guards — a card bearing Demjanjuk’s name, signature, personal details, and a photograph — was a KGB forgery designed to discredit Ukrainian nationalists by marking one of them as this savage war criminal. They argued that during the period when Ivan the Terrible had been running the Treblinka gas chamber, Demjanjuk had been held as a German prisoner of war in a region nowhere near the Polish death camps. The defense’s Demjanjuk was a hardworking, churchgoing family man who had come to America with a young Ukrainian wife and a tiny child from a European DP camp in 1952 — a father of three grown American children, a skilled autoworker with Ford, a decent, law-abiding American citizen renowned among the Ukrainian Americans in his Cleveland suburb for his wonderful vegetable garden and the pierogi that he helped the ladies cook for the celebrations at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Church. His only crime was to be born a Ukrainian whose Christian name had formerly been Ivan and to have been about the same age and perhaps even to have resembled somewhat the Ukrainian Ivan whom these elderly Treblinka survivors had, of course, not seen in the flesh for over forty years. Early in the trial, Demjanjuk had himself pleaded to the court, “I am not that awful man to whom you refer. I am innocent.”
I learned all this from a thick file of xeroxed newspaper clippings about the Demjanjuk trial that I purchased at the office of
I was reading at a table in the garden courtyard of the American Colony Hotel. Ordinarily I stayed at Mishkenot Sha’ananim, the guest house for visiting academics and artists run by the mayor’s Jerusalem Foundation and located a couple of hundred yards down the road from the King David Hotel. Several months earlier I had reserved an apartment there for my January visit, but the day before leaving London I had canceled the reservation and made one instead at the American Colony, a hotel staffed by Arabs and situated at the other end of Jerusalem, virtually on the pre-1968 borderline between Jordanian Jerusalem and Israeli Jerusalem and only blocks away from where violence had sporadically broken out in the Arab Old City during the previous few weeks. I explained to Claire that I had changed reservations to be as far as I could get from the other Philip Roth should he happen, despite the newspaper retraction, to be hanging on in Jerusalem still registered at the King David under my name. My staying at an Arab hotel, I said, minimized the likelihood of our paths ever crossing, which was what she herself had cautioned me against foolishly facilitating. “And maximizes,” she replied, “the likelihood of getting stoned to death.” “Look, I’ll be all but incognito at the American Colony,” I answered, “and for now incognito is the smartest, least disruptive, most reasonable strategy.” “No, the smartest strategy is to tell Aharon to come to the guest room here and stay in London with you.” Since on the day I left for Israel she herself was to fly to Africa to begin to make a film in Kenya, I suggested to her, when we parted at Heathrow Airport, that she was about as likely to be eaten by a lion in the streets of Nairobi as I was to come to any harm in a first-class hotel at the edge of East Jerusalem. Gloomily she disagreed and departed.
After reading the clipping file right through to an article from just the week before about a request by defense counsel Yoram Sheftel to enter ten new documents in evidence at this late stage of the proceedings, I wondered if it was while at the Demjanjuk trial that the impostor had first got the idea to pretend to be me, emboldened by the identity issue at the heart of the case, or if he had deliberately selected the trial for his performance because of the opportunities for publicity provided by the extensive media coverage. It disgusted me that he should insinuate this crazy stunt into the midst of such a grim and tragic affair, and, for the first time, really, I found myself outraged in the way that somebody without my professional curiosity about shenanigans like this one probably would have been from the start — not merely because, for whatever his reasons, he had decided that our two destinies should become publicly entangled but because he had chosen to entangle them here.
At dinner that evening I thought repeatedly of asking Aharon to recommend a Jerusalem lawyer for me to consult with about my problem, but instead I was mostly silent while Aharon spoke about a recent guest of his, a Frenchwoman, a university professor, married and the mother of two children, who had been discovered as a newborn infant in a Paris churchyard only months before the Allies liberated the city in 1944. She had been raised by foster parents as a Catholic but a few years back had come to believe that, in fact, she had been a Jewish child abandoned at birth by Jewish parents hiding somewhere in Paris and placed by them in the churchyard so that she would not be thought Jewish or raised as a Jew. This idea had begun to develop in her during the Lebanon war, when everyone she knew, including her husband and her children, was condemning the Israelis as criminal murderers and she found herself, alone and embattled, arguing strenuously in their defense.
She knew Aharon only through his books but wrote him nonetheless a compelling and impassioned letter about her discovery. He answered sympathetically, and a few days later she turned up on his doorstep to ask him to help her find a rabbi to convert her. That evening she had dinner with Aharon and his wife, Judith, and explained to them how she had never in her life felt she belonged to France, even though she wrote and spoke the language flawlessly and in her appearance and her behavior seemed to everyone as French as French could be — she was a Jew and she belonged to the Jews, of this she was ardently convinced.
The next morning Aharon took her to a rabbi he knew to ask if the rabbi would supervise her conversion. He refused, as did three other rabbis they went together to see. And each gave much the same reason for saying no: because neither her husband nor her children were Jews, the rabbis were disinclined to divide the family along religious lines. “Suppose I
After her unsuccessful week in Jerusalem, desolated to have to return, still a Catholic, to her old life in France, she was at dinner at the Appelfelds’ house on the evening before her departure, when Aharon and Judith, who could no longer bear to see the woman suffering so, suddenly announced to her, “You are a Jew! We, the Appelfelds, declare you a Jew! There — we have converted you!”
As we sat in the restaurant laughing together at the antic audacity of this obliging deed, Aharon, a small, bespectacled compact man with a perfectly round face and a perfectly bald head, looked to me very much like a benign wizard, as adept in the mysteries of legerdemain as his namesake, the brother of Moses. “He’d have no trouble,” I later wrote in the preface to our interview, “passing for a magician who entertains children at birthday parties by pulling doves out of a hat — it’s easier to associate his gently affable and kindly appearance with that job than with the responsibility by which he seems inescapably propelled: responding, in a string of elusively portentous stories, to the disappearance from Europe … of just about all the continent’s Jews, his parents among them.” Aharon himself had managed to remain alive by escaping from the Transnistria concentration camp at the age of nine and living either in hiding, foraging alone in the woods, or working as a menial laborer for poor local peasants until the Russians liberated him three years later. Before being transported to the camp, he had been the pampered child of wealthy, highly assimilated Bukovina Jews, a little boy educated by tutors, raised by nannies, and fitted out always in the finest clothes.
“To be declared a Jew by Appelfeld,” I said, “that’s no small thing. You do have it in you to bestow this mantle on people. You even try it with me.”
“Not with you, Philip. You were a Jew par excellence years before I came along.”
“No, no, never so exclusively, totally, and incessantly as the Jew it pleases you to imagine me to be.”
“Yes, exclusively, totally, incessantly,
“Against such reasoning,” I said, “there is no defense.”
He laughed quietly. “Good.”
“And tell me, do
“What I believe is not what concerns me.”
“Then what
