The impetus for my picking up this book was noticing a book in the philosophy section of my favorite bookstore. This book was At Home in Exile: Why Diaspora is Good for the Jews by sociologist Alan Wolfe. I knew about this line of argument, and sympathize with it in a lot of ways, but I didn’t buy the book. Instead I went home and started reading Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock. I knew that part of the plot of Roth’s book is about a guy promoting his home-made ideology called “diasporism” (an idea espousing the view that Israeli jews should leave Israel and return to living in galut, outside of Israel) and I was curious how Roth portrayed it. Turns out, the character promoting diasporism is called Philip Roth, but he is not the narrator of the book. The narrator of the book, however, is also called Philip Roth and is a famous writer. The famous writer is increasingly annoyed that someone travels the world in his name, making political pronouncements. Taking his cues from Dostoevsky‘s 1846 novella the Double, Roth plays with the idea of doppelgangers with aplomb. But that is just one side of this deep-reaching novel. Roth must have been at his creative peak writing this – it’s hard to see how he could out-Roth himself with this prose (it should be noted that I am the kind of person who hasn’t read more than four books by Roth, and all of them were written before 1993, so I might have to retract these words as I keep reading his more recent efforts).
Operation Shylock picks up themes from his earlier novel Counterlife, which also heavily featured ideas of alternate identities mixed with thoughts on Israel. In it, the narrator goes to Israel to visit his brother who recently had made aliyah, moving into the contested territories as a settler. Operation Shylock expands on the Israeli ideas, now including spying, Mossad, palestinian activism, lunchtime interviews with Aharon Appelfeld and – of course – the trial of accused nazi death camp commandant John Demjanjuk in 1988.
In addition to the Demjanjuk trial, Roth includes several recent jewish affairs-related news items, like Leon Klinghoffer (a disabled cruise line guest who was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist in 1985) or Mordechai Vanunu (nuclear whistleblower) and Jonathan Pollard. He talks about Yassir Arafat and goes on in length about Demjanjuk and his credulous son. This style reminds me of Bari Weiss’ recent book about antisemitism – with which this book deals too, in spades. Just as Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth’s breakthrough novel from 1969, was attacked for being jewish self-flaggelation, this book also got its fair share of similar critique. Roth also cunningly includes a lot of antisemitic tropes in certain characters, notably in the personage Wanda Possesski, in order to discuss and analyze its different aspects.
The last part of the book is a sharp, scathing analysis of the notion of Jewish loyalty, a theme that has haunted Roth ever since his early days. The main character is kidnapped by secret agents and is given a lecture on lashon hara, the evil tongue, and how it for a Jew is forbidden to speak ill of other Jews according to certain rabbis.
Reading this book actualized some dormant thoughts for me, as did another book it reminds me of – namely The Mandelbaum Gate by British writer Muriel Spark. Spark’s book is also a multifarious book about Israel, but as it was written in 1965 by a woman from Wales, it has many dissimilarities with Roth’s book (a review of The Mandelbaum Gate can be found here). One might also mention Saul Bellow‘s 1976 To Jerusalem and Back, for yet another take on Israel from an English-speaking writer.
This book was written during a time when there was a modicum of hope for the peace process in Israel, with the negotiations at Camp David and the coming of the Oslo accords. But only about a year or so later, all hope was lost when Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir and things took a turn for unknown territory.
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Kinship of all Species 