Philip Roth: Operation Shylock

“I was thinking, just before, that I could have done much worse than you,” I said. “Now it’s hard to imagine how.” I held the envelope containing my manuscript under my arm while placing the envelope full of money back in the attaché case. “Here,” I said, snapping the case shut and offering it to Smilesburger, but he held tightly to his crutches, refusing to accept it back. “All right,” I said and, seeing that the woman who’d been sleeping beside her companion on the church steps was awake now and cautiously watching the two of us, I set the case down on the pavement before Smilesburger’s feet. “The Mossad Fund for Homeless Non-Jews.”

“No jokes, please — pick up the case,” he said, “and take it. You don’t know what could be in store for you otherwise. Take the money and do what they want. Ruining reputations is no less serious an intelligence operation than destroying nuclear reactors. When they are out to silence a voice they don’t like, they know how to accomplish it without the blundering of our Islamic brothers. They don’t issue a stupid, barbaric fatwa that makes a martyred hero out of the author of a book that nobody can read — they quietly go to work on the reputation instead. And I don’t mean halfheartedly, as they did in the past with you, turning loose the intellectual stooges at their magazine. I mean hardball — loshon hora: the whispering campaign that cannot be stopped, rumors that it’s impossible to quash, besmirchment from which you will never be cleansed, slanderous stories to belittle your professional qualifications, derisive reports of your business deceptions and your perverse aberrations, outraged polemics denouncing your moral failings, misdeeds, and faulty character traits — your shallowness, your vulgarity, your cowardice, your avarice, your indecency, your falseness, your selfishness, your treachery. Derogatory information. Defamatory statements. Insulting witticisms. Disparaging anecdotes. Idle mockery. Bitchy chatter. Malicious absurdities. Galling wisecracks. Fantastic lies. Loshon hora of such spectacular dimensions that it is guaranteed not only to bring on fear, distress, disease, spiritual isolation, and financial loss but to significantly shorten a life. They will make a shambles of the position that you have worked nearly sixty years to achieve. No area of your life will go uncontaminated. And if you think this is an exaggeration you really are deficient in a sense of reality. Nobody can ever say of a secret service, ‘That’s something they don’t do.’ Knowledge is too dispersed for that conclusion to be drawn. They can only say, ‘Within my experience, it wasn’t done. And beyond that again, there’s always a first time.’ Philip, remember what happened to your friend Kosinski! The Chofetz Chaim wasn’t just whistling Dixie: there is no verbal excess, no angry word, no evil speech that is unutterable to a Jew with an unguarded tongue. You are not Jonathan Pollard — you are being neither abandoned nor disowned. Instead you are being given the benefit of a lifetime’s experience by someone who has developed the highest regard for you and cannot sit by and watch you destroyed. The consequences of what you’ve written are simply beyond calculation. I fear for you. Name a raw nerve and you recruit it. It is not a quiet book you’ve written — it is a suicidal book, even within the extremely Jewish stance you assume. Take the money, please. I beg you. I beg you. Otherwise the misery you suffered from Moishe Pipik will seem like a drop in the bucket of humiliation and shame. They will turn you into a walking joke beside which Moishe Pipik will look like Elie Wiesel, speaking words that are only holy and pure. You’ll yearn for the indignities of a double like Pipik; when they get done desecrating you and your name, Pipik will seem the personification of modesty, dignity, and the passion for truth. Lead them not into temptation, because their creativity knows no bounds when the job is to assassinate the character even of a tzaddik like you. A righteous person, a man of moral rectitude, that is what I have come to understand you to be — and against the disgrace of such a person it is my human obligation to cry out! Philip, pick up the attaché case, take it home, and put the money in your mattress. Nobody will ever know.”

“And in return?”

“Let your Jewish conscience be your guide.”

It was Sheftel, by the way, who would have benefited from a bodyguard to protect him against attack. Perhaps my most unthinking mistake of all in Jerusalem was to have allowed myself to become convinced that at the culmination of this inflammatory trial, the violent rage of a wild Jewish avenger, if and when it should erupt, would be directed at a Gentile and not, as I initially thought, and as happened — and as even the least cynical of Jewish ironists could have foreseen — at another Jew.

On December 1, 1988, during the funeral for Demjanjuk’s auxiliary Israeli lawyer — one who’d joined Sheftel, after Demjanjuk’s conviction, to help prepare the Supreme Court appeal and who mysteriously committed suicide only weeks later — Sheftel was approached by Yisroel Yehezkeli, a seventy-year-old Holocaust survivor and a frequent spectator at the Demjanjuk trial, who shouted at him, “Everything’s because of you,” and threw hydrochloric acid in the lawyer’s face. The acid completely destroyed the protective cover over the cornea of his left eye and Sheftel was virtually blind in that eye until he came to Boston some eight weeks later, where he underwent a cell transplant, a four-hour operation by a Harvard surgeon, that restored his sight. During Sheftel’s Boston sojourn and subsequent recovery, he was accompanied by John Demjanjuk, Jr., who acted as his nurse and chauffeur.

As for Yisroel Yehezkeli, he was convicted of aggravated assault. He was sentenced by a Jerusalem judge, who found him “unrepentant,” and served three years in jail. The court psychiatrist’s report described the assailant as “not psychotic, although slightly paranoid.” Most of Yehezkeli’s family had been killed at Treblinka.