Operation Shylock
First edition cover
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| Author | Philip Roth |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre |
Fiction Autobiographical fiction Spy fiction |
| Publisher | Simon & Schuster |
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Publication date
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1993 |
| Pages | 398 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 27034867 |
Operation Shylock: A Confession () is novelist Philip Roth's 19th book and was published in 1993.
The novel follows narrator "Philip Roth" on a journey to Israel, where he attends the trial of accused war criminal John Demjanjuk and becomes involved in an intelligence mission—the "Operation Shylock" of the title.
While in Israel, the narrator seeks out an impersonator who has appropriated his identity—sharing the same facial features and name as Philip Roth—and used this celebrity to spread "Diasporism," a counter-Zionist ideology advocating the return of Israeli Jews to their European nations of exile. The ensuing struggle between this doppelgänger-like stranger and "Roth," played against the backdrop of the Demjanjuk trial and the First Intifada, constitutes the book's primary storyline.
A major concern of Roth's fiction since the 1970s has been the relationship between a novelist's life and work. Though this topic is thoroughly explored in Roth's series of Zuckerman novels, Operation Shylock even more radically attacks the distinction between art and life by making a fairly mimetic version of the author the protagonist of an obviously invented (though plausible) story.
Despite this effort, separating the real from the fictional in Operation Shylock is not wholly impossible. For example, several minor characters from the novel are actual people including John Demjanjuk, Claire Bloom, and Israeli writer and Roth friend Aharon Appelfeld. The post-operative nervous breakdown mentioned in the prologue and in other books by or about Roth was drawn from Roth's real-life experience of the temporary side-effects of a post-operative sedative (triazolam) which was later banned in several countries after discovery that the manufacturer had not published studies showing a high risk of short term psychiatric disturbance.
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