Operation Shylock

only be cured by another anti-Semite, while what she is thinking is that she does not want her Jew to absolve another anti-Semite of her anti-Semitism but craves that loving forgiveness for herself alone. Isn’t one anti-Semitic woman enough? Must he have all the anti-Semitic women in the world begging his Jewish forgiveness, confessing to their Gentile rottenness, admitting to him that he is superior and they are slime? Tell me, girls, your dirty goy secrets. It’s this that turns the Jew on! But the next evening, from the nurses’ station where they play all the wonderful rock ’n’ roll, she brings to him not just one anti-Semitic woman besides herself but two. The room is dark but for the night lamp shining at the side of the sickbed where he lies gaunt, silent, greenishly pale, so miserable he is not even sure any longer whether he is conscious or comatose, whether the three nurses are seated in a row at the foot of his bed saying what he thinks he hears them saying or it is all a deathbed delirium and the three are tending him in the final awful moments of his life. ‘I am an anti-Semite like Wanda Jane,’ whispers one of the weeping nurses. ‘I need to discuss my anger with Jews. …’”

Here I found myself laughing as uproariously as I had when I’d left Jinx’s savior and my impostor in the hotel dining room the day before, and, for the moment, I could go no further.

“What’s so hilarious?” asked Aharon, smiling at my laughter. “His mischief or yours? That he pretends to be you or that you now pretend to be him?”

“I don’t know. I suppose what’s most hilarious is my distress. Define ‘mischief,’ please.”

“To a mischief-maker like you? Mischief is how some Jews get involved in living.”

“Here,” I said, and, laughing still, laughing with the foolish, uncontrollable laughter of a child who no longer can remember what it was that started him off, I handed him a copy of “The Ten Tenets of A-S.A.” “This is what she left with me.”

“So,” said Aharon, as he held between two fingers the document whose margins were filled with my scrawl, “you are his editor, too.”

“Aharon, who is this man?” I asked, and waited and waited for the laughter to subside. “What is he?” I went on when I could speak again. “He gives off none of the aura of a real person, none of the coherence of a real person. Or even the incoherence of a real person. Oh, it’s all plenty incoherent, but incoherent in some wholly artificial way: he emanates the aura of something absolutely spurious, almost the way that Nixon did. He didn’t even strike me as Jewish — that seemed as false as everything else and that’s supposed to be at the heart of it all. It isn’t just that what he calls by my name has no connection to me; it doesn’t seem to have any to him, either. A mismade artifact. No, even that puts it too positively.”

“A vacuum,” said Aharon. “A vacuum into which is drawn your own gift for deceit.”

“Don’t exaggerate. More like a vacuum cleaner into which is sucked my dust.”

“He has less talent for impersonating you than you have — maybe that’s the irritation. Substitute selves? Alter egos? The writer’s medium. It’s all too shallow and too porous for you, without the proper weight and substance. Is this the double that is to be my own? An aesthetic outrage. The great wonders performed on the golem by Rabbi Liva of Prague you are now going to perform on him. Why? Because you have a better conception of him than he does. Rabbi Liva started with clay; you begin with sentences. It’s perfect,” said Aharon, with amusement, and all the while reading my marginal commentary on the Ten Tenets. “You are going to rewrite him.”

What I had noted in the margins was this: “Anti-Semites come from all walks of life. This is too complicated for them. 1. Each tenet must not convey more than one idea. First tenet shouldn’t have both hatred and prejudice. Powerless to control is a redundancy — powerless over or can’t control. 2. No logic to progression. Should unfold from general to specific, from acceptance to action, from diagnosis to program of recovery to joy of living TOLERANT. 3. Avoid fancy words. Sounding like a highbrow. Drop negativism, endangers, intensive, immunity. Anything bookish bad for your purpose (generally true throughout life).” And on the reverse side of the sheet, which Aharon had now turned over and begun to read, I’d tried recasting the first few A- S.A. tenets in a simpler style, so that A-S.A. members (should there be any such!) could actually utilize them. I’d taken my inspiration from something Jinx had said to me — “We don’t care why we have it, we are here to admit that we have it and help each other get rid of it.” Jinx has got the tone, I thought: blunt and monosyllabic. Anti- Semites come from all walks of life.

