Operation Shylock

‘Yes. She puts something in with it — makes soup.”

Here, I thought to say to her, here is a check for a million dollars. Feed your friend and her children with this. Endorse it, I thought, and give it to her. Whether she’s crazy or sane, whether there is or is not a friend, all of that is immaterial. She is in need, here is a check — give it to her and go. I am not responsible for this check!

“Philip! Philip Roth!”

My first impulse was not to turn around and acknowledge whoever thought he had recognized me but to rush away and get lost in the crowd — not again, I thought, not another million. But before I could move, the stranger was already there beside me, smiling broadly and reaching out for my hand, a smallish, boxy, middle-aged man, dark-complexioned, with a sizable dark mustache and a heavily creased face and an arresting shock of snowy white hair.

“Philip,” he said warmly even though I withheld my hand and cautiously backed off — “Philip!” He laughed. “You don’t even know me. I’m so fat and old and lined with my worries, you don’t even remember me! You’ve grown only a forehead — I’ve grown this ridiculous hair! It’s Zee, Philip. It’s George.”

“Zee!”

I threw my arms around him while the woman at the garbage pail, transfixed all at once by the two of us embracing, uttered something aloud, angrily said something in what was no longer English, and abruptly darted away without having scavenged anything for her friend — and without the million dollars either. Then, from some fifty feet away, she turned back and, pointing now from a safe distance, began to shout in a voice so loud that everywhere people looked to see what the problem was. Zee too looked — and listened. And laughed, though without much amusement, when he found out that the problem was him. “Another expert,” he explained, “on the mentality of the Arab. Their experts on our mentality are everywhere, in the university, in the military, on the street corner, in the market —”

“Zee” was for Ziad, George Ziad,° whom I hadn’t seen in more than thirty years, since the mid-fifties, when we’d lived for a year down the corridor from each other in a residence hall for divinity students at the University of Chicago, where I was getting my M.A. in English and George was a graduate student in the program called Religion and Art. Most of the twenty or so rooms in the Disciples Divinity House, a smallish neo-Gothic building diagonally across from the main university campus, were rented by students affiliated with the Disciples of Christ Church, but since there weren’t always enough of them to fill the place, outsiders like the two of us were allowed to rent there as well. The rooms on our floor were bright with sunlight and inexpensive, and, despite the usual prohibitions that obtained everywhere in university living quarters back then, it wasn’t impossible, if you had the courage for it, to slip a girl through your door late in the evening. Zee had had the courage and the strong need for it too. In his early twenties, he had been a very lithe, dapperly dressed young man, small but romantically handsome, and his credentials — a Harvard-educated Egyptian enrolled at Chicago to study Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard — made him irresistible to all those Chicago coeds avid for cross-cultural adventure.

“I live here,” George answered when I asked what he was doing in Israel. “In the Occupied Territories. I live in Ramallah.”

“And not in Cairo.”

“I don’t come from Cairo.”

“You don’t? But didn’t you?”

“We fled to Cairo. We came from here. I was born here. The house I grew up in is still exactly where it was. I was more stupid than usual today. I came to look at it. Then, still more stupidly, I came here — to observe the oppressor in his natural habitat.”

“I didn’t know any of this, did I? That you came from Jerusalem?”

“It was not something I talked about in 1955.1 wanted to forget all that. My father couldn’t forget, and so I would. Weeping and ranting all day long about everything he had lost to the Jews: his house, his practice, his patients, his books, his art, his garden, his almond trees — every day he screamed, he wept, he ranted, and I was a wonderful son, Philip. I couldn’t forgive him his despair for the almond trees. The trees particularly enraged me. When he had the stroke and died, I was relieved. I was in Chicago and I thought, ‘Now I won’t have to hear about the almond trees for the rest of my life. Now I can be who I am.’ And now the trees and the house and the garden are all I can think about. My father and his ranting are all I can think about. I think about his tears every day. And that, to my surprise, is who I am.”

