Operation Shylock

by Philip Roth

  The Gentile with whom the Jews of your books seem to share their world is usually the embodiment of hopeless obtuseness and of menacing, primitive social behavior—the goy as drunkard, wife beater, as the coarse, brutal semisavage who is “not in control of himself.” Though obviously there’s more to be said about the non-Jewish world in those provinces where your books are set—and also about the capacity of Jews, in their own world, to be obtuse and primitive, too—even a non-Jewish European would have to recognize that the power of this image over the Jewish imagination is rooted in real experience. Alternatively the goy is pictured as an “earthy soul … overflowing with health.” Enviable health. As the mother in Cattails says of her half-Gentile son, “He’s not nervous like me. Other, quiet blood flows in his veins.”

  I’d say that it’s impossible to know anything really about the Jewish imagination without investigating the place that the goy has occupied in the folk mythology that’s been exploited in America by Jewish comedians like Lenny Bruce and Jackie Mason and, at quite another level, by Jewish novelists. American fiction’s most single-minded portrait of the goy is in The Assistant by Bernard Malamud. The goy is Frank Alpine, the down-and-out thief who robs the failing grocery store of the Jew, Bober, later attempts to rape Bober’s studious daughter, and eventually, in a conversion to Bober’s brand of suffering Judaism, symbolically renounces goyish savagery. The New York Jewish hero of Saul Bellow’s second novel, The Victim, is plagued by an alcoholic Gentile misfit named Allbee, who is no less of a bum and a drifter than Alpine, even if his assault on Leventhal’s hard-won composure is intellectually more urbane. The most imposing Gentile in all of Bellow’s work, however, is Henderson—the self-exploring rain king who, to restore his psychic health, takes his blunted instincts off to Africa. For Bellow no less than for Appelfeld, the truly “earthy soul” is not the Jew, nor is the search to retrieve primitive energies portrayed as the quest of a Jew. For Bellow no less than for Appelfeld, and, astonishingly, for Mailer no less than for Appelfeld—we all know that in Mailer when a man is a sadistic sexual aggressor his name is Sergius O’Shaugnessy, when he is a wife killer his name is Stephen Rojack, and when he is a menacing murderer he isn’t Lepke Buchalter or Gurrah Shapiro, he’s Gary Gilmore.

  Here, succumbing finally to my anxiety, I turned off the desk lamp and sat in the dark. And soon I could see into the street below. And someone was there! A figure, a man, running across the dimly lit pavement not twenty-five feet from my window. He ran crouching over but I recognized him anyway.

  I stood at the desk. “Pipik!” I shouted, flinging open the window. “Moishe Pipik, you son of a bitch!”

  He turned to look toward the open window and I saw that in either hand he held a large rock. He raised the rocks over his head and shouted back at me. He was masked. He was shouting in Arabic. Then he ran on. Then a second figure was running by, then a third, then a fourth, each of them carrying a rock in either hand and all their faces hidden by ski masks. Their source of supply was a pyramid-shaped rock pile, a rock pile that resembled a memorial cairn and that stood just inside an alleyway across from the hotel. The four ran up and down the street with their rocks until the cairn was gone. Then the street was empty again and I shut the window and went back to work.

  In The Immortal Bartfuss, your newly translated novel, Bartfuss asks irreverently of his dying mistress’s ex-husband, “What have we Holocaust survivors done? Has our great experience changed us at all?” This is the question with which the novel somehow or other engages itself on virtually every page. We sense in Bartfuss’s lonely longing and regret, in his baffled effort to overcome his own remoteness, in his avidity for human contact, in his mute wanderings along the Israeli coast and his enigmatic encounters in dirty cafés, the agony that life can become in the wake of a great disaster. Of the Jewish survivors who wind up smuggling and black-marketeering in Italy directly after the war, you write, “No one knew what to do with the lives that had been saved.”

  My last question, growing out of your preoccupation in The Immortal Bartfuss, is, perhaps, extremely comprehensive, but think about it, please, and reply as you choose. From what you observed as a homeless youngster wandering in Europe after the war, and from what you’ve learned during four decades in Israel, do you discern distinguishing patterns in the experience of those whose lives were saved? What have the Holocaust survivors done and in what ways were they ineluctably changed?