1. We admit [I’d written] that we are haters and that hatred has ruined our lives.

2. We recognize that by choosing Jews as the target for our hatred, we have become anti-Semites and that all our thoughts and actions have been affected by this prejudice.

3. Coming to understand that Jews are not the cause of our troubles but our own shortcomings are, we become ready to correct them.

4. We ask our fellow anti-Semites and the Spirit of Tolerance to help us overcome these defects.

5. We are willing to fully apologize for all the harm caused by our anti-Semitism.…

While Aharon was reading my revisions we were approached by a very slight, elderly cripple who seesawed toward us on two aluminum forearm crutches from the nearby table where he’d been eating. There was generally a contingent of the elderly eating their lunch in the clean, quiet cafe of the Ticho House, which was tucked away from the heavy Jaffa Street traffic behind a labyrinth of pinkish stone walls. The fare was simple and inexpensive and, afterward, you could take your coffee or tea on the terrace outside or on a bench beneath the tall trees in the garden. Aharon had thought it would be a tranquil place to hold our conversations undisturbed, without the distractions of the city intruding.

When the old man had made it to our table, he did not speak until he had cumbersomely uncrated his hundred meager pounds of limbs and torso onto the chair to the side of me and sat there waiting, it would seem, for a wildly fluttering heartbeat to decelerate, all the while, through the heavy lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses, determining the meaning of my face. He had that alarming boiled look of someone suffering from a skin disease, and the word to express the meaning of his face seemed to me to be “ordeal.” He wore a heavy cardigan sweater buttoned up beneath his plain blue suit and, under the sweater, a starched white shirt and bow tie, very neat and businesslike — how a decorous neighborhood tradesman might attire himself in an underheated appliance shop.

“Roth,” he said. “The author.”

“Yes.”

Here he removed his hat to reveal a microscopically honeycombed skull, a perfectly bald surface minutely furrowed and grooved like the shell of a hard-boiled egg whose dome has been fractured lightly by the back of a spoon. The man’s been dropped, I thought, and reassembled, a mosaic of smithereens, cemented, sutured, wired, bolted.…

“May I ask your name, sir?” I said. “This is Aharon Appelfeld, the Israeli author. You are?”

“Get out,” he said to Aharon. “Get out before it happens. Philip Roth is right. He is not afraid of the crazy Zionists. Listen to him. You have family? Children?”

“Three children,” Aharon replied.

“This is no place for Jewish children. Enough dead Jewish children. Take them while they’re alive and go.”

“Have you children?” Aharon asked him.

“I have no one. I came to New York after the camps. I gave to Israel. That was my child. I lived in Brooklyn on nothing. Work only, and ninety cents on the dollar to Israel. Then I retired. Sold my jewelry business. Came here. And every day I am living here I want to run away. I think of my Jews in Poland. The Jew in Poland had terrible enemies too. But because he had terrible enemies did not mean he could not keep his Jewish soul. But these are Jews in a Jewish country without a Jewish soul. This is the Bible all over again. God prepares a catastrophe for these Jews without souls. If ever there will be a new chapter in the Bible you will read how God sent a hundred million Arabs to destroy the people of Israel for their sins.”

“Yes? And was it for their sins,” Aharon asked, “that God sent Hitler?”

“God sent Hitler because God is crazy. A Jew knows God and how He operates. A Jew knows God and how, from the very first day He created man, He has been irritated with him from morning till night. That is what it means that the Jews are chosen. The goyim smile: God is merciful, God is loving, God is good. Jews don’t smile — they know God not from dreaming about Him in goyisch daydreams but from living all their lives with a God Who does not ever stop, not once, to think and reason and use His head with His loving