Operation Shylock

by Philip Roth

  In response I shook in his face the embarrassingly bald ploy itself, the ridiculous gag, the stupid detail that was his million-dollar check. “I am an American citizen,” I said. “I am here on a journalistic assignment for an American newspaper. I am not a Jewish soldier of fortune. I am not a Jewish undercover agent. I am not a Jonathan Pollard, nor do I wish to assassinate Yasir Arafat. I am here to interview another writer. I am here to talk to him about his books. You have followed me and bugged me and baited me, you have physically manhandled me, psychologically abused me, maneuvered me about like your toy for whatever reason suited you, and now you have the audacity—”

  Uri had taken a seat on the windowsill and was grinning at me while I unleashed all my contempt for these unforgivable excesses and the wanton indecency with which I had been so misused.

  “You are free to leave,” said Smilesburger.

  “I am also free to bring an action. This is actionable,” I told him, remembering all the good it had done me to make the same claim to Pipik at our first face-to-face encounter. ‘You have held me here for hours on end without giving me any idea of where I was or who you were or what might be going to happen to me. And all in behalf of some trivial scheme so ridiculous that I can hardly believe my ears when you associate it with the word ‘intelligence.’ These absurdities you concoct without the slightest regard for my rights or my privacy or my safety—this is intelligence?”

  “Perhaps we were also protecting you.”

  “Who asked you to? On the Ramallah road you were protecting me? I could have been beaten to death out there. I could have been shot.”

  “Yet you were not even bruised.”

  “The experience was nonetheless most unpleasant.”

  “Uri will chauffeur you to the American Embassy, where you can lodge a complaint with your ambassador.”

  “Just call a taxi. I’ve had enough Uri.”

  “Do as he says,” Smilesburger told Uri.

  “And where am I? Where exactly?” I asked, after Uri had left the room. “What is this place?”

  “It’s not a prison, clearly. You haven’t been chained to a pipe in a windowless room with a blindfold around your eyes and a gag in your mouth.”

  “Don’t tell me how lucky I am that this isn’t Beirut. Tell me something useful—tell me who this impostor is.”

  “You might do better to ask George Ziad. Perhaps you have been even more misused by your Palestinian friends than by me.”

  “Is this so? This is something you know?”

  “Would you believe me if I said yes? I think you will have to gather your information from someone more trustworthy as I will have to gather mine with the assistance of someone a little less easily affronted. Ambassador Pickering will contact whom he sees fit to about my conduct, and, whatever the consequences, I will live with them as best I can. I cannot believe, however, that this has been an ordeal that will scar you forever. You may even be grateful someday for whatever my contribution may have been to the book that emerges. It may not be all that such a book might be if you chose to proceed a bit further with us, but then you know just how little adventure a talent like yours requires. And in the end no intelligence agency, however reckless, can rival a novelist’s fantastical creations. You can get on now, without interference from all this crude reality, creating for yourself characters more meaningful than a simple thug like Uri or a tryingly facetious thug like me. Who is the impostor? Your novelist’s imagination will come up with something far more seductive than whatever may be the ridiculous and trivial truth. Who is George Ziad, what is his game? He too will become a problem more complexly resonant than whatever the puerile truth may be. Reality. So banal, so foolish, so incoherent—such a baffling and disappointing nuisance. Not like being in that study in Connecticut, where the only thing that’s real is you.”

  Uri poked his head into the room. “Taxi!”

  “Good,” said Smilesburger, flipping off the TV set. “Here begins your journey back to everything that is self-willed.”

  But could I be sure this taxi was going to turn out to be a taxi, when I was increasingly uncertain that these people had any affiliation whatsoever with Israeli intelligence? What proof was there? The profound illogic of it all—was that the proof? At the thought of that “taxi,” I suddenly felt endangered more by leaving than by staying and listening for as long as it took to figure out the safest possible means of extricating myself.

  “Who are you?” I asked. “Who assigned you to me?”

