans the Europeans can’t believe in, who without the backing of any government, on behalf of no political order old or new, energized instead by comic-book scenarios cooked up in horny solitude, assassinate pop stars and presidents. World War III will be triggered off not by suppressed nationalists seeking political independence, as happened the first time around when the Serbs at Sarajevo shot the heir to the Austrian throne, but by some semiliterate, whacked-out “loner” like Jimmy who lobs a rocket into a nuclear arsenal in order to impress Brooke Shields.

  To pass the time I looked around at our neighbors, some of whom had been looking disapprovingly at us. In the aisle beside me, a fellow who must have been a businessman, prosperously dressed in a tan homburg and a pale beige suit with a double-breasted vest and wearing lightly tinted glasses, was leaning over to talk to a bearded young fellow who had been reading his prayer book in the middle row of seats. He wore the long black coat of the pious Jew but had on underneath it a heavy wool sweater and a pair of corduroy pants. In English the businessman was saying to him, “I can’t take the jet lag anymore. When I was your age…” I had vaguely been expecting to overhear some religious disputation. Both men earlier had been praying in the minyan.

  After waiting several more minutes, I finally said to Jimmy, who was now sitting silently, at last out of gas, “What went wrong at the yeshivah?”

  “You’ve got balls, Nathan,” and he showed me, in the hand that he withdrew from the briefcase, yet another candy bar. He ripped open the wrapper and offered me a bite before tearing in himself to replenish his energy. “I really had you goin’ there. I really had you on the ropes.”

  “What are you doing dressed like this on the plane? Running away? You in trouble?”

  “No, no, no—just following you, if you want the truth. I want to meet your wife. I want you to help me to find a girl like her. The hell with Rabbi Greenspan. I want something old English like Maria.”

  “How do you know Maria’s name?”

  “The whole civilized world knows her name. The Virgin Mother of Our Savior. What red-blooded Jewboy could resist? Nathan, I want to live in Christendom and become an aristocrat.”

  “And what’s the rabbi bit about?”

  “You guessed it. You would. My Jewish sense of fun. The irrepressible Jewish joker. Laughs are the core of my faith—like yours. All I know about cracking offensive jokes I learned at your great feet.”

  “Sure. Including this stuff about Yad Vashem.”

  “Come on, you think I’d be crazy enough to fuck around with the Holocaust? I was just curious, that was all. See what you’d do. How it developed. You know. The novelist in me.”

  “And Israel? Your love of Israel? At the Wailing Wall you told me you were there for life.”

  “I thought I was till I met you. You changed everything. I want a shiksa just like the shiksa that married dear old Z. Teddibly British. Do like you do—the Yiddische disappearing act with the archgoy, the white priestess. Teach me how, will ya? You’re a real father to me, Nathan. And not only to me—to a whole generation of pathetic fuck-ups. We’re all satirists because of you. You led the fucking way. I went around Israel feeling like your son. That’s how I go through life. Help me out, Nathan. In England I’m always saying ‘sir’ to the wrong person—I get my signals mixed. I get nervous there that I’m looking even more ridiculous than I am. I mean the background is so neutral, and we speak the same language, or we think we do, that I wonder if there we don’t stand out even more. I always think of England as one of those places where every Jew’s shadow has an enormous hooked nose, though I know a lot of American Jews have this fantasy that it’s a Wasp paradise where they can just sneak in, passing themselves off as Yanks. Sure, no Jew exists anywhere without his shadow, but there it’s always seemed to me worse. Isn’t it? Can I, Nathan, just ease myself in with the British upper claahhses and wash away the Jewish stain?” Leaning over, he whispered to me, “You really got the inside track on how not to be a Jew. You shed it all. You’re about as Jewish as the National Geographic.”

  “You were made for the stage, Jim—a real ham.”

  “I was an actor. I told you. At Lafayette. But the stage, no, the stage inhibited me. Couldn’t project. Without the stage, that’s what I love. Who should I look up in England?”

  “Anyone but me.”

  He liked that. The candy bar had calmed him down and he was laughing now, laughing and mopping his face with his hankie. “But
you’re my idol. It’s you who inspire me to my feats of masterful improvisation. Everything I am I owe to you and Menachem. You’re the greatest father figures I ever had in my life. You’re two fucking Jews who will say anything—Diaspora Abbott and Israeli Costello. They ought to book you boys into the Borscht Belt. I got some bad news from the States, Nathan, some really shitty news from home. You know what happened when the social worker phoned my family long-distance? My old man answered and she told him what had happened and that he would have to wire fare to Jerusalem so I could come home. You know what my old man told her? They ought to book him into the Borscht Belt too. He said, ‘It’s better if James stays.’”

  “What did happen to make him so sanguine about you?”

  “I gave my big lecture on the kosher laws to the tourists inside King David’s Tomb. Impromptu. ‘The Cheeseburger and the Jew.’ Rabbi Greenspan didn’t like it. Where do I stay in London? With you and Lady Zuckerman?”

  “Try the Ritz.”