Operation Shylock

1 PIPIK APPEARS

I learned about the other Philip Roth in January 1988, a few days after the New Year, when my cousin Apter° telephoned me in New York to say that Israeli radio had reported that I was in Jerusalem attending the trial of John Demjanjuk, the man alleged to be Ivan the Terrible of Treblinka. Apter told me that the Demjanjuk trial was being broadcast, in its entirety, every day, on radio and TV. According to his landlady, I had momentarily appeared on the TV screen the day before, identified by the commentator as one of the courtroom spectators, and then this very morning he had himself heard the corroborating news item on the radio. Apter was calling to check on my whereabouts because he had understood from my last letter that I wasn’t to be in Jerusalem until the end of the month, when I planned to interview the novelist Aharon Appelfeld. He told his landlady that if I were in Jerusalem I would already have contacted him, which was indeed the case — during the four visits I had made while I was working up the Israel sections of The Counterlife, I’d routinely taken Apter to lunch a day or two after my arrival.

This cousin Apter — twice removed on my mother’s side — is an unborn adult, in 1988 a fifty-four-year-old who had evolved into manhood without evolving, an under-life-size, dollish-looking man with the terrifyingly blank little face of an aging juvenile actor. There is imprinted on Apter’s face absolutely nothing of the mayhem of Jewish life in the twentieth century, even though in 1943 his entire family had been consumed by the German mania for murdering Jews. He had been saved by a German officer who’d kidnapped him at the Polish transport site and sold him to a male brothel in Munich. This was a profitable sideline the officer had. Apter was nine. He remains chained to his childishness to this day, someone who still, in late middle age, cries as easily as he blushes and who can barely meet one’s level gaze with his own chronically imploring eyes, someone whose whole life lies in the hands of the past. For that reason, I didn’t believe any of what he said to me on the phone about another Philip Roth, who had showed up in Jerusalem without letting him know. His hunger is unappeasable for those who are not here.

But four days later I received a second call in New York about my presence in Jerusalem, this one from Aharon Appelfeld. Aharon had been a close friend since we’d met at a reception given for him by Israel’s London cultural attaché in the early eighties, when I was still living most of each year in London. The American publication of his newly translated novel, The Immortal Bartfuss, was to be the occasion for the conversation I’d arranged to conduct with him for The New York Times Book Review. Aharon phoned to tell me that at the Jerusalem café where he went to write every day, he’d picked up the previous weekend’s edition of The Jerusalem Post and, on the page-long listing of the coming week’s cultural events, under Sunday, come on a notice he thought I should know about. Had he seen it a few days earlier, Aharon said, he would have attended the event as my silent emissary.

I spent all that evening wondering what to do about Aharon’s confirmation of Apter’s news. Finally, having convinced myself during a largely sleepless night that some fluky series of errors had resulted in a mix-up of identities that it was in my best interest to disregard, I got out of bed early the next morning and, before I had even washed my face, telephoned suite 511 of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel. I asked the woman who answered — and who answered speaking American English — if a Mr. Roth was there. I heard her call out to someone, “Hon — you.” Then a man came on the line. I asked if this was Philip Roth. “It is,” he replied, “and who is this, please?”

The calls from Israel had reached me at the two-room Manhattan hotel suite where my wife and I had been living for nearly five months, as though aground on the dividing line between past and future. The impersonality of big-city hotel life was most uncongenial to the domestic instinct so strong in both of us, yet ill-equipped though we were to be displaced and to be living together in this uprooted, unfamiliar way, it was preferable for the time being to our returning to the Connecticut farmhouse where, during the previous spring and early summer, while Claire stood helplessly by, fearing the worst, I had barely made it through the most harrowing exigency of my life. Half a mile from the nearest neighbor’s dwelling and encompassed by woods and open fields at the end of a long dirt road, that large, secluded old house whose setting had for over fifteen years furnished just the isolation my concentration required had become the eerie backdrop for a bizarre emotional collapse; that cozy clapboard sanctuary, with its wide chestnut floorboards and worn easy chairs, a place where books were piled everywhere and a log fire burned high in the hearth most every night, had suddenly become a hideous asylum confining side by side one abominable lunatic and one bewildered keeper. A place I loved had come to fill me with dread, and I found myself reluctant to resume our residence there even after we’d mislaid these five months as hotel refugees and my familiar industrious personality had drifted back to take the reins and set me again to trotting reliably enough along the good old rut of my life. (Drifted back tentatively at the start, by no means convinced that things were as secure as they had seemed before; drifted back rather the way the work force standing out in the street drifts back into an office building that has been temporarily cleared because of a bomb scare.)

What had happened was this:

In the aftermath of minor knee surgery, my pain, instead of diminishing as the weeks passed, got worse and worse, far exceeding the prolonged discomfort that had prompted me to decide on surgery in the first place. When I went to see my young surgeon about the worsening condition, he merely said, “This happens sometimes,” and, claiming to have warned me beforehand that the operation might not work, dismissed me as his patient. I was left with only some pills to mitigate my astonishment and manage the pain. Such a surprising outcome from a brief outpatient procedure might have made anyone angry and despondent; what happened in my case was worse.

My mind began to disintegrate. The word DISINTEGRATION seemed itself to be the matter out of which my brain was constituted, and it began spontaneously coming apart. The fourteen letters, big, chunky, irregularly sized components of my brain, elaborately intertwined, tore jaggedly loose from one another, sometimes a fragment of a letter at a time, but usually in painfully unpronounceable nonsyllabic segments of two or three, their edges roughly serrated. This mental coming apart was as distinctly physical a reality as a tooth being pulled, and the agony of it was excruciating.

Hallucinations like these and worse stampeded through me day and night, a herd of wild animals I could do nothing to stop. I couldn’t stop anything, my will blotted out by the magnitude of the tiniest, most idiotic thought. Two, three, four times a day, without provocation or warning, I’d begin to cry. It didn’t matter if I was alone in my studio, turning the page of yet another book that I couldn’t read, or at dinner with Claire, looking hopelessly at the food she’d prepared that I couldn’t find any reason to eat — I cried. I cried before friends, before strangers; even sitting alone on the toilet I would dissolve, wring myself dry with tears, an outpouring of tears that left me feeling absolutely raw — shorn by tears of five decades of living, my inmost being lay revealed to everyone in all its sickly puniness.

I could not forget my shirtsleeves for two minutes at a time. I couldn’t seem to prevent myself from feverishly rolling up my shirtsleeves and then rolling them down just as feverishly and meticulously buttoning the cuff, only immediately to unbutton the cuff and begin the meaningless procedure once more, as though its meaning went, in fact, to the core of my existence. I couldn’t stop flinging open the windows and then, when my claustrophobic fit had given way to chills, banging them shut as though it were not I but someone else who had flung them all open. My pulse rate would shoot up to 120 beats a minute even while I sat, brain-dead, in front of the nightly TV news, a corpse but for a violently thumping heart that had taken to keeping time to a clock ticking twice as fast as any on earth. That was another manifestation of the panic that I could do nothing to control: panic sporadically throughout the day and then without letup, titanically, at night.

I dreaded the hours of darkness. Climbing the obstacle course of stairs to our bedroom one painful step at a time — bending the good leg, dragging the bad leg — I felt myself on the way to a torture session that this time I couldn’t survive. My only chance of getting through to daylight without having my mind come completely apart was to hook hold of a talismanic image out of my most innocent past and try to ride out the menace of the long night lashed to the mast of that recollection. One that I worked hysterically hard, in a kind of convulsion of yearning, to summon forth to save me was of my older brother guiding me along our street of rooming houses and summer cottages to the boardwalk and down the flight of wooden steps to the beach at the Jersey shore town where our family rented a room for a month each summer. Take me, Sandy, please. When I thought (oftentimes mistakenly) that Claire was asleep, I would chant this incantation aloud, four childish words that I had not uttered so passionately, if ever at all, since 1938, when I was five and my attentive, protective brother was ten.

I wouldn’t let Claire draw the shades at night, because I had to know the sun was rising the very second that sunrise began; but each morning, when the panes began to lighten in the east-facing windows just to the side of where I lay, whatever relief I felt from my terror of the night that had just ended was copiously displaced by my terror of the day about to begin. Night was interminable and unbearable, day was interminable and unbearable, and when I reached into my pillbox for the capsule that was supposed to carve a little hole where I could hide for a few hours from all the pain that was stalking me, I couldn’t believe (though I had no choice but to believe) that the fingers trembling in the pillbox were mine. “Where’s Philip?” I said hollowly to Claire while I stood gripping her hand at the edge of the pool. For summers on end I had swum regularly in this pool for thirty minutes at the end of each day; now I was fearful of even putting in a toe, overwhelmed by the pretty, summery surface sheen of those thousands of gallons of water in which I was sure to be sucked under for good. “Where is Philip Roth?” I asked aloud. “Where did he go?” I was not speaking histrionically. I asked because I wanted to know.

This and more like it lasted one hundred days and one hundred nights. If anyone had telephoned then to say that Philip Roth had been spotted at a war-crimes trial in Jerusalem or was advertised in the Jerusalem paper as lecturing at the King David Hotel on the only solution to the Jewish problem, I can’t imagine what I would have done. As thoroughly enveloped as I was in the disaster of self-abandonment, it might have furnished corroboratory evidence just unhinging enough to convince me to go ahead and commit suicide. Because I thought about killing myself all the time. Usually I thought of drowning: in the little pond across the road from the house … if I weren’t so horrified of the water snakes there nibbling at my corpse; in the picturesque big lake only a few miles away … if I weren’t so frightened of driving out there alone. When we came to New York that May for me to receive an honorary degree from Columbia, I opened the window of our fourteenth-floor hotel room after Claire had momentarily gone downstairs to the drugstore and, leaning as far out over the interior courtyard as I could while still holding tight to the sill, I told myself, “Do it. No snakes to stop you now.” But there was my father to stop me now; he was coming from New Jersey the next day to see me get my degree. Jokingly on the phone he’d taken to calling me “Doctor,” just as he’d done on the previous occasions when I was about to receive one of these things. I’d wait to jump until after he went home.

At Columbia, facing from the platform the several thousand people gathered festively together in the big sunny library plaza to watch the commencement exercises, I was convinced that I couldn’t make it through the afternoon-long ceremony without beginning either to scream aloud or to sob uncontrollably. I’ll never know how I got through that day or through the dinner welcoming the honorary-degree candidates the evening before without letting on to everybody who saw me that I was a man who was finished and about to prove it. Nor will I ever know what I might have gone ahead to do halfway out the hotel window that morning or even on the platform the next day, had I not been able to interpose between my denuded self and its clamorous longing for obliteration the devotion linking me to an eighty-six-year-old father whose life my death by suicide would smash to smithereens.

After the ceremony at Columbia, my father came back to the hotel with us for a cup of coffee. He’d surmised weeks before that something was critically wrong even though I insisted, when we saw each other or spoke on the phone, that it was only the persistence of the physical pain that was getting me down. “You look drained,” he said, “you look awful.” How I looked had made his own face go ashen — and he was as yet suffering from no fatal disease, as far as anyone knew. “Knee,” I replied. “Hurts.” And said no more. “This isn’t like you, Phil, you take everything in your stride.” I smiled. “I do?” “Here,” he said, “open it when you get home,” and he handed me a package that I could tell he had encased himself in its bulky brown-paper wrapping. He said, “To go with your new degree, Doctor.”

What he gave me was a framed five-by-seven portrait photo taken by a Metropolitan Life photographer some forty-five years earlier, on the occasion of my father’s Newark district’s winning one of the company’s coveted sales awards. There, as I could barely remember him now, was the striving, undeflectable insurance man out of my early grade school years, conventionally stolid-looking in the American style of the Depression era: neatly knotted conservative tie; double-breasted business suit; thinning hair closely cut; level, steady gaze; congenial, sober, restrained smile — the man that the boss wants on his team and that the customer can believe is a balanced person, a card-carrying member of the everyday world. “Trust me,” the face in the portrait proclaimed. “Work me. Promote me. You will not be let down.”

When I telephoned from Connecticut the next morning, planning to tell him all too truthfully how the gift of that old picture had buoyed me, my father suddenly heard his fifty-four-year-old son sobbing as he hadn’t sobbed since his infancy. I was astonished by how unalarmed his reaction was to what must have sounded like nothing short of a complete collapse. “Go ahead,” he said, as though he knew everything I’d been hiding from him and, just because he knew everything, had decided, seemingly out of the blue, to give me that photograph picturing him at his most steadfast and determined. “Let it all out,” he said very softly, “whatever it is, let it all come out.…”

I’m told that all the misery I’ve just described was caused by the sleeping pill that I was taking every night, the benzodiazepine triazolam marketed as Halcion, the pill that has lately begun to be charged with driving people crazy all over the globe. In Holland, distribution of Halcion had been prohibited entirely since 1979, two years after it was introduced there and eight years before it was prescribed for me; in France and Germany, doses of the size I was taking nightly had been removed from the pharmacies in the 1980s; and in Britain it was banned outright following a BBC television exposé aired in the fall of 1991. The revelation — which came as less than a revelation to someone like me — occurred in January 1992, with a long article in The New York Times whose opening paragraphs were featured prominently on the front page. “For two decades,” the piece began, “the drug company that makes Halcion, the world’s best-selling sleeping pill, concealed data from the Food and Drug Administration showing that it caused significant numbers of serious psychiatric side effects.…”

It was eighteen months after my breakdown that I first read a comprehensive indictment of Halcion — and a description of what the author called “Halcion madness” — in a popular American magazine. The article quoted from a letter in The Lancet, the British medical journal, in which a Dutch psychiatrist listed symptoms associated with Halcion that he had discovered in a study of psychiatric patients who had been prescribed the drug; the list read like a textbook summary of my catastrophe: “… severe malaise; depersonalization and derealization; paranoid reactions; acute and chronic anxiety; continuous fear of going insane; … patients often feel desperate and have to fight an almost irresistible impulse to commit suicide. I know of one patient who did commit suicide.”

It was only through a lucky break that instead of having eventually to be hospitalized myself — or perhaps even buried — I came to withdraw from Halcion and my symptoms began to subside and disappear. One weekend early in the summer of 1987, my friend Bernie Avishai drove down from Boston to visit me after having become alarmed by my suicidal maunderings over the phone. I was by then three months into the suffering and I told him, when we were alone together in my studio, that I had decided to commit myself to a mental institution. Holding me back, however, was my fear that once I went in I’d never come out. Somebody had to convince me otherwise — I wanted Bernie to. He interrupted to ask a question whose irrelevance irritated me terribly: “What are you on?” I reminded him that I didn’t take drugs and was “on” nothing, only some pills to help me sleep and to calm me down. Angered by his failure to grasp the severity of my situation, I confessed the shameful truth about myself as forthrightly as I could. “I’ve cracked up. I’ve broken down. Your friend here is mentally ill!” “Which pills?” he replied.