  “Don’t worry about that. Represent me in your book however you like. Do you prefer to romanticize me or to demonize me? Do you wish to heroize me or do you want instead to make jokes? Suit yourself.”

  “Suppose there are ten rich Jews who give their money to the Palestinians. Tell me why that is your business.”

  “Do you want to take the taxi to the American Embassy to lodge your complaint or do you want to continue to listen to someone you cannot believe? The taxi will not wait. For waiting you need a limousine.”

  “A limousine then.”

  “Do as he says,” Smilesburger said to Uri.

  “Cash or credit card?” Uri replied in perfect English, laughing loudly as he went off.

  “Why does he stupidly laugh all the time?”

  “This is how he pretends not to have a sense of humor. It’s meant to frighten you. But you have held up admirably. You are doing wonderfully. Continue.”

  “These Jews who may or may not be contributing money to the PLO, why haven’t they a perfect right to do with their money whatever they wish without interference from the likes of you?”

  “Not only do they have a right as Jews, they have an inescapable moral duty as Jews, to make reparations to the Palestinians in whatever form they choose. What we have done to the Palestinians is wicked. We have displaced them and we have oppressed them. We have expelled them, beaten them, tortured them, and murdered them. The Jewish state, from the day of its inception, has been dedicated to eliminating a Palestinian presence in historical Palestine and expropriating the land of an indigenous people. The Palestinians have been driven out, dispersed, and conquered by the Jews. To make a Jewish state we have betrayed our history—we have done unto the Palestinians what the Christians have done unto us: systematically transformed them into the despised and subjugated Other, thereby depriving them of their human status. Irrespective of terrorism or terrorists or the political stupidity of Yasir Arafat, the fact is this: as a people the Palestinians are totally innocent and as a people the Jews are totally guilty. To me the horror is not that a handful of rich Jews make large financial contributions to the PLO but that every last Jew in the world does not have it in his heart to contribute as well.”

  “The line two minutes ago was somewhat at variance with this one.”

  “You think I say these things cynically.”

  “You say everything cynically.”

  “I speak sincerely. They are innocent, we are guilty; they are right, we are wrong; they are the violated, we the violators. I am a ruthless man working in a ruthless job for a ruthless country and I am ruthless knowingly and voluntarily. If someday there is a Palestinian victory and if there is then a war-crimes trial here in Jerusalem, held, say, in the very hall where they now try Mr. Demjanjuk, and if at this trial there are not just big shots in the dock but minor functionaries like me as well, I will have no defense to make for myself in the face of the Palestinian accusation. Indeed, those Jews who contributed freely to the PLO will be held up to me as people of conscience, as people of Jewish conscience, who, despite every Jewish pressure to collaborate in the oppression of the Palestinians, chose instead to remain at one with the spiritual and moral heritage of their own long-suffering people. My brutality will be measured against their righteousness and I shall hang by my neck until I am dead. And what will I say to the court, after I have been judged and found guilty by my enemy? Will I invoke as my justification the millennial history of degrading, humiliating, terri
fying, savage, murderous anti-Semitism? Will I repeat the story of our claim on this land, the millennial history of Jewish settlement here? Will I invoke the horrors of the Holocaust? Absolutely not. I don’t justify myself in this way now and I will not stoop to doing it then. I will not plead the simple truth: ‘I am tribesman who stood with his tribe,’ nor will I plead the complex truth: ‘Born as a Jew where and when I was, I am, I always have been, whichever way I turn, condemned.’ I will offer no stirring rhetoric when I am asked by the court to speak my last words but will tell my judges only this: ‘I did what I did to you because I did what I did to you.’ And if that is not the truth, it’s as close as I know how to come to it. ‘I do what I do because I do what I do.’ And your last words to the judges? You will hide behind Aharon Appelfeld. You do it now and you will do it then. You will say, ‘I did not approve of Sharon, I did not approve of Shamir, and my conscience was confused and troubled when I saw the suffering of my friend George Ziad and how this injustice had made him crazy with hatred.’ You will say, ‘I did not approve of Gush Emunim and I did not approve of the West Bank settlements, and the bombing of Beirut filled me with horror.’ You will demonstrate in a thousand ways what a humane, compassionate fellow you are, and then they will ask you, ‘But did you approve of Israel and the existence of Israel, did you approve of the imperialist, colonialist theft that was the state of Israel?’ And that’s when you will hide behind Appelfeld. And the Palestinians will hang you, too, as indeed they should. For what justification is Mr. Appelfeld from Csernowitz, Bukovina, for the theft from them of Haifa and Jaffa? They will hang you right alongside me, unless, of course, they mistake you for the other Philip Roth. If they take you for him, you will at least have a chance. For that Philip Roth, who campaigned for Europe’s Jews to vacate the property they had stolen, to return to Europe and to the European Diaspora where they belonged, that Philip Roth was their friend, their ally, their Jewish hero. And that Philip Roth is your only hope. This man, your monster, is, in fact, your salvation—the impostor is your innocence. Pretend at your trial to be him and not yourself, trick them with all your wiles into believing you two are one and the same. Otherwise you will be judged a Jew just as hateful as Smilesburger. More hateful, for hiding from the truth the way you do.”

