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[1] ulla haselstein diasporic doubles: philip roth’s operation shylock I Roth’s signature as a writer is a blending of the realist novel with artistic self-portraiture, which defines reality as a stage for a playful mise-en-scène of the author’s personal preoccupations and obsessions. The identity of Roth’s characters is typically based on the legacy of the Jewish immigrant milieu into which they are born, and with whose coercive demands they are struggling , while at the same time recognizing that they are inextricably bound to it by kinship and a shared communal history. That this milieu has become part of a larger world of American mainstream culture which opened itself up to Jews in the aftermath of World War II has provided Roth with evernew ways of both contesting and reaffirming the Jewish tradition in America. In his early career, particularly after Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth drew fire from Jewish critics both in the U.S. and in Israel for promoting anti-Semitic stereotypes.1 Against such attacks, which were based on the notion that a beleaguered community needs to close ranks and defend itself against a hostile Gentile world, and the concomitant suggestion to exercise self-censorship in his portrayal of Jews, one of Roth’s most famous characters, the writer Nathan Zuckerman, argued for the authenticity of a postmodernist representation of the ambivalences and self-contradictions of life: The burden isn’t either/or, consciously choosing from possibilities equally dif- ficult and regrettable—it’s and/and/and/and/and as well. Life is and: the accidental and the immutable, the elusive and the graspable, the bizarre and the predictable, the actual and the potential, all the multiplying realities, entangled , overlapping, colliding, conjoined—plus the multiplying illusions!2 Over the years, Roth has used certain alter egos, such as Nathan Zuckerman or David Kepesh, again and again; the Zuckerman and Kepesh novels invite the reader to follow the protagonists’ lives and reflections as they reach midlife and old age, respectively, in sync with the author himself. As the author exposes himself in the text and at the same time withdraws be- [50] ulla haselstein hind a mask, he both invites and denies a reading of his books as confessions . In tune with psychoanalytic theories of creativity, the fictionality of autobiographical discourse and the confessional character of fiction are revealed as flip sides of each other. There is a chiasmic structure underlying Roth’s oeuvre (art is life/life is art) that is never resolved into an overriding unity: rather, with each book, new differences within both interlinked propositions are articulated. Roth critically reflected on his literary strategy of impersonation in a series of “Roth books.”3 In Operation Shylock he invoked the genre of autobiography without qualifications, and pledged to restrict himself to a factual account of his own personal experiences. But the first-person narrator invariably turns out to be yet another one of Roth’s impersonations, once again affirming the authorial obsessions that Roth’s readers suspect and are made to suspect as the formative energy of his texts.4 While in most of his other books Roth is concerned with an analysis of the American Jewish male in terms of politics, sexuality, and attitudes toward American society, in Operation Shylock Roth juxtaposes an autobiographical first-person narrator “Philip Roth” to various doppelgängers.5 The ensuing metafictional game does not only play itself out on Roth’s familiar territory of American Jewish identity and repressed sexuality , however, but also explores conflictual narratives of the political accountability and responsibility of a Jewish diasporic writer to Israel. On most standard accounts, autobiography allows for a definition of reality as a stage of the subject’s performances of him/herself, and requires that the representation of this stage conform to the factual events of the author’s public and private life. Shifting the perspective somewhat, Philippe Lejeune defined the genre of autobiography by arguing that the author’s name functions as both a textual and a referential marker and constitutes a contract between author and reader that gives the identity of author and textualized self quasi-legal force.6 In Operation Shylock, historical factuality is emphasized by the appearance of well-known public figures (such as the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld), the insertion of documents (such as an interview with Appelfeld conducted by Roth), the reporting of actual events (such as the...

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