A few minutes later he had me on the phone to the Boston psychopharmacologist who just the previous year, I later learned, had saved Bernie from a Halcion-induced breakdown very much like mine. The doctor asked me first how I was feeling; when I told him, he, in turn, told me what I was taking to make me feel that way. I refused at first to accept that all this pain stemmed simply from a sleeping pill and insisted that he, like Bernie, was failing to understand the ghastliness of what I was going through. Eventually, with my permission, he telephoned my local doctor and, under their joint supervision, I began that night to come off the drug, a process that I wouldn’t care to repeat a second time and that I didn’t think I’d live through the first. “Sometimes,” the Dutch psychiatrist, Dr. C. van der Kroef, had written in The Lancet, “there are withdrawal symptoms, such as rapidly mounting panic and heavy sweating.” My withdrawal symptoms were unremitting for seventy-two hours.

Elsewhere, enumerating the cases of Halcion madness that he had observed in the Netherlands, Dr. van der Kroef remarked, “Without exception, the patients themselves described this period as hell.”

For the next four weeks, feelings of extreme vulnerability, though no longer quite disemboweling me, still chaperoned me everywhere, especially as I was virtually unable to sleep and so was bleary with exhaustion throughout the day and then, during the insomniac, Halcionless nights, weighed down by the leaden thought of how I had disgraced myself before Claire and my brother and those friends who had drawn close to us during my hundred miserable days. I was abashed, and a good thing it was, too, since mortification seemed to me as promising a sign as any of the return of the person I formerly had been, more concerned, for better or worse, with something as pedestrian as his self-respect than with carnivorous snakes needling through the mud floor of his pond.

But much of the time I didn’t believe it was Halcion that had done me in. Despite the speed with which I recovered my mental, then my emotional equilibrium and looked to be ordering daily life as competently as I ever had before, I privately remained half-convinced that, though the drug perhaps intensified my collapse, it was I who had made the worst happen, after having been derailed by nothing more cataclysmic than a botched knee operation and a siege of protracted physical pain; half-convinced that I owed my transformation — my deformation — not to any pharmaceutical agent but to something concealed, obscured, masked, suppressed, or maybe simply uncreated in me until I was fifty-four but as much me and mine as my prose style, my childhood, or my intestines; half-convinced that whatever else I might imagine myself to be, I was that too and, if the circumstances were trying enough, I could be again, a shamefully dependent, meaninglessly deviant, transparently pitiable, brazenly defective that, deranged as opposed to incisive, diabolical as opposed to reliable, without introspection, without serenity, without any of the ordinary boldness that makes life feel like such a great thing — a frenzied, maniacal, repulsive, anguished, odious, hallucinatory that whose existence is one long tremor.

And am I half-convinced still, five years later, after all that the psychiatrists, newspapers, and medical journals have disclosed about the mind-altering wallop lurking for many of us in Upjohn’s magic little sleeping pill? The simple, truthful answer is, “Why not? Wouldn’t you be, if you were me?”

As for the Philip Roth whom I had spoken with in suite 511 of the King David Hotel and who most certainly was not me — well, what exactly he was after I had no idea, for instead of answering when he’d asked my name, I’d immediately hung up. You shouldn’t have phoned in the first place, I thought. You have no reason to be interested and you mustn’t be rattled. That would be ridiculous. For all you know, it’s simply someone else who happens coincidentally to bear the same name. And if that’s not so, if there is an impostor in Jerusalem passing himself off as you, there’s still nothing that needs to be done. He’ll be found out by others without your intervening. He already has been — by Apter and Aharon. Enough people know you in Israel to make it impossible for him not to be exposed and apprehended. What harm can he do you? The harm can only be done by you, going off half-cocked and impulsively making phone calls like this one. The last thing for him to know is that his hoax is bugging you, because bugging you has to be at the heart of whatever he is ostensibly trying to do. Aloof and unconcerned, for now at least, is your only.

This is how rattled I was already. After all, when he’d so matter-of-factly announced to me who he was I had only to tell him who I was and to see what then transpired — it might have been eye-opening and could even have been fun. My prudence in hanging up seemed, moments afterward, to have been nothing but the expression of helpless panic, a jolting indication that, nearly seven months after coming off Halcion, I might not be detraumatized at all. “Well, this is Philip Roth, too, the one who was born in Newark and has written umpteen books. Which one are you?” I could so easily have undone him with that; instead it was he who undid me merely by answering the phone in my name.

I decided to say nothing about him to Claire when I arrived in London the following week. I didn’t want her to think that there was anything in the offing with the potential to seriously disconcert me, particularly since she, for one, didn’t yet seem convinced that I had recovered sufficient strength to ride out an emotional predicament at all complex or demanding … and what was more to the point, when I was suddenly less than a hundred percent sure myself. Once I’d arrived in London I didn’t even want to remember what Apter and Aharon had phoned New York to tell me. … Yes, a situation that I might well have lightheartedly treated as a source of entertainment only a year earlier, or as a provocation to be soundly dealt with, now required that I take certain small but deliberate precautionary measures to guard against my being thrown. I wasn’t happy to make that discovery, yet I didn’t know how better to keep this bizarre triviality from developing in my mind the way the bizarre had become so painfully magnified under the sway of the Halcion. I would do what I must to maintain a reasonable perspective.

During my second night in London, still sleeping poorly because of jet lag, I began to wonder, after having popped awake in the dark for the third or fourth time, if those calls from Jerusalem — as well as my call to Jerusalem — had not perhaps occurred in dreams. Earlier that day I would have sworn that I had taken both calls at my desk in the hotel while I was sitting there beginning to work up the set of questions, based on my rereading of his books, that I intended to ask Aharon in Jerusalem, and yet, contemplating the unlikely content of the calls, I managed to convince myself during the course of that long night that they could have been placed and received only while I was asleep, that these were dreams of the kind that everyone dreams nightly, in which characters are identifiable and ring true when they’re speaking, while what they’re saying rings absolutely false. And the origin of the dreams was, when I thought about it, all too pathetically manifest. The imposturing other whose inexplicable antics I had been warned about by Apter and Aharon and whose voice I’d heard with my own ears was a specter created out of my fear of mentally coming apart while abroad and on my own for the first time since recovering — a nightmare about the return of a usurping self altogether beyond my control. As for the messengers bearing the news of my Jerusalem counterself, they too couldn’t have been any more grossly emblematic of the dreaming’s immediate, personal ramifications, since not only did their acquaintance with the unforeseen grotesquely exceed my own, but each had undergone the most tremendous transformation even before the clay of his original being had had time to anneal into a solid, shatterproof identity. The much-praised transfigurations concocted by Franz Kafka pale beside the unthinkable metamorphoses perpetrated by the Third Reich on the childhoods of my cousin and of my friend, to enumerate only two.

So eager was I to establish as fact that a dream had merely overflowed its banks that I got up to phone Aharon before it was even dawn. It was already an hour later in Jerusalem and he was a very early riser, but even if I had to risk waking him up, I felt I couldn’t wait a minute longer to have him confirm that this business was all a mental aberration of mine and that no phone conversation had taken place between the two of us about another Philip Roth. Yet, once out of bed and on the way down to the kitchen to call him quietly from there, I recognized what a pipe dream it was to be telling myself that I had only been dreaming. I ought to be rushing to telephone not Aharon, I thought, but the Boston psychopharmacologist to ask if my uncertainty as to what was real meant that three months of being bombarded chemically by triazolam had left my brain cells permanently impaired. And the only reason to be phoning Aharon was to hear what new sightings he had to report. But why not bypass Aharon and inquire directly of the impostor himself what exactly he was out to achieve? By feigning “a reasonable perspective” I was only opening myself further to a dangerous renewal of delusion. If there was any place for me to be phoning at four fifty-five in the morning, it was suite 511 of the King David Hotel.

I thought very well of myself at breakfast for having made it back to bed at five without calling anyone; I felt settling over me that blissful sense of being in charge of one’s life, a man who once again hubristically imagines himself at the helm of himself. Everything else might be a delusion, but the reasonable perspective was not.

Then the phone rang. “Philip? More good news. You are in the morning’s paper.” It was Aharon calling me.

“Wonderful. Which paper this time?”

“A Hebrew paper this time. An article about your visit to Lech Walesa. In Gdansk. This is where you were before you came to attend the Demjanjuk trial.”

Had I been speaking to almost anyone else I might have been tempted to believe that I was being teased or toyed with. But however much pleasure Aharon may take in the ridiculous side of life, deliberately to perpetrate comic mischief, even of the most mildly addling variety, was simply incompatible with his ascetic, gravely gentle nature. He saw the joke, that was clear, but he wasn’t in on it any more than I was.

Across from me Claire was drinking her coffee and looking through the Guardian. We were finishing breakfast. I hadn’t been dreaming in New York and I wasn’t dreaming now.

Aharon’s voice is mild, very light and mild, modulated for the ears of the highly attuned, and his English is spoken precisely, each word lightly glazed with an accent as Old Worldish as it is Israeli. It is an appealing voice to listen to, alive with the dramatic cadences of the master storyteller and vibrant in its own distinctly quiet way — and I was listening very hard. “I’ll translate from your statement here,” he was telling me. “‘The reason for my visit to Walesa was to discuss with him the resettlement of Jews in Poland once Solidarity comes to power there, as it will.’”

“You’d better translate the whole thing. Start from scratch. What page is it on? How long is it?”

“Not long, not short. It’s on the back page, with the features. There’s a photograph.”

“Of?”

“You.”

“And is it me?” I asked.

“I would say so.”

“What’s the heading over the story?”

“‘Philip Roth Meets Solidarity Leader.’ In smaller letters, ‘“Poland Needs Jews,” Walesa Tells Author in Gdansk.’”

“‘Poland Needs Jews,’” I repeated. “My grandparents should only be alive to hear that one.”

“‘“Everyone speaks about Jews,” Walesa told Roth. “Spain was ruined by the expulsion of the Jews,” the Solidarity leader said during their two-hour meeting at the Gdansk shipyards, where Solidarity was born in 1980. “When people say to me, ‘What Jew would be crazy enough to come here?’ I explain to them that the long experience, over many hundreds of years, of Jews and Poles together cannot be summed up with the word ‘anti-Semitism.’ Let’s talk about a thousand years of glory rather than four years of war. The greatest explosion of Yiddish culture in history, every great intellectual movement of modern Jewish life,” said the Solidarity leader to Roth, “took place on Polish soil. Yiddish culture is no less Polish than Jewish. Poland without Jews is unthinkable. Poland needs Jews,” Walesa told the American-born Jewish author, “and Jews need Poland.” ’ Philip, I feel that I’m reading to you out of a story you wrote.”

“I wish you were.”

“‘Roth, the author of Portnoy’s Complaint and other controversial Jewish novels, calls himself an “ardent Diasporist.” He says that the ideology of Diasporism has replaced his writing. “The reason for my visit to Walesa was to discuss with him the resettlement of Jews in Poland once Solidarity comes to power there, as it will.” Right now, the author finds that his ideas on resettlement are received with more hostility in Israel than in Poland. He maintains that however virulent Polish anti-Semitism may once have been, “the Jew hatred that pervades Islam is far more entrenched and dangerous.” Roth continues, “The so-called normalization of the Jew was a tragic illusion from the start. But when this normalization is expected to flourish in the very heart of Islam, it is even worse than tragic — it is suicidal. Horrendous as Hitler was for us, he lasted a mere twelve years, and what is twelve years to the Jew? The time has come to return to the Europe that was for centuries, and remains to this day, the most authentic Jewish homeland there has ever been, the birthplace of rabbinic Judaism, Hasidic Judaism, Jewish secularism, socialism — on and on. The birthplace, of course, of Zionism too. But Zionism has outlived its historical function. The time has come to renew in the European Diaspora our preeminent spiritual and cultural role.” Roth, who is fearful of a second Jewish Holocaust in the Middle East, sees “Jewish resettlement” as the only means by which to assure Jewish survival and to achieve “a historical as well as a spiritual victory over Hitler and Auschwitz.” “I am not blind,” Roth says, “to the horrors. But I sit at the Demjanjuk trial, I look at this tormentor of Jews, this human embodiment of the criminal sadism unleashed by the Nazis on our people, and I ask myself, ‘Who and what is to prevail in Europe: the will of this subhuman murderer-brute or the civilization that gave to mankind Shalom Aleichem, Heinrich Heine, and Albert Einstein? Are we to be driven for all time from the continent that nourished the flourishing Jewish worlds of Warsaw, of Vilna, of Riga, of Prague, of Berlin, of Lvov, of Budapest, of Bucharest, of Salonica and Rome because of him?’ It is time,” concludes Roth, “to return to where we belong and to where we have every historical right to resume the great Jewish European destiny that the murderers like this Demjanjuk disrupted.”’”

That was the end of the article.

“What swell ideas I have,” I said. “Going to make lots of new pals for me in the Zionist homeland.”

“Anyone who reads this in the Zionist homeland,” said Aharon, “will only think, ‘Another crazy Jew.’”

“I’d much prefer then that in the hotel register he’d sign ‘Another crazy Jew’ and not ‘Philip Roth.’”

“‘Another crazy Jew’ might not be sufficiently crazy to satisfy his mishigas.”

When I saw that Claire was no longer reading her paper but listening to what I was saying, I told her, “It’s Aharon. There’s a madman in Israel using my name and going around pretending to be me.” Then to Aharon I said, “I’m telling Claire that there’s a madman in Israel pretending to be me.”

“Yes, and the madman undoubtedly believes that in New York and London and Connecticut there is a madman pretending to be him.”

“Unless he’s not at all mad and knows exactly what he’s doing.”

“Which is what?” asked Aharon.

“I didn’t say I know, I said he knows. So many people in Israel have met me, have seen me — how can this person present himself as Philip Roth to an Israeli journalist and get away with it so easily?”

“I think this is a very young woman who wrote the story — I believe this is a person in her twenties. That’s probably what’s behind it — her inexperience.”

“And the picture?”

“The picture they find in their files.”

“Look, I have to contact her paper before this gets picked up by the wire services.”

“And what can I do, Philip? Anything?”