  “Limousine!” It was Uri back at the door of the classroom, the smiling muscleman, mockingly unantagonistic, a creature who clearly didn’t share my rationalized conception of life. His was a presence I couldn’t seem to adapt to, one of those powerfully packaged little five-footers who have organized just a bit too skillfully everything that’s disparate and fluctuating in the rest of us. The eloquence of all that sinewy tissue unimpaired by intellect made me feel, despite the considerable advantage of my height, like a very small and helpless boy. Back when the battlers settled everything and anything that was in dispute, the whole male half of the human species must have looked more or less like Uri, beasts of prey camouflaged as men, men who didn’t need to be drafted into armies and put through specialized training in order to learn how to kill.

  “Go,” said Smilesburger. “Go to Appelfeld. Go to New York. Go to Ramallah. Go to the American Embassy. You are free to indulge your virtue freely. Go to wherever you feel most blissfully unblamable. That is the delightful luxury of the utterly transformed American Jew. Enjoy it. You are that marvelous, unlikely, most magnificent phenomenon, the truly liberated Jew. The Jew who is not accountable. The Jew who finds the world perfectly to his liking. The comfortable Jew. The happy Jew. Go. Choose. Take. Have. You are the blessed Jew condemned to nothing, least of all to our historical struggle.”

  “No,” I said, “not a hundred percent true. I am a happy Jew condemned to nothing who is condemned, however, from time to time to listen to superior Jewish windbags reveling in how they are condemned to everything. Is this show finally over? All rhetorical strategies exhausted? No means of persuasion left? What about turning loose your panther now that nothing else has shattered my nerves? He can tear open my throat, for a start!”

  I was shouting.

  Here the old cripple swung up onto his crutches and poled himself to the blackboard, where he half effaced with his open palm the scriptural admonitions he’d written there in English, while the Hebrew words that someone else had written he let stand untouched. “Class dismissed,” he informed Uri and then, turning back to me, said, disappointedly, “Outraged still at having been ‘abducted’?”—and at that moment he resembled almost exactly the sickly and vanquished old man, speaking a rather more meager and circumscribed English, whom he had impersonated at lunch the day before, blasted-looking suddenly, like someone bested by life long ago. But I hadn’t bested him, that was for sure. Perhaps it had just been a very long day of thinking up ways of trapping rich Jews who weren’t giving money to the UJA. “Mr. Roth Number One—use your good Jewish brain. How better to mislead your Palestinian admirers than to let them observe us forcibly abducting their treasured anti-Zionist celebrity Jew?”

  With that, even I had heard enough, and after close to five hours as Smilesburger’s captive I finally worked up the courage to leave through the door. I might be risking my life but I simply could not listen any longer to how nicely it fit in with their phantasmagoria to do with me whatever they liked.

