Word: roth
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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BOOKS Philip Roth's Operation Shylock is a double delight...
...naturally, the central character and narrator of his new novel, Operation Shylock, appears under the name Philip Roth. And he is not the only one to do so. Another man in the book calls himself Philip Roth. This second Roth is in Jerusalem, where the first Roth plans to visit early in the novel. He is giving interviews and drumming up support for the movement he calls Diasporism: a plan, in the hope of averting a second, Arab-engineered Holocaust, to move all the Jews of European descent out of Israel and back to the countries of their ancestors...
...narrator, then, is real -- whatever that might mean in a work of fiction -- but is the other Philip Roth some sort of con man or scam artist or lunatic exploiting a reputation not his own? Or might it be the other way around? Even to frame such a question is to play and plunge helplessly into Roth's game...
...fictions about the fictions of the self-divided, having decoded them as cleverly as the next clever boy some four decades earlier in college. But this was no book I was studying or one I was writing . . ." Here a slight demurral seems appropriate: this is obviously a book that Roth is writing. His claim to the contrary is part of the trap he sets for literalist readers...
...Roth the author goes to Israel, as planned, to conduct an interview with the (real) author Aharon Appelfeld. (This exchange was actually published by the New York Times in February 1988.) He also drops in on the trial of John Ivan Demjanjuk, the Cleveland autoworker accused of being the infamous Ivan the Terrible at the Treblinka death camp . When he first catches sight of the man who either did or did not commit atrocious crimes, Roth muses, "So there he was. Or wasn...