“For the time being, no, nothing. I may want to talk to my lawyer before I even call the paper. I may want her to call the paper.” But looking at my watch I realized that it was much too early to phone New York. “Aharon, just hold tight until I have a chance to think it through and check out the legal side. I don’t even know what it is an impostor can be charged with. Invasion of privacy? Defamation of character? Reckless conduct? Is impersonation an actionable offense? What exactly has he appropriated that’s against the law and how do I stop him in a country where I’m not even a citizen? I’d actually be dealing with Israeli law, and I’m not yet in Israel. Look, I’ll call you back when I find something out.”

But once off the phone I immediately came up with an explanation not wholly disconnected from what I’d thought the night before in bed. Although the idea probably originated in Aharon’s remark that he felt that he was reading to me out of a story I’d written, it was nonetheless another ridiculously subjective attempt to convert into a mental event of the kind I was professionally all too familiar with what had once again been established as all too objectively real. It’s Zuckerman, I thought, whimsically, stupidly, escapistly, it’s Kepesh, it’s Tarnopol and Portnoy — it’s all of them in one, broken free of print and mockingly reconstituted as a single satirical facsimile of me. In other words, if it’s not Halcion and it’s no dream, then it’s got to be literature — as though there cannot be a life-without ten thousand times more unimaginable than the life-within.

“Well,” I said to Claire, “there’s somebody in Jerusalem attending the Ivan the Terrible trial who’s going around claiming to be me. Calls himself by my name. Gave an interview to an Israeli newspaper — that’s what Aharon was reading to me over the phone.”

“You found this out just now?” she asked.

“No. Aharon phoned me in New York last week. So did my cousin Apter. Apter’s landlady said she’d seen me on TV. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know what, if anything, it all amounted to.”

“You’re green, Philip. You’ve turned a frightening color.”

“Have I? I’m tired, that’s all. I was up on and off all night.”

“You’re not taking. …”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Don’t sound resentful. I just don’t want anything to happen to you. Because you have turned a terrible color — and you seem … swamped.”

“Do I? Did I? I didn’t think I did. And it’s you who have actually turned colors.”

“I’m worried, that’s why. You seem …”

“What? Seem what? What it seems to me I seem to be is someone who has just found out that somebody down in Jerusalem is giving newspaper interviews in his name. You heard what I said to Aharon. As soon as the business day begins in New York, I’m going to call Helene. I think now that the best thing is for her to telephone the paper and to get them to print a retraction tomorrow. It’s a start at stopping him. Once their retraction’s out, no other newspaper is going to go near him. That’s step number one.”

“What’s step number two?”

“I don’t know. Maybe step number two won’t be necessary. I don’t know what the law is. Do I slap an injunction on him? In Israel? Maybe what Helene does is to contact a lawyer down there. When I speak to her, I’ll find out.”

“Maybe step number two is not going there right now.”

“That’s ridiculous. Look, I’m not swamped. It’s not my plans that are going to change — it’s his.”

But by the afternoon I was back again to thinking that it was far more reasonable, sensible, and even, in the long run, more satisfyingly ruthless to do nothing for now. Telling Claire anything, given her continuing apprehension about my well-being, was, of course, a mistake and, had she not been sitting across from me at the breakfast table when Aharon phoned in his latest report, one that I would never have made. And an even bigger mistake, I thought, would be to set lawyers loose now, on two continents no less, who might not effect an outcome any less damaging than I could — if, that is, I could manage to remain something more helpful than volatilely irritated until, eventually, this impostor played out his disaster, all alone, as he must. A retraction was not likely to undo whatever damage had already been done by the newspaper’s original error. The ideas espoused so forcefully by the Philip Roth in that story were mine now and would likely endure as mine even in the recollection of those who’d read the retraction tomorrow. Nonetheless, this was not, I sternly reminded myself, the worst upheaval of my life, and I was not going to permit myself to behave as though it were. Instead of rushing to mobilize an army of legal defenders, better just to sit comfortably back on the sidelines and watch while he manufactures for the Israeli press and public a version of me so absolutely not-me that it will require nothing, neither judicial intervention nor newspaper retractions, to clear everyone’s mind of confusion and expose him as whatever he is.

After all, despite the temptation to chalk him up to Halcion’s lingering hold on me, he was not my but his hallucination, and by January 1988 I’d come to understand that he had more to fear from that than I did. Up against reality I was not quite so outclassed as I’d been up against that sleeping pill; up against reality I had at my disposal the strongest weapon in anyone’s arsenal: my own reality. It wasn’t I who was in danger of being displaced by him but he who had without question to be effaced by me — exposed, effaced, and extinguished. It was just a matter of time. Panic characteristically urges, in its quivering, raving, overexcitable way, “Do something before he goes too far!” and is loudly seconded by Powerless Fear. Meanwhile, poised and balanced, Reason, the exalted voice of Reason, counsels, “You have everything on your side, he has nothing on his. Try eradicating him overnight, before he has fully revealed exactly what he’s intent on doing, and he’ll only elude you to pop up elsewhere and start this stuff all over again. Let him go too far. There is no more cunning way to shut him down. He can only be defeated.”

Needless to say, had I told Claire that evening that I’d changed my mind since morning and, instead of racing into battle armed with lawyers, proposed now to let him inflate the hoax until it blew up in his face, she would have replied that to do that would only invite trouble potentially more threatening to my newly reconstituted stability than the little that had so far resulted from what was still only a minor, if outlandish, nuisance. She would argue with even more concern than she’d displayed at breakfast — because three months of helplessly watching my collapse up close had deeply scarred her faith in me and hadn’t done much for her own stability either — that I was nowhere ready for a test as unlikely and puzzling as this one, while I, experiencing all the satisfaction that’s bestowed by a strategy of restraint, exhilarated by the sense of personal freedom that issues from refusing to respond to an emergency other than with a realistic appraisal and levelheaded self-control, was convinced of just the opposite. I felt absolutely rapturous over the decision to take on this impostor by myself, for on my own and by myself was how I’d always preferred to encounter just about everything. My God, I thought, this is me again, finally the much-pined-for natural upsurge of my obstinate, energetic, independent self, zeroed back in on life and brimming with my old resolve, vying once again with an adversary a little less chimerical than sickly, crippling unreality. He was just what the psychopharmacologist ordered! All right, bud, one on one, let’s fight! You can only be defeated.

At dinner that evening, before Claire had a chance to ask me anything, I lied and told her that I had spoken with my lawyer, that from New York she had contacted the Israeli paper, and that a retraction was to be printed there the next day.

“I still don’t like it,” she replied.

“But what more can we do? What more need be done?”

“I don’t like the idea of you there alone while this person is on the loose. It’s not a good idea at all. Who knows what he is or who he is or what he’s actually up to? Suppose he’s crazy. You yourself called him a madman this morning. What if this madman is armed?”

“Whatever I may have called him, I happen to know nothing about him.”

“That’s my point.”

“And why should he be armed? You don’t need a pistol to impersonate me.”

“It’s Israel — everybody’s armed. Half the people in the street traipsing around carrying guns — I never saw so many guns in my life. Your going there, at a time like this, with everything erupting everywhere, is a terrible, terrible mistake.”

She was referring to the riots that had begun in Gaza and the West Bank the month before and that I’d been following in New York on the nightly news. A curfew was in effect in East Jerusalem and tourists had been warned away particularly from the Old City because of the stone throwing there and the possibility of violent clashes escalating between the army and the Arab residents. The media had taken to describing these riots, which had become a more or less daily occurrence in the Occupied Territories, as a Palestinian uprising.

“Why can’t you contact the Israeli police?” she asked.

“I think the Israeli police may find themselves facing problems more pressing than mine right now. What would I tell them? Arrest him? Deport him? On what grounds? As far as I know, he hasn’t passed a phony check in my name, he hasn’t been paid for any services in my name —”

“But he must have entered Israel with a phony passport, with papers in your name. That’s illegal.”

“But do we know this? We don’t. It’s illegal but not very likely. I suspect that all he’s done in my name is to shoot his mouth off.”

“But there must be legal safeguards. A person cannot simply run off to a foreign country and go around pretending to be someone he is not.”

“Happens probably more often than you think. How about some realism? Darling, how about your taking a reasonable perspective?”

“I don’t want anything to happen to you. That’s my reasonable perspective.”

“What ‘happened’ to me happened to me many months ago now.”

“Are you really up to this? I have to ask you, Philip.”

“There’s nothing for me to be ‘up to.’ Did anything like what happened to me ever happen to me before that drug? Has anything like it happened to me since the drug? Tomorrow they’re printing a retraction. They’re faxing Helene a copy. That’s enough for now.”

“Well, I don’t understand this calm of yours — or hers, frankly.”

“Now the calm’s upsetting. This morning it was my chagrin.”

“Yes, well — I don’t believe it.”

“Well, there’s nothing I can do about that.”

“Promise me you won’t do anything ridiculous.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know. Trying to find this person. Trying to fight with this person. You have no idea whom you might be dealing with. You must not try to look for him and solve this stupid thing yourself. At least promise that you won’t do that.”

I laughed at the very idea. “My guess,” I said, lying once again, “is that by the time I get to Jerusalem, he won’t be anywhere to be found.”

“You won’t do it.”

“I won’t have to. Look, see it this way, will you? I have everything on my side, he has nothing on his, absolutely nothing.”

“But you’re wrong. You know what he has on his side? It’s clear from every word you speak. He has you.”

After our dinner that evening I told Claire that I was going off to my study at the top of the house to sit down again with Aharon’s novels to continue making my notes for the Jerusalem conversation. But no more than five minutes had passed after I’d settled at the desk, when I heard the television set playing below and I picked up the phone and called the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and asked to be put through to 511. To disguise my voice I used a French accent, not the bedroom accent, not the farcical accent, not that French accent descended from Charles Boyer through Danny Kaye to the TV ads for table wines and traveler’s checks, but the accent of highly articulate and cosmopolitan Frenchmen like my friend the writer Philippe Sollers, no “zis,” no “zat,” all initial h’s duly aspirated — fluent English simply tinged with the natural inflections and marked by the natural cadences of an intelligent foreigner. It’s an imitation I don’t do badly — once, on the phone, I fooled even mischievous Sollers — and the one I’d decided on even while Claire and I were arguing at the dinner table about the wisdom of my trip, even while, I must admit, the exalted voice of Reason had been counseling me, earlier that day, that doing nothing was the surest way to do him in. By nine o’clock that night, curiosity had all but consumed me, and curiosity is not a very rational whim.

“Hello, Mr. Roth? Mr. Philip Roth?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Is this really the author I’m speaking to?”

“It is.”

“The author of Portnoy et son complexe?”

“Yes, yes. Who is this, please?”

My heart was pounding as though I were out on my first big robbery with an accomplice no less brilliant than Jean Genet — this was not merely treacherous, this was interesting. To think that he was pretending at his end of the line to be me while I was pretending at my end not to be me gave me a terrific, unforeseen, Mardi Gras kind of kick, and probably it was this that accounted for the stupid error I immediately made. “I am Pierre Roget,” I said, and only in the instant after uttering a convenient nom de guerre that I’d plucked seemingly out of nowhere did I realize that its initial letters were the same as mine — and the same as his. Worse, it happened also to be the barely transmogrified name of the nineteenth-century word cataloger who is known to virtually everyone as the author of the famous thesaurus. I hadn’t realized that either — the author of the definitive book of synonyms!

“I am a French journalist based in Paris,” I said. “I have just read in the Israeli press about your meeting with Lech Walesa in Gdansk.”

Slip number two: Unless I knew Hebrew, how could I have read his interview in the Israeli press? What if he now began speaking to me in a language that I had learned just badly enough to manage to be bar mitzvahed at the age of thirteen and that I no longer understood at all?

Reason: “You are playing right into his plan. This is the very situation his criminality craves. Hang up.”

Claire: “Are you really all right? Are you really up to this? Don’t go.”

Pierre Roget: “If I read correctly, you are leading a movement to resettle Europe with Israeli Jews of European background. Beginning in Poland.”

“Correct,” he replied.

“And you continue at the same time to write your novels?”

“Writing novels while Jews are at a crossroads like this? My life now is focused entirely on the Jewish European resettlement movement. On Diasporism.”

Did he sound anything like me? I would have thought that my voice could far more easily pass for someone like Sollers speaking English than his could pass for mine. For one thing, he had much more Jersey in his speech than I’d ever had, though whether because it came naturally to him or because he mistakenly thought it would make the impersonation more convincing, I couldn’t figure out. But then this was a more resonant voice than mine as well, richer and more stentorian by far. Maybe that was how he thought somebody who had published sixteen books would talk on the phone to an interviewer, while the fact is that if I talked like that I might not have had to write sixteen books. But the impulse to tell him this, strong as it was, I restrained; I was having too good a time to think of stifling either one of us.

“You are a Jew,” I said, “who in the past has been criticized by Jewish groups for your ‘self-hatred’ and your ‘anti-Semitism.’ Would it be correct to assume —”

“Look,” he said, abruptly breaking in, “I am a Jew, period. I would not have gone to Poland to meet with Walesa if I were anything else. I would not be here visiting Israel and attending the Demjanjuk trial if I were anything else. Please, I will be glad to tell you all you wish to know about resettlement. Otherwise I haven’t time to waste on what has been said about me by stupid people.”

“But,” I persisted, “won’t stupid people say that because of this resettlement idea you are an enemy of Israel and its mission? Won’t this confirm —”

“I am Israel’s enemy,” he interrupted again, “if you wish to put it that sensationally, only because I am for the Jews and Israel is no longer in the Jewish interest. Israel has become the gravest threat to Jewish survival since the end of World War Two.”

“Was Israel ever in the Jewish interest, in your opinion?”

“Of course. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Israel was the Jewish hospital in which Jews could begin to recover from the devastation of that horror, from a dehumanization so terrible that it would not have been at all surprising had the Jewish spirit, had the Jews themselves, succumbed entirely to that legacy of rage, humiliation and grief. But that is not what happened. Our recovery actually came to pass. In less than a century. Miraculous, more than miraculous — yet the recovery of the Jews is by now a fact, and the time has come to return to our real life and our real home, to our ancestral Jewish Europe.”

“Real home?” I replied, unable now to imagine how I ever could have considered not placing this call. “Some real home.”

“I am not making promiscuous conversation,” he snapped back at me sharply. “The great mass of Jews have been in Europe since the Middle Ages. Virtually everything we identify culturally as Jewish has its origins in the life we led for centuries among European Christians. The Jews of Islam have their own, very different destiny. I am not proposing that Israeli Jews whose origins are in Islamic countries return to Europe, since for them this would constitute not a homecoming but a radical uprooting.”