  7

  Her

  Story

  He’d taken nothing. Not even a sock was missing from the bureau drawer where I’d laid my loose clothing, and, in searching for the check that meant everything to him, he hadn’t disarranged a thing. He’d borrowed Tzili to read while waiting on the bed for my return but that seemed to have been the only possession of mine—my identity aside—that he had dared to touch. I began to doubt, while I packed my bag to go, if he actually had searched the room and, disturbingly for a moment, even to wonder if he had ever been here. But if he hadn’t come to claim the check as his, why had he risked my wrath (and perhaps worse) by breaking in?

  I had my jacket on and my bag packed. I was only waiting for dawn. I had but one goal and that was to disappear. The rest I’d puzzle out or not when I’d successfully accomplished an escape. And don’t write about it afterward, I told myself. Even the gullible now have contempt for the idea of objectivity; the latest thing they’ve swallowed whole is that it’s impossible to report anything faithfully other than one’s own temperature; everything is allegory—so what possible chance would I have to persuade anyone of a reality like this one? Ask Aharon, when you say goodbye to him, please to be silent and forget it. Even in London, when Claire returns and asks what happened, tell her all is well. “Nothing happened, he never turned up.” Otherwise you can explain these two days for the rest of your life and no one will ever believe your version to be anything other than your version.

  Folded in thirds in the inside pocket of my jacket were the fresh sheets of hotel stationery onto which I’d copied, in legible block letters, my remaining questions for Aharon. In my bag I had all our other questions and answers and all the tapes. I had managed despite everything to do the job, maybe not as I’d looked forward to doing it back in New York … I remembered Apter suddenly. Could I catch him at his rooming house on my way out of Jerusalem? Or would I find Pipik already waiting there, Pipik pretending to poor Apter that he’s me!

  The lights were off in my room. I’d been sitting in the dark for half an hour, waiting at the little desk by the large window with my fully packed bag up against my leg and watching the masked men who had resumed their rock conveying directly below, as though for my singular edification, as though daring me to pick up the phone to notify the army or the police. These are rocks, I thought, to split open the heads of Jews, but I also thought, I belong elsewhere, this struggle is over territory that is not mine … I counted the number of rocks they were moving. When I reached a hundred I could stand it no longer, and I called the desk and asked to be put through to the police. I was told that the line was engaged. “It’s an emergency,” I replied. “Is something wrong? Are you ill, sir?” “Please, I want to report something to the police.” “As soon as I get a free line, sir. The police are very busy tonight. You lost something, Mr. Roth?”

  A woman spoke from the other side of the door just as I was hanging up. “Let me in,” she whispered, “it’s Jinx Possesski. Something terrible is happening.”

  I pretended not to be there, but she began rapping lightly on the door—she must have overheard me on the phone.

  “He’s going to kidnap Demjanjuk’s son.”

  But I had only my one objective and didn’t bother to answer her. You can’t make a mistake doing nothing.

  “They’re plotting right this minute to kidnap Demjanjuk’s son!”

  Outside the door Pipik’s Possesski, below the window the Arabs in ski masks running rocks—I closed my eyes to compose in my head a last question to leave with Aha
ron before I flew off. Living in this society, you are bombarded by news and political disputation. Yet, as a novelist, you have, by and large, pushed aside the Israeli daily turbulence—

  “Mr. Roth, they intend to do it!”

  —in order to contemplate markedly different Jewish predicaments. What does this turbulence mean to a novelist like yourself? How does being a citizen of—

  Jinx was softly sobbing now. “He wears this. Walesa gave it to him. Mr. Roth, you’ve got to help …”

  —of this self-revealing, self-asserting, self-challenging, self-legendizing society affect your writing life? Does this news-producing reality ever tempt your imagination?

  “This will be the end of him.”

  Everything dictated silence and self-control but I couldn’t restrain myself and spoke my mind. “Good!”

  “It’ll destroy everything he’s done.”

  “Perfect!”

  “You must take some responsibility.”

  “None!”

  Meanwhile I had got down on my hands and knees and was trying to reach under the bureau to see what she had pushed beneath the door. I was able, finally, to fish it out with my shoe.

