A Holiday About Snow
Operation Shylock is the product of Roth’s renewed vigor after the Halcion-induced breakdown and quintuple bypass surgery. With the concerns that had been running through his work for years brought to a global scale and a furious pitch, the book reads as though the author had resolved, after so narrowly cheating death—twice—to get absolutely everything in. And to get in everybody Jewish who would fit: Shylock, Freud, the Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, the murdered American tourist Leon Klinghoffer, Irving Berlin. There are not one but two Philip Roths in the book. (Roth meant it when he wrote that being “implicated” heated things up for him.) One of them has written all Roth’s books, is married to a woman named Claire, and is slowly recovering from the mentally disruptive effects of Halcion. Yet this is not a book about Philip Roth. There is no father, no mother, and scant mention of Newark. Even “Claire” exists only to warn her husband, sensibly and protectively, about exposing himself to a danger he cannot resist: tracking down and confronting the other Philip Roth, an impostor who is using his name and fame to propagate a theory that he calls Diasporism—billed as “The Only Solution to the Jewish Problem”—in lectures and interviews that he is giving in Jerusalem. One fictional Roth arrives there to overtake the other in January 1988, in time for the trial of John Demjanjuk and for the stirrings of the first intifada. These are not background events for a personal drama; they are the reasons the personal drama takes place.
Roth, the author of so many convincing masks, is clearly captivated by the mysteries of identity. (“My guess is that you’ve written metamorphoses of yourself so many times,” Nathan Zuckerman tells him in The Facts, “you no longer have any idea what you are.”) An early title for Operation Shylock was Duality. The book carries an epigraph from Genesis, about Jacob wrestling with the angel, and another by Kierkegaard: “The whole content of my being shrieks in contradiction against itself.” If Israel runs away with the story once again, Roth was able this time to track the turbulence of its identity through an entire turbulent book. The Demjanjuk trial was the germinating seed, nationally and personally. It had been going on for more than a year when the real Philip Roth walked into the courtroom, in January 1988, just as he does in the novel. Indeed, the details of the proceedings contained in the novel have a journalistic accuracy that derives from the fact that Roth attended the trial compulsively, day after day. “Twenty feet in front of me sat a man accused of being one of the worst human beings who ever walked the earth,” he explains to me, “and all around me the survivors, wanting his blood. Here was history.”
But whose history, exactly? Demjanjuk’s lawyers argued a straight-out case of mistaken identity, and offered in evidence their client’s spotless record as a hardworking immigrant and model American citizen, a churchgoing family man admired by his neighbors. His accusers, they said—traumatized, elderly, with memories eroded by the decades—had mistaken him for someone to whom he merely bore a physical resemblance; someone, furthermore, who other survivors reported had been killed in a camp uprising at the end of the war. The protagonist called Philip Roth is riveted—as the real Philip Roth was riveted—by the mere proximity of such a figure. (“There he was. There he was.”) In Operation Shylock, Roth imagines, in an extraordinary Nietzschean outburst, what it must have felt like to be this murderous peasant youth, having the time of his life at Treblinka: “What a job! A sensational blowout every day! One continuous party! Blood! Vodka! Women! Death! Power! And the screams! Those unending screams! And all of it work, good, hard work.” The sixty-eight-year-old man in the dock hadn’t smashed open a skull in nearly fifty years; no wonder he appeared so benign. But is the contrast so strange?
You’ve really only lived sequentially the two seemingly antipodal, mutually excluding lives that the Nazis, with no strain to speak of, managed to enjoy simultaneously—so what, in the end, is the big deal? The Germans have proved definitively to all the world that to maintain two radically divergent personalities, one very nice and one not so nice, is no longer the prerogative of psychopaths only.
Unless, of course, they had the wrong man. Not a demon but someone perfectly innocent. Because after all the months and all the witnesses, no one seemed able to tell for sure.