“What do you do then with them? Ship them back for the Arabs to treat as befits their status as Jews?”

“No. For those Jews, Israel must continue to be their country. Once the European Jews and their families have been resettled and the population has been halved, then the state can be reduced to its 1948 borders, the army can be demobilized, and those Jews who have lived in an Islamic cultural matrix for centuries can continue to do so, independently, autonomously, but in peace and harmony with their Arab neighbors. For these people to remain in this region is simply as it should be, their rightful habitat, while for the European Jews, Israel has been an exile and no more, a sojourn, a temporary interlude in the European saga that it is time to resume.”

“Sir, what makes you think that the Jews would have any more success in Europe in the future than they had there in the past?”

“Do not confuse our long European history with the twelve years of Hitler’s reign. If Hitler had not existed, if his twelve years of terror were erased from our past, then it would seem to you no more unthinkable that Jews should also be Europeans than that they should also be Americans. There might even seem to you a much more necessary and profound connection between the Jew and Budapest, the Jew and Prague, than the one between the Jew and Cincinnati and the Jew and Dallas.”

Could it be, I asked myself while he pedantically continued on in this vein, that the history he’s most intent on erasing happens to be his own? Is he mentally so damaged that he truly believes that my history is his; is he some psychotic, some amnesiac, who isn’t pretending at all? If every word he speaks he means, if the only person pretending here is me. … But whether that made things better or worse I couldn’t begin to know. Nor, when next I found myself arguing, could I determine whether an outburst of sincerity from me made this conversation any more or less absurd, either.

“But Hitler did exist,” I heard Pierre Roget emotionally informing him. “Those twelve years cannot be expunged from history any more than they can be obliterated from memory, however mercifully forgetful one might prefer to be. The meaning of the destruction of European Jewry cannot be measured or interpreted by the brevity with which it was attained.”

“The meanings of the Holocaust,” he replied gravely, “are for us to determine, but one thing is sure — its meaning will be no less tragic than it is now if there is a second Holocaust and the offspring of the European Jews who evacuated Europe for a seemingly safer haven should meet collective annihilation in the Middle East. A second Holocaust is not going to occur on the continent of Europe, because it was the site of the first. But a second Holocaust could happen here all too easily, and, if the conflict between Arab and Jew escalates much longer, it will — it must. The destruction of Israel in a nuclear exchange is a possibility much less farfetched today than was the Holocaust itself fifty years ago.”

“The resettlement in Europe of more than a million Jews. The demobilization of the Israeli army. A return to the borders of 1948. It sounds to me,” I said, “that you are proposing the final solution of the Jewish problem for Yasir Arafat.”

“No. Arafat’s final solution is the same as Hitler’s: extermination. I am proposing the alternative to extermination, a solution not to Arafat’s Jewish problem but to ours, one comparable in scope and magnitude to the defunct solution called Zionism. But I do not wish to be misunderstood, in France or anywhere else in the world. I repeat: In the immediate postwar era, when for obvious reasons Europe was uninhabitable by Jews, Zionism was the single greatest force contributing to the recovery of Jewish hope and morale. But having succeeded in restoring the Jews to health, Zionism has tragically ruined its own health and must now accede to vigorous Diasporism.”

“Will you define Diasporism for my readers, please?” I asked, meanwhile thinking, The starchy rhetoric, the professorial presentation, the historical perspective, the passionate commitment, the grave undertones … What sort of hoax is this hoax?

“Diasporism seeks to promote the dispersion of the Jews in the West, particularly the resettlement of Israeli Jews of European background in the European countries where there were sizable Jewish populations before World War II. Diasporism plans to rebuild everything, not in an alien and menacing Middle East but in those very lands where everything once flourished, while, at the same time, it seeks to avert the catastrophe of a second Holocaust brought about by the exhaustion of Zionism as a political and ideological force. Zionism undertook to restore Jewish life and the Hebrew language to a place where neither had existed with any real vitality for nearly two millennia. Diasporism’s dream is more modest: a mere half-century is all that separates us from what Hitler destroyed. If Jewish resources could realize the seemingly fantastic goals of Zionism in even less than fifty years, now that Zionism is counterproductive and itself the foremost Jewish problem, I have no doubt that the resources of world Jewry can realize the goals of Diasporism in half, if not even one tenth, the time.”

“You speak about resettling Jews in Poland, Romania, Germany? In Slovakia, the Ukraine, Yugoslavia, the Baltic states? And you realize, do you,” I asked him, “how much hatred for Jews still exists in most of these countries?”

“Whatever hatred for Jews may be present in Europe — and I don’t minimize its persistence — there are ranged against this residual anti-Semitism powerful currents of enlightenment and morality that are sustained by the memory of the Holocaust, a horror that operates now as a bulwark against European anti-Semitism, however virulent. No such bulwark exists in Islam. Exterminating a Jewish nation would cause Islam to lose not a single night’s sleep, except for the great night of celebration. I think you would agree that a Jew is safer today walking aimlessly around Berlin than going unarmed into the streets of Ramallah.”

“What about the Jew walking around Tel Aviv?”

“In Damascus missiles armed with chemical warheads are aimed not at downtown Warsaw but directly at Dizengoff Street.”

“So what Diasporism comes down to is fearful Jews in flight, terrified Jews once again running away.”

“To flee an imminent cataclysm is ‘running away’ only from extinction. It is running toward life. Had thousands more of Germany’s fearful Jews fled in the 1930s —”

“Thousands more would have fled,” I said, “if there had been somewhere for them to flee to. You may recall that they were no more welcome elsewhere than they would be now if they were to turn up en masse at the Warsaw train station in flight from an Arab attack.”

“You know what will happen in Warsaw, at the railway station, when the first trainload of Jews returns? There will be crowds to welcome them. People will be jubilant. People will be in tears. They will be shouting, ‘Our Jews are back! Our Jews are back!’ The spectacle will be transmitted by television throughout the world. And what a historic day for Europe, for Jewry, for all mankind when the cattle cars that transported Jews to death camps are transformed by the Diasporist movement into decent, comfortable railway carriages carrying Jews by the tens of thousands back to their native cities and towns. A historic day for human memory, for human justice, and for atonement too. In those train stations where the crowds gather to weep and sing and celebrate, where people fall to their knees in Christian prayer at the feet of their Jewish brethren, only there and then will the conscience cleansing of Europe begin.” He paused theatrically here before concluding this visionary outpouring with the quiet, firm pronouncement “And Lech Walesa Jiappens to believe this just as strongly as Philip Roth does.”

“Does he? With all due respect, Philip Roth, your prophecy strikes me as nonsense. It sounds to me like a farcical scenario out of one of your books — Poles weeping with joy at the feet of the Jews! And you tell me you are not writing fiction these days?”

“This will come to pass,” he declared oracularly, “because it must come to pass — the reintegration of the Jew into Europe by the year 2000, not a reentry as refugees, you must understand, but an orderly population transfer with an international legal basis, with restoration of property, of citizenship, and of all national rights. And then, in the year 2000, the pan-European celebration of the reintegrated Jew to be held in the city of Berlin.”

“Oh, that’s the best idea yet,” I said. “The Germans particularly will be delighted to usher in the third millennium of Christianity with a couple of million Jews holding a welcome-home party at the Brandenburg Gate.”

“In his day Herzl too was accused of being a satirist and of making an elaborate joke when he proposed the establishment of a Jewish state. Many deprecated his plan as a hilarious fantasy, an outlandish fiction, and called him crazy as well. But my conversation with Lech Walesa was not outlandish fiction. The contact I have made with President Ceaușescu, through the chief rabbi of Romania, is no hilarious fantasy. These are the first steps toward bringing about a new Jewish reality based on principles of historical justice. For years now, President Ceauşescu has been selling Jews to Israel. Yes, you hear me correctly: Ceauşescu has sold to the Israelis several hundred thousand Romanian Jews for ten thousand dollars a head. This is a fact. Well, I propose to offer him ten thousand more dollars for each Jew he takes back. I’ll go as high as fifteen if I have to. I have carefully studied Herzl’s life and have learned from his experience how to deal with these people. Herzl’s negotiations with the sultan in Constantinople, though they happened to fail, were no more of a hilarious fantasy than the negotiations I will soon be conducting with the dictator of Romania at his Bucharest palace.”

“And the money to pay the dictator off? My guess is that to fund your effort you have only to turn to the PLO.’’

“I have every reason to believe that my funding will come from the American Jews who for decades now have been contributing enormous sums for the survival of a country with which they happen to have only the most abstractly sentimental connection. The roots of American Jewry are not in the Middle East but in Europe — their Jewish style, their Jewish words, their strong nostalgia, their actual, weighable history, all this issues from their European origins. Grandpa did not hail from Haifa — Grandpa came from Minsk. Grandpa wasn’t a Jewish nationalist — he was a Jewish humanist, a spiritual, believing Jew, who complained not in an antique tongue called Hebrew but in colorful, rich, vernacular Yiddish.”

Our conversation was interrupted here by the hotel operator, who broke in to tell him that Frankfurt was now on the line.

“Pierre, hold a second.”

Pierre, hold a second, and I did it, held, and, of course, obediently waiting for him to come back on made me even more ludicrous to myself than remembering everything I’d said in our conversation. I should have taped this, I realized — as evidence, as proof. But of what? That he wasn’t me? This needed to be proved?

“A German colleague of yours,” he said when he returned to speak to me again, “a journalist with Der Spiegel You must excuse me if I leave you to talk with him now. He’s been trying to reach me for days. This has been a good, strong interview — your questions may be aggressive and nasty, but they are also intelligent, and I thank you for them.”

“One more, however, one last nasty question. Tell me, please,” I asked, “are they lining up, the Romanian Jews who are dying to go back to Ceauescu’s Romania? Are they lining up, the Polish Jews who are dying to return to Communist Poland? Those Russians struggling to leave the Soviet Union, is your plan to turn them around at the Tel Aviv airport and force them onto the next flight back to Moscow? Anti-Semitism aside, you think people fresh from these terrible places will voluntarily choose to return just because Philip Roth tells them to?”

“I think I have made my position sufficiently clear to you for now,” he replied most courteously. “In what journal will our interview be published?”

“I am free-lance, Mr. Philip Roth. Could be anywhere from Le Monde to Paris-Match”

“And you will be kind enough to send a copy to the hotel when it appears?”

“How long do you expect to remain there?”

“As long as the disassociation of Jewish identity threatens the welfare of my people. As long as it takes Diasporism to recompose, once and for all, the splintered Jewish existence. Your last name again, Pierre?”

“Roget,” I said. “Like the thesaurus.”

His laugh erupted much too forcefully for me to believe that it had been provoked by my little quip alone. He knows, I thought, hanging up. He knows perfectly well who I am.

2 A LIFE NOT MY OWN

According to the testimony of six elderly Treblinka survivors, during the fifteen months from July 1942 to September 1943 when nearly a million Jews were murdered at Treblinka, the gas chamber there was operated by a guard, known to the Jews as Ivan the Terrible, whose sideline was to maim and torture, preferably with a sword, the naked men, women, and children herded together outside the gas chamber waiting to be asphyxiated. Ivan was a strong, vigorous, barely educated Soviet soldier, a Ukrainian in his early twenties whom the Germans had captured on the Eastern Front and, along with hundreds more Ukrainian POWs, recruited and trained to staff the Belsec, Sobibor, and Treblinka extermination camps in Poland. John Demjanjuk’s lawyers, one of whom, Yoram Sheftel, was an Israeli, never disputed the existence of Ivan the Terrible or the horror of the atrocities he committed. They claimed only that Demjanjuk and Ivan the Terrible were two different people and that the evidence to the contrary was all worthless. They argued that the identity photo spread assembled for the Treblinka survivors by the Israeli police was totally unreliable because of the faulty and amateurish procedures used, procedures that had led or manipulated the survivors into mistakenly identifying Demjanjuk as Ivan. They argued that the sole piece of documentary evidence, an identity card from Trawniki, an SS training camp for Treblinka guards — a card bearing Demjanjuk’s name, signature, personal details, and a photograph — was a KGB forgery designed to discredit Ukrainian nationalists by marking one of them as this savage war criminal. They argued that during the period when Ivan the Terrible had been running the Treblinka gas chamber, Demjanjuk had been held as a German prisoner of war in a region nowhere near the Polish death camps. The defense’s Demjanjuk was a hardworking, churchgoing family man who had come to America with a young Ukrainian wife and a tiny child from a European DP camp in 1952 — a father of three grown American children, a skilled autoworker with Ford, a decent, law-abiding American citizen renowned among the Ukrainian Americans in his Cleveland suburb for his wonderful vegetable garden and the pierogi that he helped the ladies cook for the celebrations at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Church. His only crime was to be born a Ukrainian whose Christian name had formerly been Ivan and to have been about the same age and perhaps even to have resembled somewhat the Ukrainian Ivan whom these elderly Treblinka survivors had, of course, not seen in the flesh for over forty years. Early in the trial, Demjanjuk had himself pleaded to the court, “I am not that awful man to whom you refer. I am innocent.”

I learned all this from a thick file of xeroxed newspaper clippings about the Demjanjuk trial that I purchased at the office of The Jerusalem Post, the English-language Israeli paper. On the drive from the airport I’d seen the file advertised in that day’s Post, and after checking in at the hotel, instead of phoning Apter and making arrangements to meet him later in the day, as I’d planned to do, I took a taxi directly over to the newspaper office. Then, before I went off to dinner with Aharon at a Jerusalem restaurant, I read carefully through the several hundred clippings, which dated back some ten years to when the U.S. government filed denaturalization charges against Demjanjuk in the Cleveland district court for falsifying, on his visa application, the details of his whereabouts during World War II.

