Operation Shylock

Operation Shylock, subtitled A Confession, is narrated by a novelist named Philip Roth, a Jewish American writer in his fifties who is recovering from a breakdown brought on by the sleeping pill Halcion when he learns that a man in Jerusalem is using his name. He travels to Israel, partly to interview the novelist Aharon Appelfeld, and finds the impostor, who looks exactly like him and whom he takes to calling Moishe Pipik. Pipik is promoting Diasporism, a plan for Ashkenazi Jews to leave Israel and resettle in the European countries their families came from, in order to prevent a second Holocaust. He is a former detective, dying of cancer, and his companion is Jinx Possesski, his former nurse, who describes herself as a recovering anti-Semite. Philip becomes involved with her.

All of this unfolds against the Jerusalem trial of John Demjanjuk, an Ohio mechanic born in Ukraine who is accused of being Ivan the Terrible, a guard at Treblinka. George Ziad, a friend from Philip's college years who is now committed to the Palestinian cause in Ramallah, takes him for the Diasporist and tries to connect him with the PLO, and Philip accidentally accepts a million dollar check for the movement. Louis B. Smilesburger, a Mossad agent on crutches, then kidnaps him and presses him into an intelligence operation. The book does not show that operation. In place of a final chapter, an epilogue explains that the account was cut at the request of Israeli intelligence, and a closing note to the reader declares the whole book fiction, a note Roth insisted the Mossad had asked him to add.

The novel runs to about four hundred pages and much of it is argument: long speeches about Israel, the Diaspora, the Holocaust and who has the right to a name. John Updike, in the New Yorker, called it "an orgy of argumentation." It is also very funny, and Kirkus judged that "rarely have fact and fiction, personal confession and wild imaginings, led such a deeply, unnervingly comic dance." Readers who enjoy Roth arguing with himself will find him at full volume here; readers new to him might start elsewhere.