Operation Shylock is subtitled A Confession, and a preface presents the entire book as a factual account of events that culminated, in the late eighties, with Roth’s agreeing to work as a spy for Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad. Many names throughout the text are marked with a tiny circle, to indicate that they have been changed. Other, well-known names serve to anchor the account in reality. Aharon Appelfeld, for instance, whom Roth had traveled to Jerusalem to interview, is accurately described, and Roth quotes extensively from the published interview itself. This careful regard for provable data accords with an initial brusquely factual tone that functions like the runway under the wheels of a 747 gathering speed.
The doppelgänger in Jerusalem turns out to be a longtime Chicago private eye who is dying of cancer, and who is accompanied by a luscious blonde named Wanda Jane (“Jinx”) Possesski. A former nurse, Jinx is also an officially recovering anti-Semite, thanks to a ten-step program that this phony Roth has developed, Anti-Semites Anonymous. While chasing the pair around the city, the book’s “real” Roth is recruited by a Palestinian friend, who may or may not be a double agent, to meet with Yasir Arafat in Tunis. He is also recruited by an ancient Mossad spymaster named Smilesburger (no little circle marks the name; clearly, it is already an alias) for a mission designed to reveal the identity of Israelis who are secretly funneling money to the PLO. No wonder he worries that he may still be feeling the hallucinatory effects of Halcion.
In all these twists and turns, Roth—the author—has never seemed more of an écouteur, or talk fetishist: every permutation of a position in the Israeli spectrum, it seems, is given a voice. The book is a compendium of speeches, propositions, and diatribes, offering equally passionate and conflicting “solutions” to the problems of a Jewish state surrounded by enemies. The whole thing is vastly implausible on anything but the deepest level, where it is often moving and profound. (What is more implausible than Jewish history in the twentieth century?) Roth was steering his immense and chattering cargo toward what he saw as a kind of Jewish Finnegans Wake: hallucinatory, folkloric, dense (but never incomprehensible), and aimed at the heart of the Jewish dream.
Roth, as an expert on crackpot solutions to Israel’s problems, demonstrates just how intractable those problems are. In The Counterlife, there is the Jewish hijacker who demands that Jews forget the Holocaust, so that Gentiles can forget the guilt that is the only explanation for their continuing vilification of Israel. (“Otherwise,” he warns, “they will annihilate the State of Israel in order to annihilate its Jewish conscience!”) Operation Shylock centers on the false Philip Roth’s even more staggering plan, Diasporism, which calls for Israeli Jews of European heritage to return, en masse, to their countries of origin—to Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Lithuania, Germany—where they will be greeted with joy by the Christian citizens, who have missed them. (The secondary program he has developed, Anti-Semites Anonymous, is meant to deal with any snags in the Christian reactions.) After this second exodus is accomplished, Israel will be able to shrink to its original 1948 borders, and its tiny remaining non-European Jewish population will live peacefully in the larger Arab surround. As a result—and here is the point, the same nagging, terrifying point—a second Holocaust will be averted in the Middle East.
Diasporism is Zionism in reverse. (Roth evidently took the word “Diasporism” from a little book called First Diasporist Manifesto, by his friend the painter R. B. Kitaj, but there is not a trace of Roth’s invented meaning among Kitaj’s vague theories.) As such, it is no more incredible, Philip the Diasporist insists, than Theodore Herzl’s plan to establish a Jewish state in the desert, which had appeared equally mad in his time. The former private eye who looks remarkably like Philip Roth (and looks more a
nd more like him as the book proceeds, even to the way he wears down the heels of his shoes) is devoting his life to preaching the cause. And for a while, it appears that his most important convert (aside from Lech Wałȩsa, with whom he has met in Gdansk) is the famous author himself. Easily mistaken for his double, Roth-the-protagonist begins to imitate his double imitating him and to give Diasporist speeches of his own. Freely adding little twists (he is having tremendous fun, or is he still feeling the Halcion?), he explains how he got the idea from the greatest Diasporist of them all, Irving Berlin:
The radio was playing ‘Easter Parade’ and I thought, But this is Jewish genius on a par with the Ten Commandments. God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave to Irving Berlin ‘Easter Parade’ and ‘White Christmas.’ The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ—the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity—and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow. Gone is the gore and the murder of Christ—down with the crucifix and up with the bonnet! He turns their religion into schlock. But nicely! Nicely! So nicely the goyim don’t even know what hit ’em. They love it. Everybody loves it.