I was reading at a table in the garden courtyard of the American Colony Hotel. Ordinarily I stayed at Mishkenot Sha’ananim, the guest house for visiting academics and artists run by the mayor’s Jerusalem Foundation and located a couple of hundred yards down the road from the King David Hotel. Several months earlier I had reserved an apartment there for my January visit, but the day before leaving London I had canceled the reservation and made one instead at the American Colony, a hotel staffed by Arabs and situated at the other end of Jerusalem, virtually on the pre-1968 borderline between Jordanian Jerusalem and Israeli Jerusalem and only blocks away from where violence had sporadically broken out in the Arab Old City during the previous few weeks. I explained to Claire that I had changed reservations to be as far as I could get from the other Philip Roth should he happen, despite the newspaper retraction, to be hanging on in Jerusalem still registered at the King David under my name. My staying at an Arab hotel, I said, minimized the likelihood of our paths ever crossing, which was what she herself had cautioned me against foolishly facilitating. “And maximizes,” she replied, “the likelihood of getting stoned to death.” “Look, I’ll be all but incognito at the American Colony,” I answered, “and for now incognito is the smartest, least disruptive, most reasonable strategy.” “No, the smartest strategy is to tell Aharon to come to the guest room here and stay in London with you.” Since on the day I left for Israel she herself was to fly to Africa to begin to make a film in Kenya, I suggested to her, when we parted at Heathrow Airport, that she was about as likely to be eaten by a lion in the streets of Nairobi as I was to come to any harm in a first-class hotel at the edge of East Jerusalem. Gloomily she disagreed and departed.

After reading the clipping file right through to an article from just the week before about a request by defense counsel Yoram Sheftel to enter ten new documents in evidence at this late stage of the proceedings, I wondered if it was while at the Demjanjuk trial that the impostor had first got the idea to pretend to be me, emboldened by the identity issue at the heart of the case, or if he had deliberately selected the trial for his performance because of the opportunities for publicity provided by the extensive media coverage. It disgusted me that he should insinuate this crazy stunt into the midst of such a grim and tragic affair, and, for the first time, really, I found myself outraged in the way that somebody without my professional curiosity about shenanigans like this one probably would have been from the start — not merely because, for whatever his reasons, he had decided that our two destinies should become publicly entangled but because he had chosen to entangle them here.

At dinner that evening I thought repeatedly of asking Aharon to recommend a Jerusalem lawyer for me to consult with about my problem, but instead I was mostly silent while Aharon spoke about a recent guest of his, a Frenchwoman, a university professor, married and the mother of two children, who had been discovered as a newborn infant in a Paris churchyard only months before the Allies liberated the city in 1944. She had been raised by foster parents as a Catholic but a few years back had come to believe that, in fact, she had been a Jewish child abandoned at birth by Jewish parents hiding somewhere in Paris and placed by them in the churchyard so that she would not be thought Jewish or raised as a Jew. This idea had begun to develop in her during the Lebanon war, when everyone she knew, including her husband and her children, was condemning the Israelis as criminal murderers and she found herself, alone and embattled, arguing strenuously in their defense.

She knew Aharon only through his books but wrote him nonetheless a compelling and impassioned letter about her discovery. He answered sympathetically, and a few days later she turned up on his doorstep to ask him to help her find a rabbi to convert her. That evening she had dinner with Aharon and his wife, Judith, and explained to them how she had never in her life felt she belonged to France, even though she wrote and spoke the language flawlessly and in her appearance and her behavior seemed to everyone as French as French could be — she was a Jew and she belonged to the Jews, of this she was ardently convinced.

The next morning Aharon took her to a rabbi he knew to ask if the rabbi would supervise her conversion. He refused, as did three other rabbis they went together to see. And each gave much the same reason for saying no: because neither her husband nor her children were Jews, the rabbis were disinclined to divide the family along religious lines. “Suppose I divorce my husband, disowm my children —” But as she happened to love them all dearly, the rabbi to whom she made this proposal took it no more seriously than it was meant.

After her unsuccessful week in Jerusalem, desolated to have to return, still a Catholic, to her old life in France, she was at dinner at the Appelfelds’ house on the evening before her departure, when Aharon and Judith, who could no longer bear to see the woman suffering so, suddenly announced to her, “You are a Jew! We, the Appelfelds, declare you a Jew! There — we have converted you!”

As we sat in the restaurant laughing together at the antic audacity of this obliging deed, Aharon, a small, bespectacled compact man with a perfectly round face and a perfectly bald head, looked to me very much like a benign wizard, as adept in the mysteries of legerdemain as his namesake, the brother of Moses. “He’d have no trouble,” I later wrote in the preface to our interview, “passing for a magician who entertains children at birthday parties by pulling doves out of a hat — it’s easier to associate his gently affable and kindly appearance with that job than with the responsibility by which he seems inescapably propelled: responding, in a string of elusively portentous stories, to the disappearance from Europe … of just about all the continent’s Jews, his parents among them.” Aharon himself had managed to remain alive by escaping from the Transnistria concentration camp at the age of nine and living either in hiding, foraging alone in the woods, or working as a menial laborer for poor local peasants until the Russians liberated him three years later. Before being transported to the camp, he had been the pampered child of wealthy, highly assimilated Bukovina Jews, a little boy educated by tutors, raised by nannies, and fitted out always in the finest clothes.

“To be declared a Jew by Appelfeld,” I said, “that’s no small thing. You do have it in you to bestow this mantle on people. You even try it with me.”

“Not with you, Philip. You were a Jew par excellence years before I came along.”

“No, no, never so exclusively, totally, and incessantly as the Jew it pleases you to imagine me to be.”

“Yes, exclusively, totally, incessantly, irreducibly. That you continue to struggle so to deny it is for me the ultimate proof.”

“Against such reasoning,” I said, “there is no defense.”

He laughed quietly. “Good.”

“And tell me, do you believe this Catholic professor’s fantasy of herself?”

“What I believe is not what concerns me.”

“Then what about what she believes? Doesn’t it occur to the professor that she may have been left in a churchyard precisely because she was not Jewish? And that her sense of apartness originates not in her having been born a Jew but in her having been orphaned and raised by people other than her natural parents? Besides, would a Jewish mother be likely to abandon her infant on the very eve of the liberation, when the chances for Jewish survival couldn’t have been better? No, no, to have been found when she was found makes Jewish parentage for this woman the least likely possibility.”

“But a possibility no less. Even if the Allies were to liberate them in only a matter of days, they had still to survive those days in hiding. And to survive in hiding with a crying infant might not have been feasible.”

“This is what she thinks.”

“It’s one thing she thinks.”

“Yes, a person can, of course, think absolutely anything. …”And I, of course, was thinking about the man who wanted people to think that he was me — did he think that he was me as well?

“You look tired,” Aharon said. “You look upset. You’re not yourself tonight.”

“Don’t have to be. Got someone else to do it for me.”

“But nothing is in the papers, nothing more that I have seen.”

“Oh, but he’s still at it, I’m sure. What’s to stop him? Certainly not me. And shouldn’t I at least try? Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t anyone in his right mind?” It was Claire’s position I heard myself taking up now that she was gone. “Shouldn’t I place an ad in The Jerusalem Post informing the citizens of Israel that there is this impostor about, an ad disassociating myself from whatever he says or does in my name? A full-page ad would end this overnight. I could appear on television. Better, I could simply go and talk to the police, because more than likely he’s traveling with false documents. I know he’s got to be breaking some kind of law.”

“But instead you do nothing.”

“Well, I have done something. Since I spoke with you I phoned him. At the King David. I interviewed him on the phone from London, posing as a journalist.”

“Yes, and you look pleased with that — now you look like yourself.”

“Well, it wasn’t entirely unenjoyable. But, Aharon, what am I to do? It’s too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous. And it’s activating — reactivating — the very state of mind that I’ve been working for months now to shake off. You know what’s at the heart of the misery of a breakdown? Me-itis. Microcosmosis. Drowning in the tiny tub of yourself. Coming here I had it all figured out: desubjectified in Jerusalem, subsumed in Appelfeld, swimming in the sea of the other self — the other self being yours. Instead there is this me to plague and preoccupy me, a me who is not even me to obsess me day and night — the me who’s not me encamped boldly in Jewish Jerusalem while I go underground with the Arabs.”

“So that’s why you’re staying over there.”

“Yes — because I’m not here for him, I’m here for you. That was the idea and, Aharon, it’s still the idea. Look” — and from my jacket pocket I took the sheet of paper on which I’d typed out for him my opening question — “let’s start,” I said. “The hell with him. Read this.”

I’d written: I find echoes in your fiction of two Middle European writers of a previous generation — Bruno Schulz, the Polish Jew who wrote in Polish and was shot and killed at fifty by the Nazis in Drogobych, the heavily Jewish Galician city where he taught high school and lived at home with his family, and Kafka, the Prague Jew who wrote in German and also lived, according to Max Brod, “spellbound in the family circle” for most of his forty-one years. Tell me, how pertinent to your imagination do you consider Schulz and Kafka to be?

Over tea then, we talked about neither me nor not-me but, somewhat more productively, about Schulz and Kafka until finally we grew tired and it was time to go home. Yes, I thought, this is how to prevail — forget this shadow and stick to the task. Of all the people who had assisted me in recovering my strength — among others, Claire, Bernie, the psychopharmacologist — I had chosen Aharon and talking to him as the final way out, the means by which to repossess that part of myself that I thought was lost, the part that was able to discourse and to think and that had simply ceased to exist in the midst of the Halcion wipeout when I was sure that I’d never be able to use my mind again. Halcion had destroyed not merely my ordinary existence, which was bad enough, but whatever was special to me as well, and what Aharon represented was someone whose maturation had been convulsed by the worst possible cruelty and who had managed nonetheless to reclaim his ordinariness through his extraordinariness, someone whose conquest of futility and chaos and whose rebirth as a harmonious human being and a superior writer constituted an achievement that, to me, bordered on the miraculous, all the more so because it arose from a force in him utterly invisible to the naked eye.

Later in the evening, before he went to bed, Aharon reformulated what he’d explained at the restaurant and typed out an answer in Hebrew to give to the translator the next day. Speaking of Kafka and himself, he said, “Kafka emerges from an inner world and tries to get some grip on reality, and I came from a world of detailed, empirical reality, the camps and the forests. My real world was far beyond the power of imagination, and my task as an artist was not to develop my imagination but to restrain it, and even then it seemed impossible to me, because everything was so unbelievable that one seemed oneself to be fictional. … At first I tried to run away from myself and from my memories, to live a life that was not my own and to write about a life that was not my own. But a hidden feeling told me that I was not allowed to flee from myself and that if I denied the experience of my childhood in the Holocaust I would be spiritually deformed.…”

My tiny cousin Apter, the unborn adult, earns his living painting scenes of the Holy Land for the tourist trade. He sells them from a little workshop — squeezed between a souvenir stall and a pastry counter — that he shares with a leather craftsman in the Jewish quarter of the Old City. Tourists who ask his prices are answered in their native tongues, for Apter, however underdeveloped as a man, happens to be someone whose past has left him fluent in English, Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, and German. He even knows some Ukrainian, the language he calls Goyish. What the tourists are told when they ask Apter’s prices is, “This is not for me to decide” — a sentiment that, unfortunately, is not humbly feigned: Apter is too cultivated to think well of his pictures. “I, who love Cézanne, who weep and pray before his paintings, I paint like a philistine without any ideals.” “Of their kind,” I tell him, “they’re perfectly all right.” “Why such terrible pictures?” he asks — “Is this too Hitler’s fault?” “If it’s any comfort to you, Hitler painted worse.” “No,” says Apter, “I’ve seen his pictures. Even Hitler painted better than I do.”

In any one week Apter might be paid as much as a hundred dollars or as little as five for one of his three-by-four-foot landscapes. A philanthropic English Jew, a Manchester manufacturer who owns a high-rise condo in Jerusalem and who somehow came to know Apter’s biography, once gave my cousin a thousand-pound check for a single painting and, ever since, has made of Apter something of a ward, sending a minion around once a year to purchase more or less the same painting for the same outlandish price. On the other hand, an elderly American woman once walked off with a picture without giving Apter anything, or so Apter says — it was one of those dozen he paints every week depicting the Jerusalem animal market near St. Stephen’s gate. The theft had left him sobbing in the street. “Police!” he shouted. “Help me! Someone help me!” But when no one came to his assistance, he raced after her himself and soon chased her down in the next turning, where she was resting against a wall, the stolen painting at her feet. “I am not a greedy man,” he said to her, “but, madam, please, I must eat.” As Apter recounted the story, she insisted to the small crowd that quickly formed around the weeping artist with his beggarly hands outstretched that she had already paid him a penny, which for such a painting was more than enough. Indignantly she screamed in Yiddish, “Look at his pocket! He’s lying!” “The twisted ogre mouth,” Apter told me, “the terrible, horrible shriek — Cousin Philip, I understood what I was up against. I said to her, ‘Madam, which camp?’ ‘All of them!’ she cried, and then she spat in my face.”

In Apter’s stories, people steal from him, spit at him, defraud and insult and humiliate him virtually every day and, more often than not, these people who victimize my cousin are survivors of the camps. Are his stories accurate and true? I myself never inquire about their veracity. I think of them instead as fiction that, like so much of fiction, provides the storyteller with the lie through which to expose his unspeakable truth. I treat the stories rather the way Aharon has chosen to understand the story concocted by his Catholic “Jew.”

I had every intention, the morning after my dinner with Aharon, of taking a taxi directly from the hotel up to Apter’s cubbyhole workshop in the old Jewish quarter and of spending a couple of hours with him before meeting once again with Aharon to resume our conversation over lunch. Instead, I went off in the taxi to the morning session of the Demjanjuk trial — to face down my impostor. If he wasn’t there, I’d go on to the King David Hotel. I had to: twenty-four more hours of doing nothing and I’d be able to think of nothing else. As it was, I had been sleepless most of the night, up just about hourly to double-check that my door was locked, and then back to bed, waiting for him to appear above the footboard, Magrittishly suspended in midair, as though the footboard were a footstone, the hotel room a graveyard, and one or the other of us the ghost. And my dreams — rocketing clusters of terrible forebodings too sinister even to be named — I awakened from them with a ruthless determination to murder the bastard with my own two hands. Yes, by morning it was clear even to me that by doing nothing I was only exaggerating everything, and yet still I wavered, and it wasn’t until the taxi was pulling up at the gate to the Jewish quarter that I finally told the driver to turn around and gave him the address of the convention center at the other end of the city, out beyond the Knesset and the museum, where, in a hall ordinarily used for lectures and movies, Demjanjuk had been on trial now for eleven months. At breakfast I’d copied the address out of the paper and heavily circled the spot on my Jerusalem street map. No more wavering.

Outside the doorway to the hall four armed Israeli soldiers were standing about chattering together next to a booth bearing a handwritten sign that read, in Hebrew and in English, “Check Your Weapons Here.” I walked by them unnoticed and into an outer lobby where I had only to show my passport to a young policewoman and write my name in a register at her desk to be allowed to proceed on through the metal detector to the inner lobby. I took my time signing in, looking up and down the page to see if my name had been written there already. Failing to find it proved nothing, of course — the court had been in session for an hour by then and there were scores of names recorded in the ledger’s pages. What’s more, I thought, the passport he held was more likely in his name than in mine. (But without a passport in my name how had he registered as me at his hotel?)

