Operation Shylock by Philip Roth

First published: 1993

Type of plot: Novel of ideas

Time of work: 1988

Locale: The United States and Israel

Principal Characters:

• Philip Roth, the author, who dominates the book as a character and relates its events in the first person
• Moishe Pipik, (“Moses Bellybutton”), the narrator’s double
• George Ziad, a college friend of Roth who has become an anti-Israeli Palestinian
• Jinx Possesski, Moishe Pipik’s voluptuous girlfriend
• Aharon Appelfeld, an Israeli novelist who is Roth’s friend
• Smilesburger, an undercover agent employed by Israel’s secret service
• John Demjanjuk, a Cleveland auto worker on trial for allegedly having been a monstrous death-camp guard

The Novel

Operation Shylock is Philip Roth’s most complex, convoluted and baffling novel, in which he uses the device of the literary double to parallel his identity and history in the text’s two leading personages. He thereby causes the reader to ponder the provocative and probably insoluble conundrums of fiction’s relation to reality and of autobiography’s role in the working of the literary imagination.

Not only does the protagonist-narrator appear under the name, personal history, and likeness of the author as Philip Roth, but from the book’s opening chapter, another man obtrudes with the same name and in the same likeness, with the same gestures and in identical attire. The narrator, Philip, decides to name his double Moishe Pipik, Yiddish for Moses Bellybutton, a comical shadow and fall guy in Jewish folklore.

Philip is recovering, in his Connecticut home, from withdrawal symptoms after having discontinued taking pills to overcome severe pain resulting from knee surgery. In January, 1988, seven months after coming off the drug, he is informed, by a friend, the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld, that a Philip Roth is lecturing in Jerusalem’s King David hotel on the topic, “Diasporism: The Only Solution to the Jewish Problem.”

Philip phones his impostor, pretending to be a French journalist, and receives a long-distance lecture on Diasporism: It is Pipik’s plan to move all Jews of European descent out of Israel and back to their ancestral countries in the hope of averting a second, Arab-organized Holocaust. Israel, Pipik insists, has become the gravest of threats to Jewish survival because of the Arabs’ resentment of Israel’s expansion. Were European Jews and their families resettled in the lands of their cultural origins, however, only Jews of Islamic descent would be left in Israel. The nation could then revert to its 1948 borders and could demobilize its large army, and Arabs and Israelis would coexist amicably and peacefully.

Philip objects that Pipik’s proposal is wholly naïve, since Europe’s hatred of Jews persists. Pipik responds that Europe’s residual anti-Semitism is outweighed by powerful currents of enlightenment and morality sustained by the memory of the Holocaust. Hence, a Diasporist movement would enable Europeans to cleanse their guilty consciences. Philip’s most caustic rebuttal to Pipik’s argument occurs later in the book:

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.

Flying to Jerusalem, Philip begins a searching interview, to be continued on several occasions in the book, with the distinguished Appelfeld, a Holocaust survivor whom he admires as a spiritual brother to his better self. (This interview was published by The New York Times in February, 1988.) He then attends the trial of John Ivan Demjanjuk, the Ukrainian-born auto worker accused of being the monstrous guard “Ivan the Terrible” Marchenko at the Treblinka death camp. (Israel’s Supreme Court declared Demjanjuk’s identity as Marchenko unproven five months after publication of the novel.)

Roth then comes face to face with his Doppelgänger, shocked to find him dressed in his own preferred outfit of blue Oxford shirt, khaki trousers, V-neck sweater, and herringbone jacket. The perfection of Pipik’s duplication infuriates the original, whose charge of personality appropriation meets a rush of fawning verbosity, with Pipik assuring Philip that he is his greatest admirer. Philip’s response to this bizarre doubling is a mixture of outrage, exasperation, fascination, and even amusement.

