Philip Roth - Operation Shylock

But why, in exchange, does the writer pirate from him? This is the question plaguing the writer as his taxi carries him safely through Jerusalem’s western hills and onto the highway for the airport. It would be comforting for him to believe that his impersonation of his impersonator springs from an aesthetic impulse to intensify the being of this hollow antagonist and apprehend him imaginatively, to make the objective subjective and the subjective objective, which is, after all, no more than what writers are paid to do. It would be comforting to understand his performances in Ramallah with George and in the jeep with Gal — as well as the passionate session locked up with the nurse, culminating in that wordless vocal obbligato with which she’d flung herself upon the floodtide of her pleasure, the streaming throaty rising and falling, at once husky and murmurous, somewhere between the trilling of a tree toad and the purring of a cat, that luxuriantly articulated the blissful climax and that still sounded sirenishly in his ears all those hours later — as the triumph of a plucky, spontaneous, audacious vitality over paranoia and fear, as a heartening manifestation of an artist’s inexhaustible playfulness and of an irrepressibly comic fitness for life. It would be comforting to think that those episodes encapsulate whatever true freedom of spirit is his, that embodied in the impersonation is the distinctively personal form that his fortitude takes and that he has no reason at this stage of life to be bewildered by or ashamed of. It would be comforting to think that, far from having pathologically toyed with an explosive situation (with George, Gal, or Jinx) or having been polluted by an infusion of the very extremism by which he feels so menaced and from which he is now in flight, he has answered the challenge of Moishe Pipik with exactly the parodie defiance it warrants. It would be comforting to think that, within the confines of a plot over which he’s had no authorial control, he has not demeaned or disgraced himself unduly and that his serious blunders and miscalculations have resulted largely from a sentimental excess of compassion for his enemy’s ailments rather than from a mind (his own) too unhinged by the paranoid threat to be able to think out an effective counterplot in which to subsume the Pipikesque imbecility. It would be comforting, it would be only natural, to assume that in a narrative contest (in the realistic mode) with this impostor, the real writer would easily emerge as inventive champion, scoring overwhelming victories in Sophistication of Means, Subtlety of Effects, Cunningness of Structure, Ironic Complexity, Intellectual Interest, Psychological Credibility, Verbal Precision, and Overall Verisimilitude; but instead the Jerusalem Gold Medal for Vivid Realism has gone to a narrative klutz who takes the cake for wholesale indifference to the traditional criteria for judgment in every category of the competition. His artifice is phony to the core, a hysterical caricature of the art of illusion, hyperbole fueled by perversity (and perhaps even insanity), exaggeration as the principle of invention, everything progressively overdrawn, super-simplified, divorced from the concrete evidence of the mind and the senses — and yet he wins! Well, let him. See him not as a terrifying incubus insufficiently existent who manufactures his being cannibalistically, not as a demoniacal amnesiac who is hiding from himself in you and can only experience himself if he experiences himself as someone else, not as something half-born or half-dead or half-crazed or half-charlatan/half-psychopath — see this bisected thing as the achievement that he is and grant him the victory graciously. The plot that prevails is Pipik’s. He wins, you lose, go home — better to relinquish the Medal for Vivid Realism, however unjustly, to fifty percent of a man than to be defeated in the struggle for recovery of your own stability and to wind up again fifty percent of yourself. Demjanjuk’s son will or will not be kidnapped and tortured through Pipik’s plotting whether you remain in Jerusalem or are back in London. Should it happen while you’re here, the newspaper stories will bear not only your name as the perpetrator but your picture and your bio in a sidebar; if you are not here, however, if you are there, then there will be a minimum of confusion all around when he is tracked to his Dead Sea cave and caught with the captive and with his bearded accomplices. That he is determined to actualize a thought that merely passed through your mind when you first saw young Demjanjuk unprotected cannot possibly impute culpability to you, however strenuously he attributes to you the prize-winning plot and claims, once his interrogation begins, merely to be the Chicago hired gun, the private detective engaged for a fee to enact, as stand-in, as Stuntman, your drastic self-intoxicated melodrama of justice and revenge. Of course, there will be those who will be only too thrilled to believe him. It won’t be hard for them either: they’ll blame it (compassionately, no doubt) on your Halcion madness the way Jekyll blamed Hyde on his drugs; they’ll say, “He never recovered from that breakdown and this was the result. It had to be the breakdown — not even he was that dreadful a novelist.”

But I never did escape from this plot-driven world into a more congenial, subtly probable, innerly propelled narrative of my own devising — didn’t make it to the airport, didn’t even get as far as Aharon’s house — and that was because in the taxi I remembered a political cartoon I’d seen in the British papers when I was living in London during the Lebanon war, a detestable cartoon of a big-nosed Jew, his hands meekly opened out in front of him and his shoulders raised in a shrug as though to disavow responsibility, standing atop a pyramid of dead Arab bodies. Purportedly a caricature of Menachem Begin, then prime minister of Israel, the drawing was, in fact, a perfectly realistic, unequivocal depiction of a kike as classically represented in the Nazi press. This cartoon was what turned me around. Barely ten minutes out of Jerusalem I told the driver to take me back to the King David Hotel. I thought, When he starts slicing off the boy’s toes and mailing them one at a time to Demjanjuk’s cell, the Guardian will have a field day. Demjanjuk’s lawyers had already challenged the integrity of the proceedings publicly, daring to announce to three Jewish judges in a Jewish courtroom that the prosecution of John Demjanjuk for crimes committed at Treblinka had the characteristics of nothing less than the Dreyfus trial. Wouldn’t the kidnapping dramatically underscore this claim as it was even less delicately made by Demjanjuk’s Ukrainian supporters in America and Canada and by his defenders, left- and right-wing, in the Western press — namely that it was impossible for anyone with a name suffixed juk to receive justice from Jews, that Demjanjuk was the Jews’ scapegoat, that the Jewish state was a lawless state, that the “show trial” convened in Jerusalem was intended to perpetuate the self-justifying Jewish myth of victimization, that revenge alone was the Jews’ objective? To drum up world sympathy for their client and to bolster their allegations of bias and prejudgment, Demjanjuk’s supporters could not themselves have hit on a publicity stunt more brilliant than the one that Moishe Pipik was planning to perform in order to vent his rage with me.

If it hadn’t been so infuriatingly clear that it was I who was the challenge he meant to defy, that this crazy kidnapping, potentially damaging to a cause perhaps even more poignant than his own, originated in his single-minded fixation on me, I might have told the driver to take me not to the King David Hotel but directly to the Jerusalem police. If it hadn’t seemed to me that I had been humiliatingly outfoxed at every turn by an adversary who was in no way my equal and that I had compounded my ineptness by unthinkingly accepting Smilesburger’s check — and subsequently elaborated on that error by failing to grasp the scale of the West Bank conflict and getting myself caught after dark on the Ramallah road by an Israeli patrol in no mood to observe the niceties of a legal search — I might not have felt that it was now incumbent on me, and on me alone, to face down this bastard once and for all. This is as far as his pathology goes. As far as mine goes. I’d overmagnified the menace of him from the start. You don’t have to call out the Israeli marines, I told myself, to put an end to Moishe Pipik. He’s got a foot in the grave already. All he needs is a little push. It’s simple: crush him.