Adjudicating Identity in Philip Roth's Operation Shylock

70 SHOFAR Winter 1998 Vol. 16, No.2 Adjudicating Identity in Philip Roth's Operation Shylock Amy Danielle Rabbino Amy Rabbino isa doctoral student in American literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her dissertation, "Courting the Past: Legal Trials and the Historical Imagination," is a study ofJewish interaction with the law. She lives in Santa Monica with her husband and new daughter. At least since the crucifixion, the Jewish relationship to legal trials has been both seminal and fraught. In his novel Operation Shylock: A Confession1 Philip Roth asserts that fiction structures our understanding of history, offering The Merchant ofVenice as a defmitive marker in the Jews' ambivalent relation to the law. Roth writes: "In the modem world, the Jew has been perpetually on trial; still today the Jew is on trial, in the person of the Israeli-and this modern trial of the Jew, this trial which never ends, begins with the trial of Shylock" (p. 274). By posing The Merchant of Venice as a bottom line, Roth illustrates the impact of fictional representation in the Real World. Roth himselfplays (seriously) with the legal boundaries between fiction and history, calling into question law's ability to determine those parameters. Significantly, no Israeli is on trial in Roth's novel, but instead the Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk. In Operation Shylock, Demjanjuk's trial is no less than a trial ofIsraeli law, authority, and legitimacy, not only by Palestinian and Americari political attack (both from the right and the left), but also by the epistemological instability which undergirds the law. Roth grapples with how to adjudicate historical crimes at their most dire in the face of the dissolution offoundational truths. While the epistemological quandary is not unique to either Jews or Israelis, Roth illustrates the dilemma where it is most acute and most inflammatory. It is also most personally urgent since he endures a profound identity crisis in Operation Shylock. What differentiates the obsessive self-consideration, characteristic of Roth's work generally and simply taken to a fevered pitch here, is its tension with the crisis over proving Demjanjuk's identity and with maintaining (reductively) Israel's "identity" as a just State peopled by victims rather than as an unjust oppressor. Roth, thereby, uses his private anxieties to illuminate our public ones. Framing these crises in the context oflegal trials enables Roth to bring his career-long scrutiny of American Jewish life to the institutions of a Jewish State. INew York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. Adjudicating Identity in Philip Roth's Operation Shylock 71 The legal trial is a frequent format for American Holocaust representation.2 This is not surprising, due to America's post-war role in the Nuremberg trials as well as a contemporary American cultural preoccupation with legal trials generally.3 The frequency with which the trial is used by American fiction writers to represent the Holocaust testifies to the desire for a stabilizing and mediating frame of reference to contemplate the unmasterable, traumatic, and incomprehensible past. The trial format entails an insistence on comprehension and knowability that may help to manage the trauma and also address the need to witness, document, and testify to the experience. Trials entail an expectation that the past can be reconstructed, examined, and objectively judged; causation, human desire, and motivation are recoverable and justiciable. This is particularly unfathomable yet necessary in understanding Nazi crimes. The trial thus serves as a paradigm for historical inquiry, reconstructing the facts through documentary evidence and narrative strategies, deeply invested in its ability to uncover the Truth, and with profound material consequences. It is also a model of inquiry into language and its referentiality in an institutional framework. The courtroom is the paradigmatic space of authority over narrative, having the ability to enforce its judgments. In practice, the influence ofpolitics and desire in law and history are well known and established.4 This does not, however, keep the rhetoric ofobjectivity from a place ofprimacy, nor does it prevent shock and dismay at overt displays ofpolitics, interest, and prejudice, or, most revealingly, aesthetics in either domain. Fiction about history stages a conflict of epistemologies. This is both why it is 2Additional examples include George Steiner's...