Operation Shylock

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Operation Shylock cover

Operation Shylock: A Confession (ISBN 0-671-70376-5) is novelist Philip Roth's 19th book and was published in 1993. The novel follows narrator "Philip Roth" on a journey to Israel. There he attends the trial of accused war criminal John Demjanjuk, while at the same time seeking out the impersonator who has appropriated his identity and celebrity in order to spread "Diasporism," a counter-Zionist ideology advocating the return of Israeli Jews to their countries of origin. 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 main story.

[edit] Connections

A major concern of Roth's fiction since the 1970s has been the relationship between a writer'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 life and art by making a fairly mimetic version of the author the protagonist of an obviously invented (though plausible) story.

Yet 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 Demjanjuk, and Israeli writer and Roth friend Aharon Appelfeld,
the nervous breakdown Roth suffered following a difficult knee operation (described in the prologue) actually occurred (cf. Claire Bloom's Leaving a Doll's House),
the George Ziad character is a caricature of literature professor and Palestinian activist Edward Said.