  A jagged piece of fabric about the size of my hand and as weightless as a swatch of gauze—a cloth Star of David, something I’d only seen before in those photographs of pedestrians on the streets of occupied Europe, Jews tagged as Jews with a bit of yellow material. This surprise shouldn’t have exasperated me more than anything else issuing from Pipik’s excesses but it did, it exasperated me violently. Stop. Breathe. Think. His pathology is his, not yours. Treat it with realistic humor—and go! But instead I gave way to my feelings. Hold off, hold off, but I couldn’t—there seemed no way for me to treat the appearance of this tragic memento as just a harmless amusement. There was absolutely nothing he wouldn’t turn into a farce. A blasphemer even of this. I cannot endure him.

  “Who is this madman! Tell me who this madman is!”

  “I will! Let me in!”

  “Everything! The truth!”

  “All I know! I will!”

  “You’re alone?”

  “All alone. I am. I swear to you I am.”

  “Wait.”

  Stop. Breathe. Think. But I did instead what I’d decided not to do until it was time to make a safe exit. I edged the big bureau away from the door just enough to open it, and then I unlocked the door and let squeeze into the room the coconspirator he had sent to entice me, dressed for those pickup bars where the oncology nurses used to go to irrigate themselves of all that death and dying back when Jinx Possesski was still a full-fledged, unreclaimed hater of Jews. Big dark glasses covered half her face, and the black dress she was wearing couldn’t have made her look any shapelier. She couldn’t have looked any shapelier without it. It was a great cheap dress. Lots of lipstick, the unkempt pale pile of Polish cornsilk, and enough of her protruding for me to conclude not only that she was up to no good but that it may not have been my terrible temper alone that had enjoined me from stopping and breathing and thinking, that I had let Jinx past my barricade because I was up to no good myself and had been for some time now. It occurred to me, friends, when she wriggled through the door and then turned the key to lock us in—and him out?—that I should never have left the front stoop in Newark. I never longed so passionately, not for her, not that quite yet, but for my life before impersonation and imitation and twofoldedness set in, life before self- mockery and self-idealization (and the idealization of the mockery; and the mockery of the idealization; and the idealization of the idealization; and the mockery of the mockery), before the alternating exaltations of hyperobjectivity and hypersubjectivity (and the hyper- objectivity about the hypersubjectivity; and the hypersubjectivity about the hyperobjectivity), back when what was outside was outside and what was inside was inside, when everything still divided cleanly and nothing happened that couldn’t be explained. I left the front stoop on Leslie Street, ate of the fruit of the tree of fiction, and nothing, neither reality nor myself, had been the same since.

  I didn’t want this temptress, I wanted to be ten; despite a lifelong determinedly antinostalgic stance, I wanted to be ten and back in the neighborhood when life was not yet a blind passage out but still like baseball, where you came home, and when the voluptuous earthliness of women other than my mamma was nothing I yet wished to gorge myself on.

  “Mr. Roth, he’s waiting to hear from Meir Kahane. They’re going to do it. Somebody has to stop them!”

  “Why did you bring this?” I said, angrily thrusting the yellow star in her face.

  “I told you. Walesa gave it to him. In Gdansk. Philip wept. Now he wears it under his shirt.”

  “The truth! The truth! Why at three in the morning do you come with this star and this story? How did you get this far anyway? How did you pass the desk downstairs? How do you get across Jerusalem at this hour, with all this danger and dressed like fucking Jezebel? This is a city seething with hatred, the violence will be terrible, it’s dreadful already, and look at how he sent you here! Look at how he’s fitted you out in this femme fatale Bond movie get-up! The man has got the instincts of a pimp! Forget the crazy Arabs—a crazy pack of pious Jews could have stoned you to death in this dress!”

  “But they are going to kidnap Demjanjuk’s son and send him back piece by piece until Demjanjuk confesses! They’re writing Demjanjuk’s confession right now. They say to Philip, You, writer—do it good!’ Toe by toe, finger by finger, eyeball by eyeball, until his father speaks the truth, they are going to torture the son. Religious people in skullcaps, and you should hear what they are saying—and Philip sits there writing the confession! Kahane! Philip is anti-Kahane, calls him a savage, and he’s sitting there waiting for a phone call from the savage fanatic he hates most in the world!”