Hours later, Pipik sends Philip a pleading note: “LET ME EXIST. . . . I AM THE YOU THAT IS NOT WORDS.” Its bearer is a wondrously voluptuous, mid-thirties blonde, Wanda Jane “Jinx” Possesski, an oncology nurse who has become Pipik’s loving companion. In due time, Jinx delivers her life story: hateful, strictly Catholic parents, then a runaway hippie life, abusive men, Christian fundamentalism, a nursing career. She became an anti-Semite out of envy of Jewish cohesion, cleverness, sexual ease, and prosperity. Then she met Pipik as a patient for cancer, now in remission. Thanks to him, she is a recovering anti-Semite, saved by an organization he founded, Anti-Semites Anonymous. When Jinx reveals that Pipik had a penile implant so he could satisfy her, Philip cannot resist the temptation to outdo his double by implanting his unassisted virility on Jinx.

Pipik and Jinx leave Israel and end up in Roth’s Hackensack, New Jersey, where Pipik expires of his cancer hours after the first Iraqi missiles explode in Tel Aviv in January, 1991. In the hope of resuscitating him, Jinx makes love for two days to his penile implant. She relates these events in a letter to Philip that concludes with the defiant comment, “I was far nuttier as a little Catholic taking Communion than having sex with my dead Jew.” In his reply, Philip disciplines his senses enough to renounce the opportunity of repossessing Possesski. His letter to Jinx remains unanswered.

The Characters

Philip Roth’s career as a novelist has long featured the self-revealing and self-reflexive concerns that pervade Operation Shylock. He has repeatedly invented avatars of himself in his protagonists, straddling the borderline between fiction and autobiography; after all, this novel is subtitled “A Confession.” In the first chapter, Philip, after having been informed of Pipik’s impersonation, muses, “It’s Zuckerman, I thought . . . it’s Kepesh, it’s Tarnopol and Portnoy—it’s all of them in one, broken free of print and mockingly reconstituted as a single satirical facsimile of me.”

Alexander Portnoy is the protagonist of Roth’s most popular novel, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). Peter Tarnopol is the central character in My Life as a Man (1974). David Alan Kepesh is the Kafkaesque victim of The Breast (1972). Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s most identifiable surrogate, stars in Zuckerman Bound (1985), which brings together three sequential novels, The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), and The Anatomy Lesson (1983). Zuckerman is virtually a Rothian clone, author of a successful, controversial novel, Carnovsky, that closely resembles Portnoy’s Complaint. This tetralogy is probably Roth’s most varied, thoughtful, playful, and altogether best fictive performance.

“Philip Roth” as the protagonist of Operation Shylock is far more aggressive than Nathan Zuckerman. Roth the novelist has created in this Philip his most vivid character: fiercely comic, exuberant, stubbornly reasonable, and, on occasion, unreasonably stubborn. Above all, Philip is immensely curious, about others as well as himself.

Philip’s impostor, Moishe Pipik, is a brilliant mimic or an authentic refraction of the narrator; he is also a liar, a charlatan, a wild obsessive, and an extravagant megalomaniac. To be sure, Pipik belongs to the literary tradition of the double, but Roth insists on making Moishe’s relation to fictional self-reflexivity more prominent than any grand psychological resonance. The author construes the double not as the embodiment of the hidden self but rather as the far less threatening reinvention of the self for fictive purposes.

Roth features two other characterizations. One is that of an old friend of Philip from his University of Chicago days, George Ziad, who has become an official of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) after having returned to his native Ramallah. Ziad calls himself “a word-throwing Arab,” full of distress and anger at Israeli occupation of Palestine. He sees the current Israel as an arrogant, provincial, mediocre Jewish Belgium, “without even a Brussels to show for it.” He characterizes Israeli politicians Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon as Holocaust-mongers and gangsters. Philip is astounded to see the formerly suave, debonair Ziad a victim of his consuming rages, spluttering anti-Israeli harangues.

As an emblematic contrast, Roth features an Israeli secret agent, Smilesburger, a smooth-talking father figure who mixes ruthlessness with tact, pragmatism with wisdom. He persuades Philip to undertake a spying mission, “Operation Shylock”— presumably against the PLO—in Athens. Then, in the book’s postscript, Smilesburger persuades a reluctant Philip to delete, for security reasons, a book chapter describing the espionage. “Let your Jewish conscience by your guide” is the epilogue’s last line.

