Philip Roth - Operation Shylock

I took from him what he handed me, two notebooks bound in imitation leather, each about the size of a billfold. One was red, and impressed on its cover, in white cursive script, were the words “My Trip.” The other, whose brown cover was a bit scratched and mildewed, was identified as “Travels Abroad” in gold letters that were stylized to look exotically non-Occidental. Engraved in a semicircular constellation around those words were postage-stamp-sized representations of the varied forms of locomotion that the intrepid wayfarer would encounter on his journey — a ship sailing along on the wavy waves, an airliner, a rickshaw pulled by a pigtailed coolie, bearing a woman with a parasol, an elephant with a driver perched atop his head and a passenger seated in an awninged cabinet on his back, a camel ridden by a robed Arabian, and, at the bottom edge of the cover, the most elaborately detailed of the six engraved images: a full moon, a starry sky, a serene lagoon, a gondola, a gondolier. …

“Nothing like this,” said Supposnik, “has turned up since the discovery at the end of the war of the diary of Anne Frank.”

“Whose are they?” I asked.

“Open them,” he said. “Read.”

I opened the red book. At the top of the entry I’d turned to, where there were lines provided for “Date,” “Place,” and “Weather,” I read “2-2-76,” “Mexico,” and “Good.” The entry itself, in legible largish handwriting inscribed with a fountain pen in blue ink, began, “Beautiful flight. A little rough. Arrived on time. Mexico City has a population of 5,000,000 people. Our guide took us through some sections of the city. We went to a residential section that was built on lava. The homes ranged from $30,000 to $160,000. They were very modern and beautiful. The flowers were very colorful.” I skipped ahead. “Wed. 2-14-76. San Huso De Puria. We had an early lunch and then went into the pool. There are 4 of them here. Each is supposed to have curative waters. Then we went to the Spa building. The girls had a mud pack on their faces and then we went into the mikva or baths. Marilyn and I shared one. It is called a family bath. It was the most delightful experience. All my friends should visit this place. Even some of my enemies. It is great.”

“Well,” I said to Supposnik, “they’re not André Gide’s.”

“It’s written whose they are — at the beginning.”

I turned to the beginning. There was a page titled “Time Keeping at Sea,” a page about “Changing the Clock,” information about “Latitude and Longitude,” “Miles and Knots,” “The Barometer,” “The Tides,” “Ocean Lanes and Distances,” “Port and Starboard,” a full page explaining “Conversion from US-$ into Foreign Currencies,” and then the page headed “Identification,” where all but a few of the blanks had been filled in by the same diarist with the same fountain pen.

“Now you see,” said Supposnik gravely.

“I do,” I said, “yes,” and opened the brown diary he’d given me. “9-3-79. Naples. Weather cloudy. Breakfast. Took tour to Pompeii again. Very interesting. Hot. Back to ship. Wrote cards. Had drink. Met 2 nice young people from London. Barbara and Lawrence. Safety drill. Weather turned nice. Going to Captain’s cocktail party in the swank [illegible] Room.”

“This is the Klinghoffer?” I asked. “From the Achille Lauro hijacking?”

“The Klinghoffer they killed, yes. The defenseless Jew crippled in a wheelchair that the brave Palestinian freedom fighters shot in the head and threw into the Mediterranean Sea. These are his travel diaries.”

“From that trip?”

“No, from happier trips. The diary from that trip has disappeared. Perhaps it was in his pocket when they tossed him overboard. Perhaps the brave freedom fighters used it for paper to cleanse their heroic Palestinian behinds. No, these are from the pleasant trips he made with his wife and his friends in the years before. They’ve come to me through the Klinghoffer daughters. I heard about the diaries. I contacted the daughters. I flew to New York to meet with them. Two specialists here in Israel, one of them associated with the forensic investigation unit of the attorney general’s office, have assured me that the handwriting is Klinghoffer’s. I brought back with me documents and letters from his business office files — the handwriting there corresponds to the diary handwriting in every last particular. The pen, the ink, the manufacturing date of the diaries themselves — I have expert documentation for their authenticity. The daughters have asked me to act as their representative to help them find an Israeli publisher for their late father’s diaries. They want to publish them here as a memorial to him and as a token of the devotion that he felt to Israel. They have asked for the proceeds to be donated to the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, a favorite charity of their father’s. I told these two young women that when Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam from the camps after the war and found the diary kept by his little daughter while the Frank family hid from the Nazis in their attic, he too wanted it only to be published privately, as a memorial to her for a small group of Dutch friends. And as you well know, having yourself made Anne Frank into the heroine of a literary work, that was the modest, unassuming way in which the Anne Frank diary first appeared. I of course will follow the wishes of the Klinghoffer daughters. But I happen also to know that, like the diary of little Anne Frank, The Travel Diaries of Leon Klinghoffer are destined to reach a far wider audience, a worldwide audience — if, that is, I can secure the assistance of Philip Roth. Mr. Roth, the introduction to the first American publication of The Diary of Anne Frank was written by Eleanor Roosevelt, the much-esteemed widow of your wartime president. A few hundred words from Mrs. Roosevelt and Anne Frank’s words became a moving entry in the history of Jewish suffering and Jewish survival. Philip Roth can do the same for the martyred Klinghoffer.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t.” However, when I made to hand back the two volumes, he wouldn’t accept them.

“Read them through,” Supposnik said. “I’ll leave them for you to read through.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I can’t be responsible. Here.”

But again he refused to take them. “Leon Klinghoffer,” he said, “could very easily have been a man out of one of your books. He’s no stranger to you. Neither is the idiom in which he expresses here, simply, awkwardly, sincerely, his delight in living, his love for his wife, his pride in his children, his devotion to his fellow Jews, his love for Israel. I know the feeling you have for the achievement that these men, burdened by all the limitations of their immigrant family backgrounds, nonetheless made of their American lives. They are the fathers of your heroes. You know them, you understand them; without sentimentalizing them, you respect them. Only you can bring to these two little travel diaries the compassionate knowledge that will reveal to the world exactly who it was and what it was that was murdered on the cruise ship Achille Lauro on October 8, 1985. No other writer writes about these Jewish men in the way that you do. I’ll return tomorrow morning.”

“It’s not likely I’ll be here tomorrow morning. Look,” I said angrily, “you cannot leave these things with me.”

“I cannot think of anyone more reliable to entrust them to.” And with that he turned and left me there holding the two diaries.

The Smilesburger million-dollar check. The Lech Walesa six-pointed star. Now the Leon Klinghoffer travel diaries. What next, the false nose worn by the admirable Macklin? Whatever Jewish treasure isn’t nailed down comes flying straight into my face! I went immediately to the front desk and asked for an envelope large enough to hold the two diaries and wrote Supposnik’s name across it and my own in the upper left-hand corner. “When the gentleman returns,” I said to the clerk, “give him this package, will you?”