Recent Reading: Operation Shylock

Since I finished Blake Bailey's epic biography of Philip Roth, I have been reading many of Roth's books. And, honestly, you are probably better off reading some of Roth's books than the biography, at least in my opinion.

Yesterday I started reading Operation Shylock: A confession. At various point in his career, Roth has been accused of being a self-hating Jew. In this book, Roth tackles that idea by having the narrator be himself and also having another character who claims he is Philip Roth. As Roth says in the book.

There's a madman in Israel using my name and going around pretending to be me (p. 33).

In the book, Roth is taking Halcion to help him sleep since he has severe joint pain.

After all, despite the temptation to chalk him up to Halcion's lingering hold on me, he was not my but his hallucination. and by January 1988 I'd come to understand that he had more to fear from that than I did. Up against reality I was not quite so outclassed as I'd been up against that sleeping pill; up against reality I had at my disposal the strongest weapon in anyone's arsenal: my own reality. It wasn't I who was in danger of being displaced by him but he who had without question to be effaced by me -- exposed, effaced, and extinguished. It was just a matter of time. Panic characteristically urges, in its quivering, raving, overexcitable way, "Do something before he goes too far!" and is loudly seconded by Powerless Fear. Meanwhile, poised and balanced, Reason, the exalted voice of Reason, counsels, "You have everything on your side, he has nothing on his. Try Eradicating him overnight, before he has fully revealed exactly what he's intent on doing, and he'll only elude you to pop up elsewhere and start this stuff all over again. Let him go too far. There is no more cunning way to shut him down. He can only be defeated" (p. 36).

And what is it that the other Philip Roth says that concerns the so-called real Philip Roth? A friend from Israel shares an article from a Hebrew language newspaper that he translates for him over the phone. (It is, perhaps, useful to know that the story is set in 1988.)

"'Philip Roth Meets Solidarity Leader.' In smaller letters, '"Poland Needs Jews," Walesa Tells Author in Gdansk.'"

..."'"Everyone speaks about Jews," Walesa told Roth. "Spain was ruined by the expulsion of the Jews," The Solidarity leader said during their two-hour meeting at the Gdansk shipyards, where Solidarity was born in 1980. "When people say to me, 'What Jew would be crazy enough to come here?' I explain to them that the long experience, over many hundreds of years, of Jews and Poles together cannot be summed up with the word 'anti-Semitism.' Let's talk about a thousand years of glory rather than four years of war. The greatest explosion of Yiddish culture in history, every great intellectual movement of modern Jewish life," said the Solidarity leader to Roth, "took place on Polish soil. Yiddish culture is no less Polish than Jewish. Poland without Jews is unthinkable. Poland needs Jews," Walesa told the American-born Jewish author, "and Jews need Poland," 'Philip, I feel that I'm reading to you out of a story you wrote."

"I wish you were."

' ' Roth, the author of Portnoy's Complaint and other controversial Jewish novels, calls himself an "ardent Diasporist." He says that the ideology of Diasporism has replaced his writing. "The reason for my visit to Walesa was to discuss with him the resettlement of Jews in Poland once Solidarity comes to power there, as it will." Right now, the author finds that his ideas on resettlement are received with more hostility in Israel than in Poland. He maintains that however virulent Polish anti-Semitism may once have been, "the Jew hatred that pervades Islam is far more entrenched and dangerous." Roth continues, "The so-called normalization of the Jew was a tragic illusion from the start. But when this normalization is expected to flourish in the very heart of Islam, it is even worse than tragic -- it is suicidal. Horrendous as Hitler was for us, he lasted a mere twelve years, and what is twelve years to the Jew? The time has come to return to the Europe that was for centuries , and remains to this day, the most authentic Jewish homeland there has ever been, the birthplace of rabbinic Judaism, Hasidic Judaism, Jewish secularism, socialism -- on and on. The birthplace, of course, of Zionism too. But Zionism has outlived its historical function. The time has come to renew in the European Diaspora our preeminent spiritual and cultural role." Roth, who is fearful of a second Jewish holocaust in the Middle East, sees "Jewish resettlement" as the only means by which to assure Jewish survival and to achieve "a historical as well as a spiritual victory over Hitler and Auschwitz (pgs .31-32).

As can be expected, Philip Roth, the author, finds it impossible to ignore his doppelganger and the rest of the book describes his quest to find and confront this person.