Gradations of humor tint the characterizations, including farce, burlesque, parody, and lampoonery. Roth stages a verbal vaudeville, with the characters often talking heads attached to frenzied monologues and excessively melodramatic, zany gestures. Thus, Jinx Possesski is a comic-book version of Jewish masturbatory fantasies centering around a delectable and available shiksa. Smilesburger is a tongue-in-cheek salute to John le Carré’s fictional master spy Smiley. Pipik is ludicrous as well as deranged. In a bedroom conversation with Jinx, Philip expresses his sense of being trapped in a farce: “It’s Hellzapoppin’ with Possesski and Pipik, it’s a gag a minute with you two madcap kids. . . . Diasporism is a plot for a Marx Brothers movie—Groucho selling Jews to Chancellor Kohl!”

Critical Context

Operation Shylock is vulnerable, despite its wit, learning, intelligence, and eloquence, to the charges of hostile critics that Roth is trapped in narcissistic, sermon-ridden reveries whose tone is overly argumentative and whose vision is enslaved to his personal experiences and obsessions. In his defense, Roth could cite the long-established tradition of introspective writing originated by such classics of Romanticism as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Les Confessions de J.-J. Rousseau (1782, 1789; The Confessions of J.-J. Rousseau, 1783-1790) and William Wordsworth’s The Prelude: Or, The Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1850). One direct influence on Roth’s autobiographical texts is surely Fyodor Dostoevski’s Notes from the Underground (1864), the first-person narrator of which resembles his creator in temperament and history yet remains a creature of fiction. A century later, Albert Camus used the same searingly subjective device in La Chute (1956; The Fall, 1957).

In less direct form, many of modernism’s greatest novels and stories by such writers as Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce present material from the author’s life. Many others, including Dostyevski, Kafka, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, Nikolai Gogol, Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Vladimir Nabokov, have employed the literary device of the double.

Operation Shylock is thus both postmodern in its uses of self-consciousness and traditional in its exploration of the divided self. It is a masterful accomplishment by one of America’s most important writers.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold. “Operation Roth.” The New York Review of Books 40 (April 22, 1993): 45-48. Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale, has long admired Roth’s writing. He particularly praises the novel’s narrative exuberance, moral intelligence, and high humor.

Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven, et al. “Philip Roth’s Diasporism: A Symposium.” Tikkun 8 (May/June, 1993): 41-45. Several writers express their views about the concept of diaspora in Roth’s Operation Shylock. An in-depth and wide-ranging look at the novel.

Furman, Andrew. “A New Other’ in American Jewish Literature: Philip Roth’s Israel Fiction.” Contemporary Literature 36 (Winter, 1995): 633-653. Focuses on the theme that centers on Israel and projects the concept of the Other’ on the Arab. Although it seems that Roth has escaped the current literary trend of demonizing the Arab, Furman demonstrates that a close textual reading of The Counterlife and Operation Shylock reveals that the theme is reiterated in both works.

Halkin, Hillel. “How to Read Philip Roth.” Commentary 97 (February, 1994): 43-48. Although some critics maintain that Roth is steering away from themes of Judaism, Halkin argues that Roth’s later works are dominated by Jewish themes. Halkin presents several critical analyses of Roth’s books, including Operation Shylock.

Safer, Elaine B. “The Double, Comic Irony, and Postmodernism in Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock. MELUS 21 (Winter, 1996): 157-172. Safer asserts that the humor in Roth’s novel revolves around the ironic use of doubles and a postmodernist blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction.

Updike, John. “Recruiting Raw Nerves.” The New Yorker 69 (March 15, 1993): 109-112. As a novelist, Updike is in many ways Roth’s opposite: coolly disciplined, WASPish, never boisterous. Yet he is an astute and generous critic, and his review praises Roth highly for his evocative style and ingenious plotting. Updike, however, does complain that the book has too many long monologues and that Roth is “an exhausting author to be with.”