Word: roth
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Roth the author (the guy who actually lives in Connecticut) spendidly puts together a farcical spy tale, a post-modern identity crisis and a reading of modern Jewish life. Operation Shylock humor never fails and the narrative bursts with irony. The insistance on plot veracity might seem heavy-handed by the end, but the twists never lack ingenuity. Nothing here sounds stupid or farfetched, even though it is unlikely that any of it happened...
Only the politics will keep some from enjoying the novel, but there are so many turns that it is impossible to pin down Roth the author's intentions and "blame" him for holding any particular view. Would some chastise the sympathetic portayal of a Palestinian Nationalist? Or rather, would some be upset by a sympathic portrait of a Mossad (the Israeli Secret Police) officer named (or not named) Smilesburger, who regrets the plight of Palestinians but defends Israel nonetheless...
Jumbled among these elements is the trial of John Demjanjuk, the retired Cleveland autoworker accused of being Ivan the Terrible, the notorious Nazi guard at Treblinka. Roth attends the trial in the beginning to find Pipik, but he gets so caught up in the idea of mistaken identity that he begins to go out of sheer interest. Roth jumbles in more characters--the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld (who actually exists); his cousin Apter, a slow-witted artist and Holocaust survivor (who doesn't): George Ziad, an old graduate school friend who is now a militant Palistinian living on the West...
...these characters work to finally push Roth to the brink--he signs on to work for the Mossad on a mission to find Jews who contribute to the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Posing as Pipik posing as Roth, Roth meets with Yasser Arafat in a chapter that was "removed" from the book for "Israeli security reasons...
...book ends with Roth and Smilesburger meeting in a Jewish deli on the West side of Manhattan. Over coffee and lox, the Mossad agent urges Roth to use his Jewish conscience to decide what part of this story to tell. Then he gives him a million dollars. And Roth is free to write his "true" story--or maybe...