His point, though it may be difficult to discern at first, is that there have been more effective ways of “defusing the enmity of centuries” than the bloodshed that Israel currently endures and employs. “I took more pride,” he says, “in ‘Easter Parade’ than in the victory of the Six Day War, found more security in ‘White Christmas’ than in the Israeli nuclear reactor.” Which brings us back to the dangers at hand. If the Israelis ever reach a point where they feel impelled to drop a nuclear bomb, he concludes, “they will have saved their state by destroying their people.” Because “they will never survive morally after that; and if they don’t, why survive as Jews at all?”
The novelist is mistaken for the Diasporist not only because of the similarity in looks but because of the reputation of his books. To any Palestinians who happened to be readers of modern American literature, there was no disparity between Philip Roth’s renowned hostility to Jews and his purported plan to move them out of Israel. Both were commendable positions, possibly even helpful ones. And so our protagonist is approached, in a crowded Jerusalem marketplace, by a Palestinian recruiter for the PLO (unless he is really working for Israel) who also happens to be an old friend from the University of Chicago. This learned, elegant, American-schooled, and totally enraged Palestinian is called George Ziad (the name, we see, has been changed). Roth—I mean the man who actually wrote this book—tells me that he adapted the name from that of a Palestinian who took him into Palestinian areas in the West Bank, and to visit an Israeli military court in Ramallah (where Ziad takes the fictional Roth), in order to show him a dirtier side of Israeli justice than was being broadcast in the Demjanjuk trial. Roth insists that Edward Said, the eminent Palestinian and Columbia professor, never entered his mind, although reviewers often mentioned him, and The New Yorker, despite its meticulous fact-checking department, consistently misspelled the character’s name George Zaid.
Whatever his origins, and whoever he is working for, this Palestinian intellectual gets some of the strongest moral and political rhetoric in the book. After years of living in Boston and disavowing any connection with his past, he has given up everything, including a job he loved, teaching literature, and brought his wife and son to a dusty West Bank outpost, where, attempting to repossess his father’s land, he has succeeded only in repossessing his father’s anger. His daily life is a series of roadblocks and humiliations. Twenty years of the occupation, forty years of the Jewish state, have “corroded everything moderate in him” and made him wholly subject to “the great disabling fantasy of revenge.” And for some fourteen pages he spills out his opinions, his grievances, his memories, and his fury on the subject of Israel:
This state has no moral identity. It has forfeited its moral identity, if it ever had any to begin with. By relentlessly institutionalizing the Holocaust it has even forfeited its claim to the Holocaust! The state of Israel has drawn the last of its moral credit out of the bank of the dead six million—this is what they have done by breaking the hands of Arab children on the orders of their illustrious minister of defense.
This from the author who was outraged by the anti-Israel talk at London dinner parties. Roth has not changed his position (if, as a novelist, he can be said to have any positions at all). He has created a character.
The only brake on Ziad’s rage comes from his wife. A pencil-quick, unforgettable sketch of female pragmatism and anguished motherhood, Anna Ziad regrets the life that her family has left behind in Boston and is choking over what she considers to be her husband’s destructive loyalties. “Why aren’t you loyal,” she cries to him, “to your intellect? Why aren’t you loyal to literature?” Valuing her son’s future far above the “childish, stupid ethnic mythologies” she sees on every side, she argues: “Isn’t it ‘life’ when you read books and listen to music and choose your friends because of their qualities and not because they share your roots? Roots! A concept for cavemen to live by!”
An intense, migraine-afflicted, morally complex Palestinian woman: it is hard to imagine a stranger skin for Roth to inhabit, even for a few pages. Was there a model? Had she any basis in reality? (Does it matter?) Roth replies to my questions in the negative, saying that he had simply tried “to reverse the stereotype, a process that usually leads you toward reality.” In fact, the most lauded modern Arabic novel of the Palestinian struggle, Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun, which drew on hundreds of oral histories and was published a few years after Operation Shylock, features a heroine—a warrior’s wife and a mother—of similar pragmatic and protective strengths.