  And nobody did anything to stop me. Uri, happy-go-lucky Uri, pushed the door open all the way and then, clownishly standing at rigid attention like the lackey he was not, pressed himself against the wall to allow maximum passageway for my exit.

  I was out in the foyer at the top of the landing when I heard Smilesburger call out, “You forgot something.”

  “Oh no I didn’t,” I called back, but Uri was already beside me, holding the little red book that I had been reading earlier to try to concentrate my forces.

  “Beside your chair,” Smilesburger answered, “you left one of Klinghoffer’s diaries.”

  I took the diary from Uri just as Smilesburger appeared in the classroom door. “We are lucky, for an embattled little country. There are many talented Jews like yourself out in our far-flung Diaspora. I myself happened to have had the privilege of recruiting the distinguished colleague of yours who created these diaries for us. It was a task that he came to enjoy. At first he declined—he said, ‘Why not Roth? It’s right up his alley.’ But I told him, ‘We have something else in mind for Mr. Roth.’”

  EPILOGUE

  Words

  Generally

  Only Spoil Things

  I have elected to delete my final chapter, twelve thousand words describing the people I convened with in Athens, the circumstances that brought us together, and the subsequent expedition, to a second European capital, that developed out of that educational Athens weekend. Of this entire book, whose completed manuscript Smilesburger had asked to inspect, only the contents of chapter 11, “Operation Shylock,” were deemed by him to contain information too seriously detrimental to his agency’s interests and to the Israeli government to be published in English, let alone in some fifteen other languages. I was, of course, no more obliged to him, his agency, or the state of Israel to suppress those forty-odd pages than I was to submit the entire manuscript or any part of it for a prepublication reading. I had signed no statement beforehand promising to refrain from publishing anything about my mission or to seek clearance for publication from them, nor had this subject been discussed during the briefings that took place in Tel Aviv on the two days after my abduction. This was a potentially disruptive issue which neither party had wished to raise, at least for the time being, my handlers because they must have believed that it was not so much the good Jew in me as the ambitious writer in me consenting, finally, to gather intelligence for them about “Jewish anti-Zionist elements threatening the security of Israel” and I because I had concluded that the best way to serve my professional interest was to act as though it were nothing but the good Jew, rising to the call of duty, who was signing on as an Israeli operative.

  But why did I do it—given
all the risks and uncertainties that exceeded by far the dangers of the unknown that adhere to writing—and enter into that reality where the brutal forces were in combat and something serious was at stake? Under the enchantment of these alluringly effervescent characters with their deluge of dangerous talk, spinning inside the whirlpool of their contradictory views—and without the least control over this narrative Ping-Pong in which I appear as the little white ball—was I simply susceptible as never before to a new intensification of the excitement? Had my arresting walk through the wilderness of this world—the one that began with Halcion, that Slough of Despond, and after the battle with Pipik, King of the Bottomless Pit, concluded in the dungeon of the Giant Mossad—germinated a new logic for my Jewish pilgrimage? Or, rather than betraying my old nature, was I succumbing at long last to a basic law of my existence, to the instinct for impersonation by which I had so far enacted and energized my contradictions solely within the realm of fiction? I really couldn’t see what was behind what I was doing, and that too may have accounted for why I was doing it: I was enlivened by its imbecilic side—maybe nothing was behind it. To do something without clarity, an inexplicable act, something unknowable even to oneself, to step outside responsibility and give way fully to a very great curiosity, to be appropriated unresistingly by the strangeness, by the dislocation of the unforeseen … No, I could not name for myself what it was that drew me in or understand whether what was impinging on this decision was absolutely everything or absolutely nothing, and yet, lacking the professional’s ideology to fire my fanaticism—or fueled perhaps by the ideology of the professionally unideological like myself—I undertook to give the most extreme performance of my life and seriously to mislead others in something more drastic than a mere book.