“What do you do here, Zee?”

Smiling at me benignly, he answered, “Hate.”

I didn’t know what to reply and so said nothing.

“She had it right, the expert on my mentality. What she said is true. I am a stone-throwing Arab consumed by hate.”

Again I offered no reply.

His next words came slowly, tinged with a tone of sweet contempt.

“What do you expect me to throw at the occupier? Roses?”

“No, no,” he finally said when I continued to remain silent, “it’s the children who do it, not the old men. Don’t worry, Philip, I don’t throw anything. The occupier has nothing to fear from a civilized fellow like me. Last month they took a hundred boys, the occupiers. Held them for eighteen days. Took them to a camp near Nablus. Boys eleven, twelve, thirteen. They came back brain-damaged. Can’t hear. Lame. Very thin. No, not for me. I prefer to be fat. What do I do? I teach at a university when it is not shut down. I write for a newspaper when it is not shut down. They damage my brain in more subtle ways. I fight the occupier with words, as though words will ever stop them from stealing our land. I oppose our masters with ideas — that is my humiliation and shame. Clever thinking is the form my capitulation takes. Endless analyses of the situation — that is the grammar of my degradation. Alas, I am not a stone-throwing Arab — I am a word-throwing Arab, soft, sentimental, and ineffective, altogether like my father. I come to Jerusalem to stand and look at the house where I was a boy. I remember my father and how his life was destroyed. I look at the house and want to kill. Then I drive back to Ramallah to cry like him over all that is lost. And you — I know why you are here. I read it in the papers and I said to my wife, ‘He hasn’t changed.’ I read aloud to my son just two nights ago your story ‘The Conversion of the Jews.’ I said, ‘He wrote this when I knew him, he wrote this at the University of Chicago, he was twenty-one years old, and he hasn’t changed at all.’ I loved Portnoy’s Complaint; Philip. It was great, great! I assign it to my students at the university. ‘Here is a Jew,’ I tell them, ‘who has never been afraid to speak out about Jews. An independent Jew and he has suffered for it too:’ I try to convince them that there are Jews in the world who are not in any way like these Jews we have here. But to them the Israeli Jew is so evil they find it hard to believe. They look around and they think, What have they done? Name one single thing that Israeli society has done! And, Philip, my students are right — who are they? what have they done? The people are coarse and noisy and push you in the street. I’ve lived in Chicago, in New York, in Boston, I’ve lived in Paris, in London, and nowhere have I seen such people in the street. The arrogance! What have they created like you Jews out in the world? Absolutely nothing. Nothing but a state founded on force and the will to dominate. If you want to talk about culture, there is absolutely no comparison. Dismal painting and sculpture, no musical composition, and a very minor literature — that is what all their arrogance has produced. Compare this to American Jewish culture and it is pitiable, it is laughable. And yet they are not only arrogant about the Arab and his mentality, they are not only arrogant about the goyim and their mentality, they are arrogant about you and your mentality. These provincial nobodies look down on you. Can you imagine it? There is more Jewish spirit and Jewish laughter and Jewish intelligence on the Upper West Side of Manhattan than in this entire country — and as for Jewish conscience, as for a Jewish sense of justice, as for Jewish heart … there’s more Jewish heart at the knish counter at Zabar’s than in the whole of the Knesset! But look at you! You look great. Still so thin! You look like a Jewish baron, like a Rothschild from Paris.”

“Do I really? No, no, still an insurance man’s son from New Jersey.”

“How is your father? How is your mother? How is your brother?” he asked me, excitedly.

The metamorphosis that, physically, had all but effaced the boy I’d known at Chicago was nothing, I had come to realize, beside an alteration, or deformation, far more astonishing and grave. The gush, the agitation, the volubility, the frenzy barely beneath the surface of every word he babbled, the nerve-racking sense he communicated of someone aroused and decomposing all at the same time, of someone in a permanent state of