Inside the lobby I had to hand over the passport again, this time as security for an audio headset. The soldier on duty there, another young woman, showed me how I could tune it to a simultaneous English translation of the Hebrew proceedings. I waited for her to recognize me as someone who’d been to the trial before, but once she’d done her job she went back to reading her magazine.

When I entered the courtroom and saw, from behind the last row of spectators, what exactly was going on, I forgot completely why I had come; when, after sorting out the dozen or so figures on the raised platform at the front of the courtroom, I realized which one was the accused, not only did my double cease to exist, but, for the time being, so did I.

There he was. There he was. Once upon a time, drove two, three hundred of them into a room barely big enough for fifty, wedged them in every which way, bolted the doors shut, and started up the engine. Pumped out carbon monoxide for half an hour, waited to hear the screams die down, then sent in the live ones to pry out the dead ones and clean up the place for the next big load. “Get that shit out of there,” he told them. Back when the transports were really rolling, did this ten, fifteen times a day, sometimes sober, sometimes not, but always with plenty of gusto. Vigorous, healthy boy. Good worker. Never sick. Not even drink slowed him down. Just the opposite. Bludgeoned the bastards with an iron pipe, tore open the pregnant women with his sword, gouged out their eyes, whipped their flesh, drove nails through their ears, once took a drill and bored a hole right in someone’s buttocks — felt like it that day, so he did it. Screaming in Ukrainian, shouting in Ukrainian, and when they didn’t understand Ukrainian, shot them in the head. What a time! Nothing like it ever again! A mere twenty-two and he owned the place — could do to any of them whatever he wished. To wield a whip and a pistol and a sword and a club, to be young and healthy and strong and drunk and powerful, boundlessly powerful, like a god! Nearly a million of them, a million, and on every one a Jewish face in which he could read the terror. Of him. Of him! Of a peasant boy of twenty-two! In the history of this entire world, had the opportunity ever been given to anyone anywhere to kill so many people all by himself, one by one? What a job! A sensational blowout every day! One continuous party! Blood! Vodka! Women! Death! Power! And the screams! Those unending screams! And all of it work, good, hard work and yet wild, wild, untainted joy — the joy most people only get to dream of, nothing short of ecstasy! A year, a year and a half of that is just about enough to satisfy a man forever; after that a man need never complain that life had passed him by; after that anyone could be content with a routine, regular nine-to-five job where no blood ever really flowed except, on rare occasions, as a result of an accident on the factory floor. Nine to five, then home to dinner with the wife and kids — that’s all you needed after that. At twenty-two he’d seen all that anyone could ever hope to see. Great while it lasted, stupendous while you were young and fearless and on a tear, running over with animal zest for just about everything, but the sort of thing you outgrow eventually, as indeed he had. You have to know when to quit with a job like that and, luckily, he was one who did.

There he was. There it was, bald now and grown stocky, a big, cheerful palooka of sixty-eight, a good father, a good neighbor, loved by his family and all his friends. Still did push-ups every morning, even in his cell, the kind where you’ve got to leave the floor and clap your hands together before you come back down on your palms — could still boast wrists so thick and strong that, on the plane over, ordinary handcuffs hadn’t been large enough to encompass them. Nonetheless, it was nearly fifty years since he’d last smashed open anyone’s skull, and he was by now as benign and unfrightening as an old boxing champ. Good old Johnny — man the demon as good old Johnny. Loved his garden, everyone said. Rather tend tomatoes now and raise string beans than bore a hole in somebody’s ass with a drill. No, you’ve got to be young and in your prime, you’ve got to be on top of things and raring to go to manage successfully even something as simple as having a little fun like that with somebody’s big fat behind. He’d sowed his oats and settled down, all that rough stuff sworn off long ago. Could only barely remember now all the hell he had raised. So many years! The way they fly! No, he was somebody else entirely. That hell-raiser was no longer him.

There he was, between two police guards at a small table behind the longer table from which his three attorneys conducted his defense. He wore a pale blue suit over an open-necked shirt, and there was a headset arched across his large bald skull. I didn’t realize right off that he was listening to a simultaneous translation of the proceedings into Ukrainian — he looked as though he were passing the time with a favorite pop cassette. His arms were crossed casually over his chest, and ever so faintly his jaws moved up and down as though he were an animal at rest tasting the last of its cud. That’s all he did while I watched him. Once he looked indifferently out at the spectators, entirely at ease with himself, munching almost imperceptibly on nothing. Once he took a sip of water from the glass on the table. Once he yawned. You have the wrong man, this yawn proclaimed. With all due respect, these Jewish old people who identify Demjanjuk as their terrible Ivan are senile or mistaken or lying. I was a German prisoner of war. I know no more about a camp at Treblinka than an ox or a cow does. You might as well have a cud-chewing quadruped on trial here for murdering Jews — it would make as much sense as trying me. I am stupid. I am harmless. I am nobody. I knew nothing then and I know nothing now. My heart goes out to you for all you suffered, but the Ivan you want was never anybody as simple and innocent as good old Johnny the gardener from Cleveland, Ohio.

I remembered reading in the clipping file that on the day the prisoner was extradited from the United States and arrived in Israel, he asked the Israeli police, as they were taking him from the plane in his oversized handcuffs, if he could be permitted to kneel down and kiss the airstrip. A pious pilgrim in the Holy Land, a devout believer and religious soul — that was all he’d ever been. Permission was denied him.

So there he was. Or wasn’t.

When I looked around the crowded courtroom for an empty place, I saw that at least a third of the three hundred or so spectators were high school kids, probably bused in together for the morning session. There was also a large contingent of soldiers, and it was in among them that I found a seat about halfway back in the center of the hall. They were boys and girls in their late teens, with that ragtag look that distinguishes Israeli soldiers from all others, and though clearly they too were there for “educational” reasons, I couldn’t spot more than a handful of them paying attention to the trial. Most were sprawled across their seats, either shifting restlessly or whispering back and forth or just catatonically daydreaming, and not a few were asleep. The same could be said of the students, some of whom were passing notes like schoolkids anywhere who’ve been taken on a trip by the teacher and are bored out of their minds. I watched two girls of about fourteen giggling together over a note they’d received from a boy in the row behind them. Their teacher, a lanky, intense young man with glasses, hissed at them to cut it out, but watching the two of them I was thinking, No, no, it’s right — to them Treblinka should be a nowhere someplace up in the Milky Way; in this country, so heavily populated in its early years by survivors and their families, it’s actually a cause for rejoicing, I thought, that by this afternoon these young teenagers won’t even remember the defendant’s name.

At a dais in the center of the stage sat the three judges in their robes, but it was a while before I could begin to take them in or even to look their way because, once again, I was staring at John Demjanjuk, who claimed to be no less run-of-the-mill than he looked — my face, he argued, my neighbors, my job, my ignorance, my church affiliation, my long, unblemished record as an ordinary family man in Ohio, all this innocuousness disproves a thousand times over these crazy accusations. How could I be both that and this?

Because you are. Because your appearance proves only that to be both a loving grandfather and a mass murderer is not all that difficult. It’s because you could do both so well that I can’t stop staring at you. Your lawyers may like to think otherwise but this admirably unimportant American life of yours is your worst defense — that you’ve been so wonderful in Ohio at living your little, dull life is precisely what makes you so loathsome here. You’ve really only lived sequentially the two seemingly antipodal, mutually excluding lives that the Nazis, with no strain to speak of, managed to enjoy simultaneously — so what, in the end, is the big deal? The Germans have proved definitively to all the world that to maintain two radically divergent personalities, one very nice and one not so nice, is no longer the prerogative of psychopaths only. The mystery isn’t that you, who had the time of your life at Treblinka, went on to become an amiable, hardworking American nobody but that those who cleaned the corpses out for you, your accusers here, could ever pursue anything resembling the run-of-the-mill after what was done to them by the likes of you — that they can manage run-of-the-mill lives, that’s what’s unbelievable!

Not ten feet from Demjanjuk, at a desk at the foot of the judges’ dais, was a very pretty dark-haired young woman whose function there I couldn’t at first ascertain. Later in the morning I realized that she was a documents clerk assisting the chief judge, but when I first noticed her so handsomely composed in the middle of everything, I could think only of those Jewish women whom Demjanjuk was accused of brutalizing with a sword and a whip and a club in the narrow pathway, the “tube,” where those off the cattle cars were corralled together by him before he drove them through the gas-chamber door. She was a young woman of a physical type he must have encountered more than once in the tube and over whom his power there had been absolute. Now, whenever he looked toward the judges or toward the witness stand across from the defense attorney’s table, she had to be somewhere in his field of vision, head unshaven, fully clothed, self-assured and unafraid, an attractive young Jewish woman beyond his reach in every way. Before I understood what her job must be, I even wondered if that couldn’t have been why she’d been situated exactly where she was. I wondered if in his dreams back at the jail he ever saw in that documents clerk the ghost of the young women he had destroyed, if in his dreams there was ever a flicker of remorse, or if, as was more likely, in the dreams as in the waking thoughts he only wished that she had been there in the tube at Treblinka too — she, the three judges, his courtroom guards, the prosecuting attorneys, the translators, and, not least of all, those who came to the courtroom every day to stare as I was staring.

His trial was really no surprise to him, this propaganda trial trumped up by the Jews, this unjust, lying farce of a trial to which he had been dragged in irons from his loving family and his peaceful home. All the way back there in the tube, he’d known the trouble these people could cook up for a simple boy like himself. He knew their hatred of Ukrainians, had known about it all his life. Who had made the famine when he was a child? Who had transformed his country into a cemetery for seven million human beings? Who had turned his neighbors into subhuman creatures devouring mice and rats? As a mere boy he’d seen it all, in his village, in his family — mothers who ate the gizzards of the family pet cat, little sisters who had given themselves for a rotten potato, fathers who resorted to cannibalism. The crying. The shrieking. The agony. And everywhere the dead. Seven million of them! Seven million Ukrainian dead! And because of whom? Caused by whom!

Remorse? Go fuck your remorse!

Or did I have Demjanjuk wrong? While he chewed his cud and sipped his water and yawned through the trial’s tedious stretches, perhaps his mind was empty of everything but the words “It wasn’t me” — needed nothing more than that to keep the past at bay. “I hate no one. Not even you filthy Jews who want me dead. I am an innocent man. It was somebody else.”

And was it somebody else?

So there he was — or wasn’t. I stared and I stared, wondering if, despite all I’d read of the evidence against him, his claim that he was innocent was true; if the survivors who’d identified him could all be lying or wrong; if the identity card of the uniformed concentration-camp guard, bearing his Cyrillic signature and the photo of his youthful face, could indeed be a forgery; if the contradictory stories of his whereabouts as a German POW during the months when the prosecution’s evidence placed him at Treblinka, muddled stories that he’d changed at virtually every inquiry before and since he’d received the original indictment, added up nonetheless to a believable alibi; if the demonstrably incriminating lies with which, since 1945, he had been answering the questions of refugee agencies and immigration authorities, lies that had led to his denaturalization and deportation from the United States, somehow pointed not to his guilt but to his innocence.

But the tattoo in his left armpit, the tattoo the Nazis had given their SS staff to register each individual’s blood type — could that mean anything other than that he’d worked for them and that here in this courtroom he was lying? If not for fear of the truth being discovered, why had he set about secretly in the DP camp to obliterate that tattoo? Why, if not to hide the truth, had he undertaken the excruciatingly painful process of rubbing it bloody with a rock, of waiting for the flesh to heal, and of then repeatedly scraping and scraping with the rock until in time the skin was so badly scarred that his telltale tattoo was eradicated? “My tragic mistake,” Demjanjuk told the court, “is that I can’t think properly and I can’t answer properly.” Stupidity — the only thing to which he had confessed since the complaint identifying him as Ivan the Terrible was first filed against him by the U.S. Attorney’s office eleven years earlier in Cleveland. And you cannot hang a man for being stupid. The KGB had framed him. Ivan the Terrible was somebody else.

A disagreement was brewing between the chief judge, a somber, gray-haired man in his sixties named Dov Levin, and the Israeli defense lawyer, Yoram Sheftel. I couldn’t understand what the dispute was about because my headset had turned out to be defective, and rather than get up and possibly lose my seat while going for a replacement, I stayed where I was and, without understanding anything of the conflict, listened to the exchange heat up in Hebrew. Seated on the dais to the left of Levin was a middle-aged female judge with glasses and short-clipped hair; beneath her robe she was mannishly attired in a shirt and tie. To Levin’s right was a smallish, bearded judge with a skullcap, a grandfatherly, sagacious-looking man of about my age and the sole Orthodox member of the panel.

I watched as Sheftel grew more and more exasperated with whatever Levin was telling him. The day before, I’d read in the Demjanjuk clipping file about the lawyer’s flamboyant, hotheaded style. The theatrical zealousness with which he espoused his client’s innocence, particularly in the face of the anguished eyewitness survivor testimony, seemed to have made him less than beloved by his compatriots; indeed, since the trial was being broadcast nationally on radio and television, chances were that the young Israeli lawyer had become one of the least popular figures in all of Jewish history. I remembered reading that during a noon recess some months back, a courtroom spectator whose family had been killed at Treblinka had shouted at Sheftel, “I can’t understand how a Jew can defend such a criminal. How can a Jew defend a Nazi? How can Israel allow it? Let me tell you what they did to my family, let me explain what they did to my body!” As best I could gather from his argument with the chief judge, neither that nor any other challenge to his Jewish loyalties had diminished Sheftel’s confidence or the forcefulness he was prepared to bring to Demjanjuk’s defense. I wondered how endangered he was when he exited the courtroom, this small, unstoppable battering ram of a man, this engine of defiance so easily discernible by his long sideburns and his narrow-gauge beard. Stationed at regular intervals around the edge of the courtroom were unarmed uniformed policemen with walkie-talkies; undoubtedly there were armed plainclothes-men in the hall as well — here Sheftel was no less secure from harm than was his hated client. But when he drove home at the end of the day in his luxurious Porsche? When he went out with his girlfriend to the beach or a movie? There had to be people all over Israel, people watching television at this very moment, who would have been glad to shut him up with whatever it took to do it right.