  “Answer me please with the truth. Why did he send you here in this dress? With this star? How does a person like him come about? The chicanery is inexhaustible.”

  “I ran! I told him, ‘I cannot listen anymore. I cannot watch you destroy everything!’ I ran away!”

  “To me.”

  “You must give him back the check!”

  “I lost the check. I don’t have the check. I told him that. Something untoward happened. Certainly the girlfriend of your boyfriend can understand that. The check is gone.”

  “But your keeping the money is what’s making him wild! Why did you accept Mr. Smilesburger’s money when you knew it wasn’t meant for you!”

  I pushed the cloth star into her hand. “Take this with you and get out of here.”

  “But Demjanjuk’s son!”

  “Miss, I was not born to Bess and Herman Roth in Newark’s Beth Israel Hospital to protect this man Demjanjuk’s son.”

  “Then protect Philip!”

  “That is what I’m doing.”

  “But it’s to prove himself to you that he’s doing what he’s doing. He’s out of his mind for your admiration. You are the hero, like it or not!”

  “Please, with a dick like his he doesn’t need me for a hero. He was nice enough to come here to show it to me. Did you know that? He’s not particularly pestered by inhibitions, is he?”

  “No,” she muttered, “oh, no,” and here she caved in and dropped to the edge of the bed in tears.

  “Nope,” I said, “uh-uh, you two aren’t taking turns—get up and get out.”

  But she was crying so pathetically that all I could do was to return to the easy chair by the window and sit there until she had exhausted herself on my pillow. That she was clutching that cloth star while she wept disgusted and infuriated me.

  Down in the street the masked Arabs were gone. I didn’t seem to have been born to stop them either.

  When I couldn’t any longer stand the sight of her with the star, I came over to the bed and pulled it out of her hands, and then I unzipped my suitcase and shoved it in with my things. I still have it. I am looking at it while I write.

  “It’s an implant,” she sa
id.

  “What is? What are you saying?”

  “It isn’t ‘his.’ It’s a plastic implant.”

  “Oh? Tell me more.”

  “Everything’s been cut out of him. He couldn’t stand how it left him. So he had the procedure. Plastic rods are in there. Inside the penis is a penile implant. Why do you laugh? How can you laugh! You’re laughing at somebody’s terrible suffering!”

  “I’m not at all—I’m laughing at all the lies. Poland, Walesa, Kahane, even the cancer’s a lie—Demjanjuk’s son is a lie. And this prick he’s so proud of, come clean, in what Amsterdam doodad shop did you two find that nutty joke? It’s Hellzapoppin’ with Possesski and Pipik, it’s a gag a minute with you two madcap kids—who wouldn’t laugh? The prick was great, I have to admit, but I think I’ll always love best the Poles at the Warsaw railroad station ecstatically welcoming back their Jews. Diasporism! Diasporism is a plot for a Marx Brothers movie—Groucho selling Jews to Chancellor Kohl! I lived eleven years in London—not in bigoted, backwater, pope-ridden Poland but in civilized, secularized, worldly-wise England. When the first hundred thousand Jews come rolling into Waterloo Station with all their belongings in tow, I really want to be there to see it. Invite me, won’t you? When the first hundred thousand Diasporist evacuees voluntarily surrender their criminal Zionist homeland to the suffering Palestinians and disembark on England’s green and pleasant land, I want to see with my very own eyes the welcoming committee of English goyim waiting on the platform with their champagne. ‘They’re here! More Jews! Jolly good!’ No, fewer Jews is my sense of how Europe prefers things, as few of them as possible. Diasporism, my dear, seriously misses the point about the depths of the antipathy. But then, that shouldn’t come as news to a charter member of A-S.A. That poor old Smilesburger was nearly suckered by Diasporism’s founding father out of a million bucks—Well, I don’t think this Smilesburger is all there either.”

  “What Mr. Smilesburger does with his money,” she shot back, her face rapidly melting down into the defeated grimace of a thwarted child, “is up to Mr. Smilesburger!”