Philip Roth - Operation Shylock

“Do I really? No, no, still an insurance man’s son from New Jersey.”

“How is your father? How is your mother? How is your brother?” he asked me, excitedly.

The metamorphosis that, physically, had all but effaced the boy I’d known at Chicago was nothing, I had come to realize, beside an alteration, or deformation, far more astonishing and grave. The gush, the agitation, the volubility, the frenzy barely beneath the surface of every word he babbled, the nerve-racking sense he communicated of someone aroused and decomposing all at the same time, of someone in a permanent state of imminent apoplexy … how could that be Zee, how could this overweight, overwrought cyclone of distress possibly have been the cultivated young gentleman we all so admired for his suavity and his slick composure? Back then I was still a crisscross of personalities, a grab bag of raw qualities, strands of street-corner boyishness still inextricably interwoven with the burgeoning high-mindedness, while George had seemed to me so successfully imperturbable, so knowing in the ways of life, so wholly and impressively formed . Well, to hear him tell it now, I’d had him wrong in every way: in reality he’d been living under an ice cap, a son trying in vain to stanch the bleeding of a wronged and ruined father, with his wonderful manners and his refined virility not only masking the pain of dispossession and exile but concealing even from himself how scorched he was by shame, perhaps even more so than the father.

Emotionally, his voice quaking, Zee said to me, “I dream of Chicago. I dream of those days when I was a student in Chicago.”

“Yes, we were lively boys.”

“I dream about Walter Schneeman’s Red Door Book Shop. I dream about the University Tavern. I dream about the Tropical Hut. I dream about my carrel in the library. I dream about my courses with Preston Roberts. I dream about my Jewish friends, about you and Herb Haber and Barry Targan and Art Geffin — Jews who could not conceive of being Jews like this! There are weeks, Philip, when I dream of Chicago every single night!” Taking my hands tightly in his and shaking them as though they were a set of reins, he said suddenly, “What are you doing? What are you doing right this minute?”

I was, of course, on my way to visit Apter at his room, but I decided not to tell this to George Ziad in the state of agitation he was in. The previous evening I had spoken briefly on the phone with Apter, assuring him once again that the person identified as me at the Demjanjuk trial a week earlier had merely been someone who looked like me and that I had arrived in Jerusalem only the day before and would come to see him at his stall in the Old City the very next afternoon. And here, like virtually every other man I seemed to meet in Jerusalem, Apter had begun to cry. Because of the violence, he told me, because of the Arabs throwing stones, he was too frightened to leave his room and I must come to see him there:

I did not want to tell George that I had a cousin here who was an emotionally impaired Holocaust survivor, because I did not want to hear him tell me how it was the Holocaust survivors, poisoned by their Holocaust pathology, against whose “will to dominate” the Palestinians had for over four decades now been struggling to survive.

“Zee, I have time for just a quick cup of coffee — then I’ve got to run.

