Philip Roth - Operation Shylock

Now, eleven months later, Rosenberg had been surprisingly recalled, this time by the defense, in the midst of its summing up. The judge was telling Rosenberg, “You will listen carefully to the questions put to you and you will reply and confine yourself to the questions put to you. You will not enter into polemics nor will you lose your self-control as, unfortunately, happened more than once in the course of your testimony —”

But, as I have said, during my first few minutes inside the courtroom, I could not focus on the English translation coming through my headphones, not with young Demjanjuk in the row before me, mine to maintain surveillance over, mine to sit by and protect — if protection was indeed warranted — from the machinating Moishe Pipik, and not with these two diaries filling my pockets. Were they the diaries of Leon Klinghoffer? Unobtrusively as I could, I lifted them out of either pocket and turned them over and over in my hands; I even put them up to my nose, quickly one and then the other, to sniff their papery odor, that pleasant moldering smell that faintly perfumes old library stacks. Holding the red diary open in my lap, I read for a moment from a page midway through. “Thurs. 9/23/78. On way to Yugoslavia. Du Brovnik. Went past Messina and Straits. Reminded us of 1969 trip to city of Messina. New crowd got aboard at Genoa. Show tonight was great. Everyone has coughing spells. I don’t know why, weather is perfect.”

That comma setting off “why” from “weather” — is it likely, I asked myself, that a man in the appliance business in Queens would have deftly dropped a comma in there? In jottings as rudimentary as these should I be finding any punctuation at all? And no spelling errors anywhere other than in the writing of an unfamiliar place name? New crowd got aboard at Genoa . Deliberately planted there, that item? There perhaps to presage what would happen seven years hence, when, in the new crowd that boarded the Achille Lauro at some Italian port or other — maybe it was even at Genoa — were hidden the three Palestinian terrorists who would kill this very same diarist? Or was that simply a report of what had happened on their cruise of September 1978 — a new crowd had boarded at Genoa and, for the Klinghoffers, nothing horrible ensued.

But distracted as I was from following the judge’s opening remarks by the presence, in the seat before me, of young Demjanjuk, not yet kidnapped and still unharmed; distracted as I was by the diaries that had been forced on me by Supposnik — wondering whether they were forged, wondering whether Supposnik was a charlatan who was a party to the forgery or a passionate Jewish survivor who was its unsuspecting victim, wondering whether the diaries were exactly what he’d said they were, and, if so, wondering whether it really was somehow my Jewish duty to write the introduction that might then elicit publishing interest in them other than just in Israel — I was still further disconcerted by trying to puzzle out why everything I’d truthfully told George Ziad in the taxi could have been assumed by him to be, of all things, “disinformation.”

It must be because he assumed, first off, that, like the antiquarian bookseller Supposnik, our tiny taxi driver was another of those Israeli secret police men that he’d been directing my attention to everywhere we met; it must be that he assumed not only that we two were under close surveillance but that I had surmised this upon getting into the cab and had then, ingeniously, come up with the story of the second Philip Roth in order to jam the interloper’s circuits with so much cuckoo nonsense. Otherwise I didn’t know what to make of this word “disinformation” or of the affectionate grip in which he’d taken my hand only minutes after angrily informing me that I was a moral idiot.

Admittedly, the story of my double was difficult to accept at face value. The story of anyone’s double would be. It was my own difficulty accepting it that largely accounted for why I had so mismanaged just about everything having to do with Pipik and was probably mismanaging it still. But however hard it was to swallow the existence of a character as audaciously fraudulent as Moishe Pipik or to imagine him meeting with any success whatsoever, I’d have thought it still easier for George to accept this double’s unlikely existence than to believe that (1) I could seriously be the proponent of a political scheme as antihistorically harebrained as Diasporism or that (2) Diasporism could possibly constitute a source of hope for the Palestinian national movement, especially one worthy of financial backing. No, only the insane desperation of a zealot who knew himself to be powerless and who had lived too long in behalf of a cause on the brink of total failure could lead someone as intelligent as George Ziad to seize with such reckless enthusiasm on an idea so spurious. And yet if George were that blinded, that defeated by suffering, that disfigured by impotent rage, then surely he would have disqualified himself long ago from anything like the position of influence that he claimed enabled him to come to see me, as he had this morning, to make arrangements for the secret Athens meeting. On the other hand, perhaps by now the mind of my old Chicago friend was so savagely unhinged by despair that he had taken to living in a dream of his own devising, “Athens” his Palestinian Xanadu and those rich Jewish backers of the PLO no more real than the imaginary friends of a lonely child.

It was not for me, after these last seventy-two hours, to reject as too outlandish the possibility that the situation for him here had driven George crazy. Yet I did reject it. It was just too insipid a conclusion. Not everybody was crazy. Resolute is not crazy. Deluded is not crazy. To be thwarted, vengeful, terrified, treacherous — this is not to be crazy. Not even fanatically held illusions are crazy, and deceit certainly isn’t crazy — deceit, deviousness, cunning, cynicism, all of that is far from crazy … and there, that, deceit , there was the key to my confusion! Of course! It wasn’t I who’d been deceiving George, it was George who was deceiving me! I had been suckered by the tragic melodrama of the pitiful victim who is driven nearly insane by injustice and exile. George’s madness was Hamlet’s — an act .

Yes, here’s an explanation to it all! Eminent Jewish writer shows up in Jerusalem espousing a massive transfer of Israel’s Ashkenazi population back to their European countries of origin. The idea may appear as grossly unrealistic to a Palestinian militant as to Menachem Begin, but that an eminent writer should come up with such an idea might not seem unrealistic to either; no, nothing peculiar to them about an eminent writer who imagines there is some correlation between his own feverish, ignorant apocalyptic fantasies and the way that struggles between contending political forces are won and lost in actuality. Of course, politically speaking, the eminent writer is a joke; of course nothing the man thinks moves anyone in Israel or anywhere else to act one way or another, but he’s a cultural celebrity, he commands column inches all over the world, and consequently the eminent writer who thinks that the Jews should get the hell out of Palestine is not to be ignored or ridiculed but to be encouraged and exploited. George knows him. He’s an old American buddy of George’s. Seduce him, George, with our suffering. Between books all these eminent writers love five or six days in a good hotel, enmeshed in the turbulent tragedies of the heroically oppressed. Track him down. Find him. Tell him how they torture us — it’s the ones who stay in the best hotels who are, understandably, particularly sensitized to the horrors of injustice. If a dirty fork on the breakfast tray elicits an angry protest to room service, imagine their outrage over the cattle prod. Rant, rave, display your wounds, give him the Celebrity Tour — the military courtrooms, the bloodstained walls — tell him that you’ll take him to talk with Father Arafat himself. Let’s see what kind of coverage George can whip up for Mr. Roth’s little publicity stunt. Let’s put this megalomaniac Jew on the cover of Time!