Operation Shylock
Encyclopedia
Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist. He gained fame with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of Jewish-American life that earned him a National Book Award...
's 19th book and was published in 1993.
Summary
The novel follows narrator "Philip Roth" on a journey to IsraelIsrael
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
, where he attends the trial of accused war criminal
War crime
War crimes are serious violations of the laws applicable in armed conflict giving rise to individual criminal responsibility...
John Demjanjuk
John Demjanjuk
John Demjanjuk is a retired Ukrainian-American auto worker who gained notoriety after being accused numerous times of Holocaust-related war crimes....
and becomes involved in an intelligence mission—the "Operation Shylock" of the title.
Plot
While in Israel, the narrator seeks out an impersonator who has appropriated his identity—sharing the same facial features and name as Philip Roth—and used this celebrity to spread "DiasporismDiaspora
A diaspora is "the movement, migration, or scattering of people away from an established or ancestral homeland" or "people dispersed by whatever cause to more than one location", or "people settled far from their ancestral homelands".The word has come to refer to historical mass-dispersions of...
," a counter-Zionist
Zionism
Zionism is a Jewish political movement that, in its broadest sense, has supported the self-determination of the Jewish people in a sovereign Jewish national homeland. Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Zionist movement continues primarily to advocate on behalf of the Jewish state...
ideology advocating the return of Israeli Jews to their European nations of exile. The ensuing struggle between this doppelgänger-like
Doppelgänger
In fiction and folklore, a doppelgänger is a paranormal double of a living person, typically representing evil or misfortune...
stranger and "Roth," played against the backdrop of the Demjanjuk trial and the First Intifada
First Intifada
The First Intifada was a Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories. The uprising began in the Jabalia refugee camp and quickly spread throughout Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem....
, constitutes the book's primary storyline.
Connections
A major concern of Roth's fiction since the 1970s has been the relationship between a novelist's life and work. Though this topic is thoroughly explored in Roth's series of ZuckermanNathan Zuckerman
Nathan Zuckerman is a fictional character who appears as the narrator or protagonist of many of Philip Roth's works of fiction.-Character:...
novels, Operation Shylock even more radically attacks the distinction between art and life by making a fairly mimetic version of the author the protagonist of an obviously invented (though plausible) story.
Despite this effort, separating the real from the fictional in Operation Shylock is not wholly impossible. Specifically:
- several minor characters from the novel are actual people including John DemjanjukJohn DemjanjukJohn Demjanjuk is a retired Ukrainian-American auto worker who gained notoriety after being accused numerous times of Holocaust-related war crimes....
, Claire BloomClaire BloomClaire Bloom is an English film and stage actress.-Early life:Bloom was born in the North London suburb of Finchley, the daughter of Elizabeth and Edward Max Blume, who worked in sales...
, Ted SolotaroffTed SolotaroffTheodore "Ted" Solotaroff was an American writer, editor and literary critic.-Biography:Born into a working-class Jewish family in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Ted Solotaroff attended the University of Michigan, graduating in 1952, and did graduate work at the University of Chicago, where he became...
, and Israeli writer and Roth friend Aharon AppelfeldAharon Appelfeld-Biography:Appelfeld was born in the village of Zhadova near Czernowitz, Romania, now Ukraine. In 1941, when he was eight years old, the Romanian army invaded his hometown and his mother was murdered. Appelfeld was deported with his father to a concentration camp in Ukraine. He escaped and hid for...
, - the nervous breakdownNervous breakdownMental breakdown is a non-medical term used to describe an acute, time-limited phase of a specific disorder that presents primarily with features of depression or anxiety.-Definition:...
Roth suffered following a difficult knee operation—described in the prologue—actually occurred (cf. Claire Bloom'sClaire BloomClaire Bloom is an English film and stage actress.-Early life:Bloom was born in the North London suburb of Finchley, the daughter of Elizabeth and Edward Max Blume, who worked in sales...
1996 Leaving a Doll's House: A MemoirLeaving a Doll's House: A MemoirLeaving a Doll's House: A Memoir is an autobiography written by British actress Claire Bloom and published in 1996 by Virago Press. The book currently holds a 3-star rating on Amazon, with reviewers praising it for its honest disclosure yet also finding fault in what some viewed as excessive...
).
Tour and "Confession"
Roth mounted an extensive book tour to support the "Confession." In March of 1993, he maintained the veracity of his novel to The New York TimesThe New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
Esther B. Fein: "'Operation Shylock,' Roth insists with a post-modern straight face, is a 'confession,' not a novel, and he means for us to take this every bit as seriously as the contents labels demanded by the strictures of the Food and Drug Administration. 'The book is true,' Roth said the other day. 'As you know, at the end of the book a Mossad
Mossad
The Mossad , short for HaMossad leModi'in uleTafkidim Meyuchadim , is the national intelligence agency of Israel....
operative made me realize it was in my interest to say this book was fiction. And I became quite convinced that it was in my interest to do that. So I added the note to the reader as I was asked to do. I'm just a good Mossadnik.'"
