It was 1988 when Philip Roth appeared unannounced in Jerusalem to preach an extravagant idea: “diasporism”, a kind of reverse version of Zionism.
European Jews, the writer would have said, should return to the countries from which they came – Poland, Ukraine, Germany, among others – because, aware of the horrors that anti-Semitism had produced in the past, they would welcome them with open arms. The continuation of Israel as a Jewish nation surrounded by hostile Arabs would inevitably lead to a new Holocaust.
Some Israeli journalists paid attention to this nonsense. They believed they were listening to the most powerful voice in American literature. How not to interview the man who in 1969 scandalized the United States with The Portnoy Complex, the hilarious best-seller about a Jewish lawyer who recounts masturbatory exploits and erotic adventures to his psychoanalyst?
The interviewee, however, was in reality a lookalike of the famous writer – and a faker. The real Roth would take advantage of a visit to Jerusalem to confront this impostor.
What is said above is fiction. Roth’s reader knows that we are talking about Operation Shylock, one of the great novels that the writer bequeathed to us in more than 50 years of literary activity (in Brazil, his work is published by Companhia das Letras). When the book was released in 1993, the author, in a promotional move, declared that it was all true, but it is clear that we are facing an ingenious combination of real and imaginary facts.
Dead in 2018, at the age of 85, as a result of heart problems, Philip Roth deserves to be re-read. In fact, it needs to be reread today: Operation Shylock, the only one of his works whose action takes place in Israel, took on tones that are both sinister and ironic in light of recent events.
In part, the false Roth’s delusions appear to have been confirmed by the Hamas attack on October 7. The massacre of Israelis committed by the terrorist group was the closest anyone has come to a second Holocaust: 1400 dead, most of them Jews.
On the other hand, the illusion that anti-Semitism in Europe had been buried by the trauma of Nazism was refuted by the immediate reaction to Hamas’ barbaric action: a global wave of anti-Semitism, with crowds on the streets of London calling for the end of Israel, mobs of lynchers from Dagestan searching for Jews at the airport and synagogues vandalized around the world.
The shadow of anti-Semitism is present throughout Roth’s work. At the same time, he always believed in the United States as an imperfect but generally welcoming home for his culture.
Roth belonged to a generation of Jews who integrated themselves into American intellectual life in the turbulent years that range from McCarthyism and the Korean War to protests against the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal – a period that his literature portrayed in all its dilemmas and contradictions.
The son of an insurance agent and a housewife, Roth grew up in the Jewish neighborhoods of Newark, New Jersey, a city that features in much of his fiction. With his debut book, Goodbye Columbus, from 1959, he experienced consecration and controversy: he became the youngest author to receive the National Book Award, one of the most renowned literary awards in the United States; at the same time, he faced accusations of anti-Semitism because of his humorous portrayal of Jewish characters.
His fourth (and most commercially successful) book, The Pornoy Complex raised more wild accusations of anti-Semitism. Later, they would also try to brand Roth as a misogynist – moralistic and reductive – due to his preference for male heroes whose revolt against social constraints is expressed in an insatiable search for sex.
Opening the most brilliant phase of Roth’s work, Operation Shylock was followed in 1995 by the creative and sexual whirlwind that is The Sabbath Theater, considered by the author himself as his greatest achievement. Then came the so-called “American Trilogy” – American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Mark (2000).
Finally, in 2004, came The Plot Against America, a work that constructs an alternative past in which aviator Charles Lindbergh, a known anti-Semite, wins the 1940 presidential elections. The United States would thus have a Nazi sympathizer in the most critical years of the Second World War. War. The subtlety of the book is in showing how the Lindbergh government’s anti-Semitic policies are being implemented gradually and surreptitiously.
But The Human Mark is perhaps Roth’s work that most urgently needs to be revisited. It is the story of Coleman Silk, a university professor who falls into disgrace for using a forbidden word in the classroom: he asks if certain students who were always absent were spooks, which in Portuguese means ghost or haunting, but which can also be a racist insult.
This is just the starting point of a story that, published 23 years ago, prefigures the censorship surveillance that today governs the left in its identity aspect. Authors such as political scientist Yascha Mounk and historian Simon Sebag Montefiore say that this ideological line is at the basis of the shameful demonstrations of support for Hamas seen at Harvard, Berkeley and other prestigious American universities.
As identitarianism works with the watertight categories of “oppressed” and “oppressor”, argue Mounk and Montefiore, Hamas, a fundamentalist and reactionary movement, is seen as an emancipatory force in the fight against Israel’s “colonialism”.
An old-school progressive, Philip Roth would probably agree that a certain militancy that has always seen him as the voice of patriarchal oppression has serious anti-Semitic tendencies.
But we don’t need to speculate about what the Newark writer would think these days. His literature says it all.
Jerônimo Teixeira