Philip Roth - Operation Shylock

And yet there I was, more than twice the age of the redefining young writer who’d spontaneously taken “Stand Alone!” as his defiant credo, driving the hundred miles down to New York early the next morning to learn from Smilesburger what he wanted removed from my book. Nothing need hide itself in fiction but are there no limits where there’s no disguise? The Mossad was going to tell me.

Why am I a sucker for him? Is it just what happens between two men, one being susceptible to the manipulations of the other who feels to him more powerful? Is his that brand of authoritative manhood that is able to persuade me to do its bidding? Or is there something in my sense of his worldliness that I just don’t feel I measure up to, because he’s swimming in the abrasive tragedies of life and I’m only swimming in art? Is there something in that big, tough — almost romantically tough — mind at work that I am intellectually vulnerable to and that makes me trust in his judgment more than in my own, something perhaps about his moving the pieces on the chessboard the way Jews always wished their fathers could so no one would pull those emblematic beards? There’s something in Smilesburger that evokes not my real father but my fantastic one — that takes over, that takes charge of me . I vanquish the bogus Philip Roth and Smilesburger vanquishes the real one! I push against him, I argue against him, and always in the end I do what he wants — in the end I give in and do everything he says!

Well, not this time. This time the terms are mine.

Smilesburger had chosen as the site for our editorial meeting a Jewish food store on Amsterdam Avenue, specializing in smoked fish, that served breakfast and lunch on a dozen Formica-topped tables in a room adjacent to the bagel and bialy counter and that looked as though, years back, when someone got the bright idea to “modernize,” the attempt at redecoration had been sensibly curtailed halfway through. The place reminded me of the humble street-level living quarters of some of my boyhood friends, whose parents would hurriedly eat their meals in a closet-sized storeroom just behind the shop to keep an eye on the register and the help. In Newark, back in the forties, we used to buy, for our household’s special Sunday breakfasts, silky slices of precious lox, shining fat little chubs, chunks of pale, meaty carp and paprikaed sable, all double-wrapped in heavy wax paper, at a family-run store around the corner that looked and smelled pretty much as this one did — the tiled floor sprinkled with sawdust, the shelves stacked with fish canned in sauces and oils, up by the cash register a prodigious loaf of halvah soon to be sawed into crumbly slabs, and, wafting up from behind the showcase running the length of the serving counter, the bitter fragrance of vinegar, of onions, of whitefish and red herring, of everything pickled, peppered, salted, smoked, soaked, stewed, marinated, and dried, smells with a lineage that, like these stores themselves, more than likely led straight back through the shtetl to the medieval ghetto and the nutrients of those who lived frugally and could not afford to dine à la mode, the diet of sailors and common folk, for whom the flavor of the ancient preservatives was life. And the neighborhood delicatessen restaurants where we extravagantly ate “out” as a treat once a month bore the same stamp of provisional homeliness, that hallmark look of something that hadn’t quite been transformed out of the eyesore it used to be into the eyesore it aspired to become. Nothing distracted the eye, the mind, or the ear from what was sitting on the plate. Satisfying folk cuisine eaten in simple surroundings, on tables, to be sure, and without people spitting in their plates, but otherwise earthly sustenance partaken in an environment just about as unsumptuous as a feasting place can get, gourmandizing at its most commonplace, the other end of the spectrum of Jewish culinary establishments from the commodiously chandeliered dining salon at Miami Beach’s Fontainebleau. Barley, eggs, onions, soups of cabbage, of beets, inexpensive everyday dishes prepared in the old style and devoured happily, without much fuss, off of bargain-basement crockery.

By now, of course, what was once the ordinary fare of the Jewish masses had become an exotic stimulant for Upper West Siders two and three generations removed from the great immigration and just getting by as professionals in Manhattan on annual salaries that, a century earlier, would have provided daily banquets all year long for every last Jew in Galicia. I’d see these people — among them, sometimes, lawyers, journalists, or editors I knew — taking pleasure, mouthful by mouthful, in their kasha varnishkas and their gefilte fish (and riveted, all the while they unstintingly ate, to the pages of one, two, or even three daily papers) on those occasions when I came down to Manhattan from Connecticut and took an hour off from whatever else I was doing to satisfy my own inextinguishable appetite for the chopped-herring salad as it was unceremoniously served up ( that was the ceremony) at one of those very same tables, facing onto the trucks, taxis, and fire engines streaming north, where Smilesburger had suggested that we meet for breakfast at ten a.m. to discuss my book.

After shaking Smilesburger’s hand and sitting down directly across from him and the coatrack against which his forearm crutches were leaning, I told him how I rarely came to New York without stopping off here for either a breakfast or a lunch, and he answered that he knew all about that. “My daughter-in-law spotted you a couple of times. She lives just around the corner.”

“What does she do?”

“Art historian. Tenured professor.”

“And your son?”

“International entrepreneur.”

“And his name?”

“Definitely not ‘Smilesburger,’” he said, smiling kindly. And then, with an open, appealing, spirited warmth that I was unprepared for from this master of derisive artifice and that, despite its disarming depth of realness, couldn’t possibly have been purged of all his callous shrewdness, he carried me almost to the edge of gullibility by saying, “And so how are you, Philip? You had heart surgery. Your father died. I read Patrimony . Warmhearted but tough. You’ve been through the wringer. Yet you look wonderful. Younger even than when I saw you last.”

“You too,” I said.

He clapped his hands together with relish. “Retired,” he replied. “Eighteen months ago, freed of it all, of everything vile and sinister. Deceptions. Disinformation. Fakery. ‘Our revels now are ended, … melted into air, into thin air.’”

This was strange news in the light of why we were meeting, and I wondered if he wasn’t simply attempting to gain his customary inquisitorial upper hand here at the very outset, by misleading me once again, this time, for a change, by encouraging me to believe that my situation was in no way threatening and that I couldn’t possibly be shanghaied into anything but a game of checkers by a happy-go-lucky senior citizen like him, a pensioner wittily quoting Prospero, wandless old Prospero, bereft of magical power and casting a gentle sunset glow over a career of godlike treachery. Of course, I told myself, there’s no apartment just around the corner where he’s staying with a daughter-in-law who’d spotted me eating here before; and the chocolaty tan that had led to a dramatic improvement of his skin condition and that gave an embalmed-looking glow of life to that heavily lined, cadaverous face stemmed, more than likely, from a round of ultraviolet therapy administered by a dermatologist rather than from retirement to the Negev. But the story I got was that, in a desert development community, he and his wife were now happily gardening together only a mile down the road from where his daughter, her husband, and their three adolescent children had been living since the son-in-law had moved his textile business to Beersheba. The decision to fly to America to see me, and, while here, to spend a few days with his two American grandchildren, had been made wholly on his own. My manuscript had been forwarded to him from his old office, where he hadn’t set foot since his retirement; as far as he could tell, no one had opened the sealed envelope and read the manuscript, although it wouldn’t be difficult for either of us, he said, to imagine the response there if anyone had.