Reception
Roth's long-time professional acquaintance John UpdikeJohn Updike
John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic....
gave the novel a famously caustic review in The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
. Updike found the book "an orgy of argumentation...this hard-pressed reviewer was reminded not only of Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60...
but of Hamlet, which also has too many characters, numerous long speeches, and a vacillating, maddening hero who in the end shows the right stuff." Updike closed with the admonition, "It should be read by anyone who cares about (1) Israel and its reprecussions, (2) the development of the postmodern, deconstruction-mInded novel, (3) Philip Roth." In The New York Times Book Review
The New York Times Book Review
The New York Times Book Review is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to The New York Times in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely read book review publications in the industry. The offices are located near Times Square in New York...
, novelist and poet D.M. Thomas called the novel "an impassioned quarrel...Despite the seriousness of its theme, the book carries the feeling of creative joy. One feels that Roth feels that he's let rip."
The novel appears to have grown in stature since publication. In 2006, when New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus
Sam Tanenhaus
Sam Tanenhaus is an American historian, biographer, and journalist.-Biography:Tanenhaus received his B.A. in English from Grinnell College in 1977 and a M.A. in English Literature from Yale University in 1978. He is currently the editor of The New York Times Book Review and Week in Review...
mailed a short letter to "a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors," asking that they indentify the best work of American fiction published in the preceding quarter-century, several respondents named Operation Shylock. (The eventual winner was Toni Morrison's
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison is a Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, editor, and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved...
1987 Beloved
Beloved (novel)
Beloved is a novel by the American writer Toni Morrison, published in 1987. Set in 1873 just after the American Civil War , it is based on the story of the African-American slave, Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in 1856 in Kentucky by fleeing to Ohio, a free state...
.) Reporting upon Roth's reception of the 2011 Man Booker International Prize
Man Booker International Prize
The Man Booker International Prize is a biennial international literary award given to a living author of any nationality for a body of work published in English or generally available in English translation....
, critic Jonathan Derbyshire of the New Statesman
New Statesman
New Statesman is a British centre-left political and cultural magazine published weekly in London. Founded in 1913, and connected with leading members of the Fabian Society, the magazine reached a circulation peak in the late 1960s....
wrote, "The judging panel make the inevitable reference in their summing-up to Roth's extraordinary fecundity over the past 15 years or so, at a stage in his life when 'most novelists are in decline'. The most notable fruits of Roth's Indian summer, 1995's 'Sabbath's Theater
Sabbath's Theater
Sabbath's Theater is a novel by Philip Roth about the exploits of 64-year-old Mickey Sabbath. It received the National Book Award for fiction in 1995.-Summary and themes:Mickey Sabbath Sabbath's Theater (1995, ISBN 0-679-77259-6) is a novel by Philip Roth about the exploits of 64-year-old Mickey...
' and 'American Pastoral
American Pastoral
American Pastoral is a Philip Roth novel concerning Seymour "Swede" Levov, a Jewish-American businessman and former high school athlete from Newark, New Jersey. Levov's happy and conventional upper middle class life is ruined by the domestic social and political turmoil of the 1960s, which in the...
', published two years later, are certainly among his most luminous achievements. But two slightly earlier novels stand out for me, both of them hectically metafictional works partly set in Israel: 'The Counterlife
The Counterlife
The Counterlife is a novel by the American author Philip Roth. It is the fourth full novel to feature the fictional novelist Nathan Zuckerman. When The Counterlife was published, Zuckerman had most recently appeared in a novella called The Prague Orgy, the epilogue to the omnibus volume Zuckerman...
' (1986) and 'Operation Shylock.'"
Awards
Operation Shylock received the 1993 PEN/Faulkner Award for best novel. Roth would eventually become the first three-time winner of the award: for Shylock, 2001's The Human StainThe Human Stain
The Human Stain is a novel by Philip Roth. It is set in late 1990s rural New England. Its first person narrator is 65-year-old author Nathan Zuckerman, a character in previous Roth novels, including American Pastoral and I Married a Communist ; these two books form a loose trilogy with The Human...
, and 2007's Everyman
Everyman (novel)
Everyman is a novel by Philip Roth, published by Houghton Mifflin in May 2006. The audiobook version is narrated by George Guidall and published by Recorded Books in 2006. It won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2007. It is Roth's third novel to receive the prize.-Plot summary:The book...
.