Sheftel’s dispute with the judge had resulted in Levin’s declaring an early lunch recess. I came to my feet with everyone else as the judges stood and left the dais. All around me the high school kids raced for the exits; only a little less eagerly, the soldiers followed them out. In a few minutes no more than thirty or so spectators remained scattered about the hall, most huddled together talking softly to one another, the rest just sitting silently alone as though too infirm to move or swallowed up in a trance. All were elderly — retired, I thought at first, people who had the time to attend the sessions regularly. Then I realized that they must be camp survivors. And what was it like for them to find standing only a few feet away the mustached young man in the neat gray business suit whom I now recognized, from his newspaper photos, as Demjanjuk’s twenty-two-year-old son, John junior, the son who vociferously protested that his father was being framed and who, in his media interviews here, proclaimed his father’s absolute and total innocence of all wrongdoing? These survivors had, of course, to recognize who he was — I’d read that at the start of the trial, the son, at the family’s request, had been seated prominently right up behind his father on the stage, and even I, a newcomer, had spotted him when Demjanjuk, several times that morning, had looked down into the first row, where John junior was seated, and, grimacing unself-consciously, had signaled to him his boredom with the tiresome legal wrangling. I calculated that John junior had been no more than eleven or twelve when his father had first been fingered as Ivan the Terrible by U.S. immigration. The boy had gone through his childhood thinking, as so many lucky children do, that he had a name no more or less distinctive than anyone else’s and, happily enough, a life to match. Well, he would never be able to believe that again: forevermore he was the namesake of the Demjanjuk whom the Jews had tried before all of mankind for someone else’s horrible crime. Justice may be served by this trial, but his children, I thought, are now plunged into the hatred — the curse is revived.

Did no survivor in all of Israel think of killing John Demjanjuk, Jr., of taking revenge on the guilty father through the perfectly innocent son? Was there no one whose family had been exterminated at Treblinka who had thought of kidnapping him and of then mutilating him, gradually, piecemeal, an inch at a go, until Demjanjuk could take no more and admitted to the court who he was? Was there no survivor, driven insane with rage by this defendant’s carefree yawning and his indifferent chewing of his cud, no grieving, wrathful wreck of a survivor, blighted and enraged enough to envisage in the torturing of the one the means of extracting a confession from the other, to perceive in the outright murder of the next in line a perfectly just and fitting requital?

I asked these questions of myself when I saw the tall, slender, well-groomed young man headed briskly toward the main exit with the three defense lawyers — I was astonished that, like Sheftel, Demjanjuk’s namesake, his male successor and only son, was about to step into the Jerusalem streets wholly unprotected.

Outside the courtroom the balmy winter weather had taken a dramatic turn. It was another day entirely. A tremendous rainstorm was raging, sheets of rain driven laterally by a strong wind that made it impossible to discern anything beyond the first few rows of cars in the lot surrounding the convention center. The people trying to determine how to leave the building were packed together in the outer foyer and on the walkway under the overhang. It was only when I’d moved into this crowd that I remembered whom I’d come looking for — my tiny local difficulty had been utterly effaced by a very great mass of real horror. To have run off, as I had, to hunt him down seemed to me now far worse than rash; it was to succumb momentarily to a form of insanity. I was thoroughly ashamed of myself and disgusted once again for getting into a dialogue with this annoyance — how crazy and foolish to have taken the bait! And how little urgency finding him had for me now. Laden with all I’d just witnessed, I resolved to put myself to my proper use.

I was to meet Aharon for lunch just off Jaffa Street, at the Ticho House, but with the rainstorm growing more and more violent I didn’t see how I could possibly get there in time. Yet, having just removed myself from standing in my own way, I was determined that nothing, but nothing, should obstruct me, least of all the inclement weather. Squinting through the rain to search for a taxi, I suddenly saw young Demjanjuk dart out from beneath the overhang, following behind one of his lawyers into the open door of a waiting car. I had the impulse to race after him and ask if I could bum a ride to downtown Jerusalem. I didn’t do it, of course, but if I had, might I not myself have been mistaken for the self-appointed Jewish avenger and been gunned down in my tracks? But by whom? Young Demjanjuk was there for the taking. And could I be the only person in all of this crowd to see how very easy taking him could be?

About a quarter of a mile up a hill from the parking lot, there was a big hotel that I remembered seeing on the drive in, and, desperate, I finally stepped out of the crowd and into the rainstorm and made a dash for the hotel. Minutes later, my clothes soaked and my shoes filled with water, I was standing in the hotel lobby looking for a phone to call a taxi, when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to find facing me the other Philip Roth.

3 WE

“I can’t speak,” he said. “It’s you. You came!”

But the one who couldn’t speak was I. I was breathless, and only in part because of running uphill against the lashing force of that storm. I suppose until that moment I’d never wholeheartedly believed in his existence, at least as anything more substantial than that pompous voice on the telephone and some transparently ridiculous newspaper blather. Seeing him materialize voluminously in space, measurable as a customer in a clothing shop, palpable as a prizefighter up in the ring, was as frightening as seeing a vaporous ghost — and simultaneously electrifying, as though after immersion in that torrential storm, I’d been doused, for good measure, like a cartoon-strip character, full in the face with an antihallucinogenic bucket of cold water. As jolted by the spellbinding reality of his unreality as by its immensely disorienting antithesis, I was at a loss to remember the plans I’d made for how to act and what to say when I’d set out to hunt him down in the taxi that morning — in the mental simulation of our face-off I had failed to remember that the face-off would not, when it came to pass, be a mental simulation. He was crying. He had taken me in his arms, sopping wet though I was, and begun to cry, and not undramatically either — as though one or the other of us had just returned intact from crossing Central Park alone at night. Tears of joyous relief — and I had imagined that confronted with the materialization of me, he would recoil in fear and capitulate.

“Philip Roth! The real Philip Roth — after all these years!” His body trembled with emotion, tremendous emotion even in the two hands that tightly grasped my back.

It required a series of violent thrusts with my elbows to unlock his hold on me. “And you,” I said, shoving him a little as I stepped away, “you must be the fake Philip Roth.”

He laughed. But still cried! Not even in my mental simulation had I loathed him quite as I did seeing those stupid, unaccountable tears.

“Fake, oh, compared to you, absolutely fake — compared to you, nothing, no one, a cipher. I can’t tell you what it’s like for me! In Israel! In Jerusalem! I don’t know what to say! I don’t know where to begin! The books! Those books! I go back to Letting Go, my favorite to this day! Libby Herz and the psychiatrist! Paul Herz and that coat! I go back to ‘The Love Vessel’ in the old Dial! The work you’ve done! The potshots you’ve taken! Your women! Ann! Barbara! Claire! Such terrific women! I’m sorry, but imagine yourself in my place. For me — to meet you — in Jerusalem! What brings you here?”

To this dazzling little question, so ingenuously put, I heard myself reply, “Passing through.”

“I’m looking at myself,” he said, ecstatically, “except it’s you.”

He was exaggerating, something he may have been inclined to do. I saw before me a face that I would not very likely have taken for my own had I found it looking back at me that morning from the mirror. Someone else, a stranger, someone who had seen only my photograph or some newspaper caricature of me, might possibly have been taken in by the resemblance, especially if the face called itself by my name, but I couldn’t believe that there was anyone who would say, “Don’t fool me, you’re really that writer,” had it gone about its business as Mr. Nusbaum’s or Dr. Schwartz’s. It was actually a conventionally better-looking face, a little less mismade than my own, with a more strongly defined chin and not so large a nose, one that, also, didn’t flatten Jewishly like mine at the tip. It occurred to me that he looked like the after to my before in the plastic surgeon’s advertisement.

“What’s your game, my friend?”

“No game,” he replied, surprised and wounded by my angry tone. “And I’m no fake. I was using ‘real’ ironically.”

“Well, I’m not so pretty as you and I’m not so ironical as you and I was using ‘fake’ unerringly.”

“Hey, take it easy, you don’t know your strength. Don’t call names, okay?”

“You go around pretending to be me.”

This brought that smile back — “You go around pretending to be me,” he loathsomely replied.

“You exploit the physical resemblance,” I went on, “by telling people that you are the writer, the author of my books.”

“I don’t have to tell them anything. They take me for the author of those books right off. It happens all the time.”

“And you just don’t bother to correct them.”

“Look, can I buy you lunch? You — here! What a shock to the system! But can we stop this sparring and sit down in this hotel and talk seriously together over lunch? Will you give me a chance to explain?”

“I want to know what you’re up to, buddy!”

“I want you to know,” he said gently and, like a Marcel Marceau at his corniest, with an exaggerated tamping-down gesture of his two hands, indicated that I ought to try to stop shouting and be reasonable like him. “I want you to know everything. I’ve dreamed all my life —”

“Oh no, not the ‘dreams,’” I told him, incensed now not only by the ingenue posturing, not only by how he persisted in coming on so altogether unlike the stentorian Diasporist Herzl he’d impersonated for me on the phone, but by the Hollywooded version of my face so nebbishly pleading with me to try to calm down. Odd, but for the moment that smoothed-out rectification of my worst features got my goat as much as anything did. What do we despise most in the appearance of somebody who looks like ourselves? For me, it was the earnest attractiveness. “Please, not the softly melting eyes of the nice Jewish boy. Your ‘dreams’! I know what you’ve been up to here, I know what’s been going on here between you and the press, so just can the harmless-shlimazl act now.”

“But your eyes melt a little too, you know. I know the things you’ve done for people. You hide your sweet side from the public — all the glowering photographs and I’m-nobody’s-sucker interviews. But behind the scenes, as I happen to know, you’re one very soft touch, Mr. Roth.”

“Look, what are you and who are you? Answer me!”

“Your greatest admirer.”

“Try again.”

“I can’t do better than that.”

“Try anyway. Who are you?”

“The person in the world who has read and loved your books like no one else. Not just once, not just twice — so many times I’m embarrassed to say.”

“Yes, that embarrasses you in front of me? What a sensitive boy.”

“You look at me as though I’m fawning, but it’s the truth — I know your books inside out. I know your life inside out. I could be your biographer. I am your biographer. The insults you’ve put up with, they drive me nuts just on your behalf. Portnoy’s Complaint, not even nominated for a National Book Award! The book of the decade and not even nominated! Well, you had no friend in Swados; he called the shots on that committee and had it in for you but good. So much animosity — I don’t get it. Podhoretz — I actually cannot speak the man’s name without tasting my gall in my mouth. And Gilman — that attack on When She Was Good, on the integrity of that book. Saying you wrote for Womrath’s Book Store — about that perfectly honorable little book! And Professor Epstein, there’s a genius. And those broads at Ms. And this exhibitionist Wolcott —”

I sank back into the chair behind me, and there in the hotel lobby, clammy and shivering under the rain-soaked clothes, I listened as he recalled every affront that had ever appeared in print, every assault that had ever been made on my writing and me — some, insults so small that, miraculously, even I had forgotten them, however much they might have exasperated me a quarter of a century earlier. It was as though the genie of grievance had escaped the bottle in which a writer’s resentments are pickled and preserved and had manifested itself in humanish form, spawned by the inbreeding of my overly licked oldest wounds and mockingly duplicating the man I am.

“ — Capote on the Carson show, coming on with that ‘Jewish Mafia’ shit, ‘From Columbia University to Columbia Pictures’ —”

“Enough,” I said, and pushed myself violently up out of the chair. “That is really enough!”

“It’s been no picnic, that’s all I’m trying to say. I know what a struggle living is for you, Philip. May I call you Philip?”

“Why not? That’s the name. What’s yours?”

With that sonny-boy smile I wanted to smash with a brick, he replied, “Sorry, truly sorry, but it’s the same. Come on, have some lunch. Maybe,” he said, pointing to my shoes, “you want to stop in the toilet and shake those out. You got drenched, man.”

“And you’re not wet at all,” I observed.

“Hitched a ride up the hill.”

Could it be? Hitched the ride I’d thought of hitching with Demjanjuk’s son?

“You were at the trial then,” I said.

“There every day,” he replied. “Go, go ahead, dry off,” he said, “I’ll get a table for us in the dining room. Maybe you can relax over lunch. We have a lot to talk about, you and me.”

In the bathroom I took a deliberately long time to dry myself off, thinking to give him every opportunity to call a taxi and make a clean getaway without ever having to confront me again. His had been a commendable, if nauseating, performance for someone who, despite his cleverly seizing the initiative, had to have been only a little less caught off guard in the lobby than I was; as the sweet-natured innocent, cravenly oscillating between bootlicking and tears, his had been a more startlingly original performance by far than my own mundane portrayal of the angry victim. Yet the impact of my materialization must surely have been more galvanic even for him than his had been for me and he had to be thinking hard now about the risk of pushing this thing further. I gave him all the time he needed to wise up and clear out and disappear for good, and then, with my hair combed and my shoes each emptied of about half a cup of water, I came back up into the lobby to phone a taxi to get me over to my lunch date with Aharon — I was half an hour late already — and immediately I spotted him just outside the entryway to the restaurant, ingratiating smile still intact, more handsomely me than even before.

“I was beginning to think Mr. Roth had taken a powder,” he said.

“And I was hoping the same about you.”

“Why,” he asked, “would I want to do a thing like that?”

“Because you’re involved in a deceptive practice. Because you’re breaking the law.”

“Which law? Israeli law, Connecticut state law, or international law?”

“The law that says that a person’s identity is his private property and can’t be appropriated by somebody else.”

“Ah, so you’ve been studying your Prosser.”

“Prosser?”

“Professor Prosser’s Handbook of the Law of Torts.”

“I haven’t been studying anything. All I need to know about a case like this common sense can tell me.”

“Well, still, take a look at Prosser. In 1960, in the California Law Review, Prosser published a long article, a reconsideration of the original 1890 Warren and Brandeis Harvard Law Review article in which they’d borrowed Judge Cooley’s phrase ‘the general right to be let alone’ and staked out the dimensions of the privacy interest. Prosser discusses privacy cases as having four separate branches and causes of action — one, intrusion upon seclusion; two, public disclosure of private facts; three, false light in the public eye; and four, appropriation of identity. The prima facie case is defined as follows: ‘One who appropriates to his own use or benefit the name or likeness of another is subject to liability to the other for invasion of his privacy.’ Let’s have lunch.”

The dining room was completely empty. There wasn’t even a waiter to show us in. At the table he chose for us, directly in the center of the room, he drew out my chair for me as though he were the waiter and stood politely behind it while I sat down. I couldn’t tell whether this was straight satire or seriously meant — yet more idolatry — and even wondered if, with my behind an inch from the seat, he might do what sadistic kids like to do in grade school and at the last moment pull the chair out from under me so that I landed on the floor. I grabbed an edge of the chair in either hand and pulled the seat safely under me as I sat.