And the Israeli countervoice? There are several, with deep attachments to the state, who speak out of a hard-won sense of realpolitik that passes for a saddened wisdom. The question of a national moral identity is fully played out between a father and son: the latter, a twenty-two-year-old army lieutenant, is so sick of the violence he has seen, and of the monstrous reflection of himself that he sees in the eyes of Palestinian women and children, that he is ready to go off to study at NYU. (“Nine tenths of their misery,” he says of the Palestinians, “they owe to the idiocy of their own political leaders. I know that. But still I look at my own government and I want to vomit.”) The father, a camp survivor who is now a Haifa manufacturer, argues that the morally esteemed British and French and Canadians would act exactly as the Israelis act if they were faced with the threats the Israelis face. “A state does not act out of moral ideology, a state acts out of self-interest,” he lectures his son. “A state acts to preserve its existence.” When the idealistic young man protests that it might be better, then, to be stateless, the father replies wearily, “We tried it.” He hardly needs to add, “It didn’t work out.”
If this is the only argument made in support of the contemporary Israeli state, the moral feeling for the people who have historically defined the state is intense. Looking around during the Demjanjuk trial, Roth-the-protagonist notes that the greatest mystery isn’t that a monster managed to live an ordinary life but rather, as he imagines telling the monster, that “those who cleaned the corpses out for you, your accusers here, could ever pursue anything resembling the run-of-the-mill after what was done to them by the likes of you—that they can manage run-of-the-mill lives, that’s what’s unbelievable!”
Of course, not everybody managed it. Aharon Appelfeld, already a familiar sort of Rothian alter ego—“hiding as a child from his murderers in the Ukrainian woods while I was still on a Newark playground playing fly-catcher’s-up”—has a doppelgänger of his own. He is a sad and wistful figure called Cousin Apter, a tiny “unborn adult” who has emerged less than intact from even greater childhood horrors than Appelfeld’s. The permanently childish Apter, Roth explains to me, is “what might have happened to Aharon if he hadn’t escaped into th
e woods.”
Does all this suggest that the Holocaust is the bedrock reason, and reason enough, for loyalty to Israel? It is the Israeli spymaster, Smilesburger, who denounces any attempt to “hide behind Appelfeld” as a morally comfortable way of supporting Israel. After all, he asks, “what justification is Mr. Appelfeld from Csernowitz, Bukovina, for the theft from them of Haifa and Jaffa?” Projecting a future Palestinian victory and a very different war-crimes trial in Jerusalem, the spymaster points out that all supporters of Israel will be accused of facilitating “the imperialist, colonialist theft that was the state of Israel.” Whatever the fine distinctions in their reasoning, Smilesburger and Philip Roth will be hanged side by side. Millennial claims on the land? A millennial history of murderous anti-Semitism? Standing with one’s tribe? The Holocaust? Being condemned, as a Jew born where and when he was, in whichever way he turned? No, the only explanation that Smilesburger plans to give for his position, to any such future court, is: “I do what I do because I do what I do.”
These are the graver aspects of Operation Shylock. The book is crowded not only with arguments about political morality but with jokes, shtick, absurdities, impossibilities, the escapades of people with American cartoon names (Jinx, Smilesburger) or Yiddish cartoon names (Moishe Pipik, Meema Gitcha), and with outright belly laughs. It is a wildly and distractingly antic book, though, precisely because it deals with grave and hazardous subjects. Wild, distracting, and antic are Roth’s ways of avoiding pomposity, sentimentality, and didacticism. Even more than in 1959, and especially now that he was dealing openly with the Holocaust and the moral foundations of Israel, Roth was the anti–Leon Uris. He knew the risks that he was taking in this nervy, jabbering, structurally pinwheeling book: at one point, Roth-the-protagonist worries that the story is “too freakishly plotted” and that the careering sequence of events leaves “nowhere for intelligence to establish a foothold and develop a perspective.” Is one voice right and the other wrong? For whom does the author speak? With Roth, this is simply the wrong question. His goal is to speak for them all.
Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books Page 22
