Операция «Шейлок»: Исповедь Филипа Рота

1993 novel by Philip Roth

Operation Shylock: A Confession is a 1993 novel by American novelist Philip Roth.

The novel follows narrator "Philip Roth" on a journey to Israel, where he attends the trial of accused war criminal John Demjanjuk and becomes involved in an intelligence mission—the "Operation Shylock" of the title. While in Israel, the narrator seeks out an impersonator who has appropriated his identity. This man has Roth's facial features, goes by the same name, and uses Roth's status as a celebrity author to spread "Diasporism", a counter Zionist ideology advocating the return, to Europe, of all formerly European Jews who have become Israeli. The ensuing struggle between this doppelgänger like stranger and "Roth", played against the backdrop of the Demjanjuk trial and the First Intifada, constitutes the book's primary storyline. Roth becomes romantically involved with Jinx Posseski, his doppelgänger's lover and partner in crime. This makes it harder for him to hold the line against the imposter, because he feels guilty. He also has several unsuccessful face to face confrontations with his double; each time, the other "Philip Roth" (whom Roth dubs "Moishe Pipik") gets the better of the original, genuine Roth by accusing him of taking his fame too lightly, and eschewing his responsibilities to people in the real world. Because the central proposition of "Diasporism" is highly amenable to the PLO, a former friend named George Ziad, who knew the real Philip Roth in college, attempts to put Roth in contact with the actual PLO. (Ziad thinks Roth is a Diasporist, thanks to Moishe Pipik.) Roth intends to refuse until he is contacted by agents of Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency. They urge him to accept Ziad's offer, so that he can become an undercover agent and gather intelligence for Israel. Roth apparently does so, but the end of the book reveals that Operation Shylock is (supposedly) missing an excised chapter where Roth describes the details and outcome of his Mossad mission. The book ends without resolving the questions the "lost" chapter raises, including whether Roth continues to support the Israeli cause, and whether or not it is important for Roth to tell his readers such details about his life. The revelation that Mossad has been watching Roth (largely through disguised agents) and trying to involve him in Israel's political intrigues leaves Roth looking rather hapless and myopic in terms of his ability to understand realpolitik and the way power functions in his present day (the year 1988).

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 Zuckerman 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. For example, several minor characters from the novel are actual people including John Demjanjuk, Claire Bloom, and Israeli writer and Roth friend Aharon Appelfeld. The post operative nervous breakdown mentioned in the prologue and in other books by or about Roth was drawn from Roth's real life experience of the temporary side effects of a post operative sedative (triazolam) which was later banned in several countries after discovery that the manufacturer had not published studies showing a high risk of short term psychiatric disturbance.