“Coffee where? Here? In the city of my father? Here in the city of my father they’ll sit down right next to us — they’ll sit in my lap .” He said this while pointing to two young men standing beside a fruit vendor’s stall only some ten or fifteen feet away. They were wearing jeans and talking together, two short, strongly built fellows I would have assumed were market workers taking a few minutes off for a smoke had Zee not said, “Israeli security. Shin Bet. I can’t even go into a public toilet in the city of my father that they don’t come in next to me and start pissing on my shoes. They’re everywhere. Interrogate me at the airport, search me at customs, intercept my mail, follow my car, tap my phone, bug my house — they even infiltrate my classroom.” He began to laugh very loudly. “Last year, my best student, he wrote a wonderful Marxist analysis of Moby Dick — he was Shin Bet too. My only ‘A.’ Philip, I cannot sit and have coffee here. Triumphant Israel is a terrible, terrible place to have coffee. These victorious Jews are terrible people. I don’t just mean the Kahanes and the Sharons. I mean them all , the Yehoshuas and the Ozes included. The good ones who are against the occupation of the West Bank but not against the occupation of my father’s house, the ‘beautiful Israelis’ who want their Zionist thievery and their clean conscience too. They are no less superior than the rest of them — these beautiful Israelis are even more superior. What do they know about ‘Jewish,’ these ‘healthy, confident’ Jews who look down their noses at you Diaspora ‘neurotics’? This is health? This is confidence? This is arrogance . Jews who make military brutes out of their sons — and how superior they feel to you Jews who know nothing of guns! Jews who use clubs to break the hands of Arab children — and how superior they feel to you Jews incapable of such violence! Jews without tolerance, Jews for whom it is always black and white, who have all these crazy splinter parties, who have a party of one man , they are so intolerant one of the other — these are the Jews who are superior to the Jews in the Diaspora? Superior to people who know in their bones the meaning of give-and-take? Who live with success, like tolerant human beings, in the great world of crosscurrents and human differences? Here they are authentic , here, locked up in their Jewish ghetto and armed to the teeth? And you there, you are ‘unauthentic,’ living freely in contact with all of mankind? The arrogance , Philip, it is insufferable! What they teach their children in the schools is to look with disgust on the Diaspora Jew, to see the English-speaking Jew and the Spanish-speaking Jew and the Russian-speaking Jew as a freak, as a worm, as a terrified neurotic. As if this Jew who now speaks Hebrew isn’t just another kind of Jew — as if speaking Hebrew is the culmination of human achievement! I’m here, they think, and I speak Hebrew, this is my language and my home, and I don’t have to go around thinking all the time, ‘I’m a Jew but what is a Jew?’ I don’t have to be this kind of self-questioning, self-hating, alienated, frightened neurotic. And what those so-called neurotics have given to the world in the way of brainpower and art and science and all the skills and ideals of civilization, to this they are oblivious. But then to the entire world they are oblivious. For the entire world they have one word: goy! ‘I live here and I speak Hebrew and all I know and see are other Jews like me and isn’t that wonderful!’ Oh, what an impoverished Jew this arrogant Israeli is! Yes, they are the authentic ones, the Yehoshuas and the Ozes, and tell me, I ask them, what are Saul Alinsky and David Riesman and Meyer Schapiro and Leonard Bernstein and Bella Abzug and Paul Goodman and Allen Ginsberg, and on and on and on and on? Who do they think they are , these provincial nobodies! Jailers! This is their great Jewish achievement — to make Jews into jailers and jet-bomber pilots! And just suppose they were to succeed, suppose they were to win and have their way and every Arab in Nablus and every Arab in Hebron and every Arab in the Galilee and in Gaza, suppose every Arab in the world, were to disappear courtesy of the Jewish nuclear bomb, what would they have here fifty years from now? A noisy little state of no importance whatsoever. That’s what the persecution and the destruction of the Palestinians will have been for — the creation of a Jewish Belgium, without even a Brussels to show for it. That’s what these ‘authentic’ Jews will have contributed to civilization — a country lacking every quality that gave the Jews their great distinction! They may be able to instill in other Arabs who live under their evil occupation fear and respect for their ‘superiority,’ but I grew up with you people, I was educated with you people, by you people, I lived with real Jews, at Harvard, at Chicago, with truly superior people, whom I admired, whom I loved, to whom I did indeed feel inferior and rightly so — the vitality in them, the irony in them, the human sympathy, the human tolerance ; the goodness of heart that was simply instinctive in them, people with the Jewish sense of survival that was all human, elastic, adaptable, humorous, creative, and all this they have replaced here with a stick! The Golden Calf was more Jewish than Ariel Sharon, God of Samaria and Judea and the Holy Gaza Strip! The worst of the ghetto Jew combined with the worst of the bellicose, belligerent goy, and that is what these people call ‘authentic’! Jews have a reputation for being intelligent, and they are intelligent. The only place I have ever been where all the Jews are stupid is Israel. I spit on them! I spit on them!” And this my friend Zee proceeded to do, spat on the wet, gritty marketplace pavement while looking defiantly at the two toughs in jeans he’d identified as Israeli security, neither of whom happened to be looking our way or, seemingly, to be concerned with anything other than their own conversation.