Roth Unbound by Claudia Roth Pierpont

Author:Claudia Roth Pierpont
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2016-02-11T16:00:00+00:00

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.

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