Philip Roth - Operation Shylock

No, I didn’t stop for a very long time. On and on and on, obeying an impulse I did nothing to quash, ostentatiously free of uncertainty and without a trace of conscience to rein in my raving. I was telling them about the meeting of the World Diasporist Congress to take place in December, fittingly enough in Basel, the site of the first World Zionist Congress just ninety years ago. At that first Zionist Congress there had been only a couple of hundred delegates — my goal was to have twice that many, Jewish delegations from every European country where the Israeli Ashkenazis would soon resume the European Jewish life that Hitler had all but extinguished. Walesa, I told them, had already agreed to appear as keynote speaker or to send his wife in his behalf if he concluded that he could not safely leave Poland. I was talking about the Armenians, suddenly, about whom I knew nothing. “Did the Armenians suffer because they were in a Diaspora? No, because they were at home and the Turks moved in and massacred them there.” I heard myself next praising the greatest Diasporist of all, the father of the new Diasporist movement, Irving Berlin. “People ask where I got the idea. Well, I got it listening to the radio. The radio was playing ‘Easter Parade’ and I thought, But this is Jewish genius on a par with the Ten Commandments. God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave to Irving Berlin ‘Easter Parade’ and ‘White Christmas.’ The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ — the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity — and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow. Gone is the gore and the murder of Christ — down with the crucifix and up with the bonnet! He turns their religion into schlock . But nicely! Nicely! So nicely the goyim don’t even know what hit ’em. They love it. Everybody loves it. The Jews especially. Jews loathe Jesus. People always tell me Jesus is Jewish. I never believe them. It’s like when people used to tell me Cary Grant was Jewish. Bull shit . Jews don’t want to hear about Jesus. And can you blame them? So — Bing Crosby replaces Jesus as the beloved Son of God, and the Jews, the Jews , go around whistling about Easter! And is that so disgraceful a means of defusing the enmity of centuries? Is anyone really dishonored by this? If schlockified Christianity is Christianity cleansed of Jew hatred, then three cheers for schlock. If supplanting Jesus Christ with snow can enable my people to cozy up to Christmas, then let it snow, let it snow, let it snow! Do you see my point?” I took more pride, I told them, in “Easter Parade” than in the victory of the Six Day War, found more security in “White Christmas” than in the Israeli nuclear reactor. I told them that if the Israelis ever reached a point where they believed their survival depended not merely on breaking hands but on dropping a nuclear bomb, that would be the end of Judaism, even if the state of Israel should survive. “Jews as Jews will simply disappear. A generation after Jews use nuclear weapons to save themselves from their enemies, there will no longer be people to identify themselves as Jews. The Israelis will have saved their state by destroying their people. They will never survive morally after that; and if they don’t, why survive as Jews at all? They barely have the wherewithal to survive morally now. To put all these Jews in this tiny place, surrounded on all sides by tremendous hostility — how can you survive morally? Better to be marginal neurotics, anxious assimilationists, and everything else that the Zionists despise, better to lose the state than to lose your moral being by unleashing a nuclear war. Better Irving Berlin than Ariel Sharon. Better Irving Berlin than the Wailing Wall. Better Irving Berlin than Holy Jerusalem! What does owning Jerusalem , of all places, have to do with being Jews in 1988? Jerusalem is by now the worst thing that could possibly have happened to us. Last year in Jerusalem! Next year in Warsaw! Next year in Bucharest! Next year in Vilna and Cracow! Look, I know people call Diasporism a revolutionary idea, but it’s not a revolution that I’m proposing, it’s a retroversion , a turning back, the very thing Zionism itself once was. You go back to the crossing point and cross back the other way . Zionism went back too far, that’s what went wrong with Zionism. Zionism went back to the crossing point of the dispersion — Diasporism goes back to the crossing point of Zionism .”

My sympathies were entirely with George’s wife. I didn’t know which was more insufferable to her, the fervor with which I presented my Diasporist blah-blah or the thoughtfulness with which George sat there taking it in. Her husband had finally stopped talking — only to listen to this! Either to warm herself or to contain herself she’d enwrapped herself in her own arms and, like a woman on the brink of keening, she began almost imperceptibly rocking and swaying to and fro. And the message in those eyes of hers couldn’t have been plainer: I was more than even she could bear, she who had by now borne everything. He suffers enough without you Shut up. Go away. Disappear .

All right, I’ll address this woman’s fears directly. Wouldn’t Moishe Pipik? “Anna, I’d be skeptical too if I were you. I’d be thinking, just as you are, This writer is one of those writers with no grasp on reality. This is all the nonsensical fantasy of a man who understands nothing. This is not even literature, let alone politics, this is a fable and a fairy tale. You are thinking of the thousand reasons why Diasporism can only fail, and I am telling you that I know the thousand reasons, I know the million reasons. But I am also here to tell you, to tell George, to tell Kamil, to tell whoever here will listen that it cannot fail because it must not fail , because the absurdity is not Diasporism but its alternative: Destruction. What people once thought about Zionism you are now thinking about Diasporism: an impossible pipe dream. You are thinking that I am just one more victim of the madness here that is on both sides — that this mad, crazy, tragic predicament has engulfed my sanity too. I see how miserable I am making you by exciting expectations in George that you know to be utopian and beyond implementation — that George, in his heart of hearts, knows to be utopian. But let me show you both something I received just a few hours ago that may cause you to think otherwise. It was given to me by an elderly survivor of Auschwitz.”

I removed from my jacket the envelope containing Smilesburger’s check and handed it to Anna. “Given to me by someone as desperate as you are to bring this maddening conflict to a just and honorable and workable conclusion. His contribution to the Diasporist movement.”

When Anna saw the check, she began to laugh very softly, as though this were a private joke intended especially for her amusement.

“Let me see,” said George, but for the moment she would not relinquish it. Wearily he asked her, “Why do you laugh? I prefer that, mind you, to the tears, but why do you laugh like this?”

“From happiness. From joy. I’m laughing because it’s all over. Tomorrow the Jews are going to line up at the airline office to get their one-way tickets for Berlin. Michael, look.” And she drew the boy close to her to show him the check. “Now you will be able to live in wonderful Palestine for the rest of your life. The Jews are leaving. Mr. Roth is the anti-Moses leading them out of Israel. Here is the money for their airfare.” But the pale, elongated, beautiful boy, without so much as glancing at the check in his mother’s hand, clenched his teeth and pulled away violently. This did not stop Anna, however — the check was merely the pretext she needed to deliver her diatribe. “Now there can be a Palestinian flag flying from every building and everybody can stand up and salute it twenty times a day. Now we can have our own money, with Father Arafat’s portrait on our very own bills. In our pockets we can jingle coins bearing the profile of Abu Nidal. I’m laughing,” she said, “because Palestinian Paradise is at hand.”