“Hey,” he said, laughing, “you don’t entirely trust me,” and came around to take the chair across the table.

An indication of how stunned I’d been out in the lobby — and had remained even off by myself in the bathroom, where I had somehow got round to believing that victory was achieved and he was about to run off, never to dare to return — was that only when we were sitting opposite each other did I notice that he was dressed identically to me: not similarly, identically. Same washed-out button-down, openneck Oxford blue shirt, same well-worn tan V-neck cashmere sweater, same cuffless khaki trousers, same gray Brooks Brothers herringbone sports jacket threadbare at the elbows — a perfect replica of the colorless uniform that I had long ago devised to simplify life’s sartorial problem and that I had probably recycled not even ten times since I’d been a penniless freshman instructor at the University of Chicago in the mid-fifties. I’d realized, while packing my suitcase for Israel, that I was just about ragged enough for my periodic overhaul — and so too, I saw, was he. There was a nub of tiny threadlets where the middle front button had come off his jacket — I noticed because for some time now I’d been exhibiting a similar nub of threadlets where the middle button had yet again vanished from my jacket. And with that, everything inexplicable became even more inexplicable, as though what we were missing were our navels.

“What do you make of Demjanjuk?” he asked.

Were we going to chat? About Demjanjuk no less?

“Don’t we have other, more pressing concerns, you and I? Don’t we have the prima facie case of identity appropriation to talk about, as outlined in point four by Professor Prosser?”

“But all that sort of pales, don’t you think, beside what you saw in that courtroom this morning?”

“How would you know what I saw this morning?”

“Because I saw you seeing it. I was in the balcony. Upstairs with the press and the television. You couldn’t take your eyes off him. Nobody can the first time. Is he or isn’t he, was he or wasn’t he? — the first time, that’s all that goes round in anyone’s head.”

“But if you’d spotted me from the balcony, what was all that emotion about back in the lobby? You already knew I was here.”

“You minimize your meaning, Philip. Still doing battle against being a personage. You don’t entirely take in who you are.”

“So you’re taking it in for me — is that the story?”

When, in response, he lowered his face — as though I’d impertinently raised a subject we’d already agreed to consider off bounds — I saw that his hair had seriously thinned out and was striated gray in a pattern closely mirroring my own. Indeed, all those differences between our features that had been so reassuringly glaring at first sight were dismayingly evaporating the more accustomed to his appearance I became. Penitentially tilted forward like that, his balding head looked astonishingly like mine.

I repeated my question. “Is that the story? Since I apparently don’t ‘take in’ what a personage I am, you have kindly taken it upon yourself to go about as this great personage for me?”

“Like to see a menu, Philip? Or would you like a drink?”

There was still no waiter anywhere, and it occurred to me that this dining room was not even open yet for business. I reminded myself then that the escape hatch of the “dream” was no longer available to me. Because I am sitting in a dining room where there is no food to be obtained; because across from me there sits a man who, I must admit, is nearly my duplicate in every way, down to the button missing from his jacket and the silver-gray filaments of hair, that he has just pointedly displayed to me; because, instead of adjusting manfully to the predicament and intuitively taking control, I am being pushed to within an inch of I don’t know what intemperate act by this stupidly evolving, unendurable farce, apparently all this only means that I am wide awake. What is being manufactured here is not a dream, however weightless and incorporeal life happens to feel at this moment and however alarmingly I may sense myself as a speck of being embodying nothing but its own speckness, a tiny existence even more repugnant than his.

“I’m talking to you,” I said.

“I know. Amazing. And I’m talking to you. And not just in my head. More amazing.”

“I meant I would like an answer from you. A serious answer.”

“Okay, I’ll answer seriously. I’ll be blunt, too. Your prestige has been a little wasted on you. There’s a lot you haven’t done with it that you could have done — a lot of good. That is not a criticism, just a statement of fact. It’s enough for you to write — God knows a writer like you doesn’t owe anyone any more than that. Of course not every writer is equipped to be a public figure.”

“So you’ve gone public for me.”

“A rather cynical way to put it, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes? What is the uncynical way?”

“Look, at bottom — and this is meant with no disrespect, but since bluntness is your style — at bottom you are only instrumental.”

I was looking at his glasses. It had taken this long for me to get round to the glasses, glasses framed in a narrow gold half-frame exactly like my own. … Meanwhile he had reached inside his jacket pocket and withdrawn a worn old billfold (yes, worn exactly like mine) and extracted from it an American passport that he handed across the table to me. The photograph was one taken of me some ten years ago. And the signature was my signature. Flipping through its pages, I saw that Philip Roth had been stamped in and out of half a dozen countries that I myself had never visited: Finland, West Germany, Sweden, Poland, Romania.

“Where’d you get this?”

“Passport office.”

“This happens to be me, you know.” I was pointing to the photograph.

“No,” he quietly replied. “It’s me. Before my cancer.”

“Tell me, did you think this all out beforehand or are you making the story up as you go along?”

“I’m terminally ill,” he replied, and so confusing was that remark that when he reached across for the passport, the strongest and best evidence I had of the fraud that he was perpetrating, I stupidly handed it back to him instead of keeping it and causing a fracas then and there. “Look,” he said, leaning intensely across the table in a way I recognized as an imitation of my own conversational style, “about the two of us and our connection is there really any more to say? Maybe the trouble is that you haven’t read enough Jung. Maybe it comes down to nothing more than that. You’re a Freudian, I’m a Jungian. Read Jung. He’ll help you. I began to study him when I first had to deal with you. He explained for me parallelisms that are unexplainable. You have the Freudian belief in the sovereign power of causality. Causeless events don’t exist in your universe. To you things that aren’t thinkable in intellectual terms aren’t worth thinking about. A lot of smart Jews are like that. Things that aren’t thinkable in intellectual terms don’t even exist. How can I exist, a duplicate of you? How can you exist, a duplicate of me? You and I defy causal explanation. Well, read Jung on ‘synchronicity.’ There are meaningful arrangements that defy causal explanation and they are happening all the time. We are a case of synchronicity, synchronistic phenomena. Read a little Jung, Philip, if only for your peace of mind. ‘The uncontrollability of real things’ — Carl Jung knows all about it. Read The Secret of the Golden Flower. It’ll open your eyes to a whole other world. You look stupefied — without a causal explanation you are lost. How on this planet can there be two men of the same age who happen not only to look alike but to bear the same name? All right, you need causality? I’ll give you causality. Forget about just you and me — there would have been another fifty little Jewish boys of our age growing up to look like us if it hadn’t been for certain tragic events that occurred in Europe between 1939 and 1945. And is it impossible that half a dozen of them might not have been Roths? Is our family name that rare? Is it impossible that a couple of those little Roths might not have been called after a grandfather Fayvel, like you, Philip, and like me? You, from your career perspective, may think it’s horrible that there are two of us and that you are not unique. From my Jewish perspective, I have to say I think it’s horrible that only two are left.”

“No, no, not horrible — actionable. It’s actionable that of the two of us left, one of us goes around impersonating the other. Had there been seven thousand of us left in the world, only one of us, you see, would have written my books.”

“Philip, nobody could treasure your books more than I do. But we are at a point in Jewish history when maybe there is more for us to be talking about, especially together here at last in Jerusalem, than your books. Okay, I have allowed people to confuse me with you. But, tell me, please, how else could I have got to Lech Walesa?”

“You can’t seriously be asking me that question.”

“I can and I am, and with good reason. By seeing Lech Walesa, by having with him the fruitful talk we had, what harm did I do you? What harm did I do anyone? The harm will come only if, because of your books and for no other reason, you should want to be so legalistic as to go ahead and try to undo everything I achieved in Gdansk. Yes, the law is on your side. Who says no? I wouldn’t have undertaken an operation on this scale without first knowing in every last detail the law that I am up against. In the case of Onassis v. Christian Dior — New York, Inc., where a professional model, a Jackie Onassis look-alike, was used in advertisements for Dior dresses, the court determined that the effect of using a look-alike was to represent Jackie Onassis as associated with the product and upheld her claim. In the case of Carson v. Here’s Johnny Portable Toilets, a similar decision was reached. Because the phrase ‘Here’s Johnny’ was associated with Carson and his TV show, the toilet company had no right, according to the court, to display the phrase on their portable toilets. The law couldn’t be any more clear: even if the defendant is using his own name, he may be liable to prosecution for appropriation if the use implies that some other famous individual of that name is actually being represented. I am, as you see, more knowledgeable than you are about exactly what is actionable here. But I really cannot believe that you can believe that there is a telling similarity between the peddling of high-fashion shmatas, let alone the selling and renting of portable toilets, and the mission to which I have dedicated my life. I took your achievement as my own; if you like, all right, I stole your books. But for what purpose? Once again the Jewish people are at a terrible crossroad. Because of Israel. Because of Israel and the way that Israel endangers us all. Forget the law and listen, please, to what I have to say. The majority of Jews don’t choose Israel. Its existence only confuses everyone, Jews and Gentiles alike. I repeat: Israel only endangers everyone. Look at what happened to Pollard. I am haunted by Jonathan Pollard. An American Jew paid by Israeli intelligence to spy against his own country’s military establishment. I’m frightened by Jonathan Pollard. I’m frightened because if I’d been in his job with U.S. naval intelligence, I would have done exactly the same thing. I daresay, Philip Roth, that you would have done the same thing if you were convinced, as Pollard was convinced, that, by turning over to Israel secret U.S. information about Arab weapons systems, you could be saving Jewish lives. Pollard had fantasies about saving Jewish lives. I understand that, you understand that: Jewish lives must be saved, and at absolutely any cost. But the cost is not betraying your country, it’s greater than that: it’s defusing the country that most endangers Jewish lives today — and that is the country called Israel! I would not say this to anyone else — I am saying this only to you. But it must be said. Pollard is just another Jewish victim of the existence of Israel — because Pollard enacted no more, really, than the Israelis demand of Diaspora Jews all the time. I don’t hold Pollard responsible, I hold Israel responsible — Israel, which with its all-embracing Jewish totalism has replaced the goyim as the greatest intimidator of Jews in the world; Israel, which today, with its hunger for Jews, is, in many, many terrible ways, deforming and disfiguring Jews as only our anti-Semitic enemies once had the power to do. Pollard loves Jews. I love Jews. You love Jews. But no more Pollards, please. God willing, no more Demjanjuks either. We haven’t even spoken of Demjanjuk. I want to hear what you saw in that courtroom today. Instead of talking about lawsuits, can we, now that we know each other a little better, talk about —”

“No. No. What is going on in that courtroom is not an issue between us. Nothing there has the least bearing on this fraud that you are perpetrating by passing yourself off as me.”

“Again with the fraud,” he mumbled sadly, with a deliberately comical Jewish intonation. “Demjanjuk in that courtroom has everything to do with us. If it wasn’t for Demjanjuk, for the Holocaust, for Treblinka —”

“If this is a joke,” I said, rising out of my seat, “it is a very stupid, very wicked joke and I advise you to stop it right now! Not Treblinka — not that, please. Look, I don’t know who you are or what you are up to, but I’m warning you — pack up and get out of here. Pack it up and go!”

“Oh, where the hell is a waiter? Your clothes are wet, you haven’t eaten —” And to calm me down he reached across the table and took hold of my hand. “Just hang on — waiter!”

“Hands off, clown! I don’t want lunch — I want you out of my life! Like Christian Dior, like Johnny Carson and the portable toilet — out!”

“Christ, you’re on a short fuse, Philip. You’re a real heart-attack type. You act like I’m trying to ridicule you, when, Christ, if I valued you any more —”

“Enough — you’re a fraud!”

“But,” he pleaded, “you don’t know yet what I’m trying to do.”

“I do know. You are about to empty Israel of the Ashkenazis. You are about to resettle Jews in all the wonderful places where they were once so beloved by the local yokels. You and Walesa, you and Ceauescu are about to avert a second Holocaust!”

“But — then — that was you,” he cried. “You were Pierre Roget! You tricked me!” And he slumped over in his chair at the horror of the discovery, pure commedia dell’arte.

“Repeat that, will you? I did what?”

But he was now in tears, second time since we’d met. What is it with this guy? Watching him shamelessly carrying on so emotionally reminded me of my Halcion crying jags. Was this his parody of my powerlessness, still more of his comic improvisation, or was he hooked on Halcion himself? Is this a brilliant creative disposition whose ersatz satire I’m confronting or a genuine ersatz maniac? I thought, Let Oliver Sacks figure him out — you get a taxi and go, but then somewhere within me a laugh began, and soon I was overcome with laughter, laughter pouring forth from some cavernous core of understanding deeper even than my fears: despite all the unanswered questions, never, never had anybody seemed less of a menace to me or a more pathetic rival for my birthright. He struck me instead as a great idea … yes, a great idea breathing with life!

Although I was over an hour late for our appointment, I found Aharon still waiting for me in the café of the Ticho House when finally I arrived there. He had figured that it was the rainstorm that delayed me and had been sitting alone at a table with a glass of water, patiently reading a book.

For the next hour and a half we ate our lunch and talked about his novel Tzili, beginning with how the child’s consciousness seemed to me the hidden perspective from which not just this but other novels of his were narrated as well. I said nothing about anything else. Having left the aspirant Philip Roth weeping in that empty hotel dining room, crushed and humiliated by my loud laughter, I had no idea what to expect next. I had faced him down — so now what?

This, I told myself: this. Stick to the task!

Out of the long lunchtime conversation, Aharon and I were able to compose, in writing, the next segment of our exchange.

ROTH: In your books, there’s no news from the public realm that might serve as a warning to an Appelfeld victim, nor is the victim’s impending doom presented as part of a European catastrophe. The historical focus is supplied by the reader, who understands, as the victims cannot, the magnitude of the enveloping evil. Your reticence as a historian, when combined with the historical perspective of a knowing reader, accounts for the peculiar impact your work has — for the power that emanates from stories that are told through such very modest means. Also, dehistoricizing the events and blurring the background, you probably approximate the disorientation felt by people who were unaware that they were on the brink of a cataclysm.

It’s occurred to me that the perspective of the adults in your fiction resembles in its limitations the viewpoint of a child, who, of course, has no historical calendar in which to place unfolding events and no intellectual means of penetrating their meaning. I wonder if your own consciousness as a child at the edge of the Holocaust isn’t mirrored in the simplicity with which the imminent horror is perceived in your novels.

APPELFELD: You’re right. In Badenheim 1939 I completely ignored the historical explanation. I assumed that the historical facts were known and that readers would fill in what was missing. You’re also correct, it seems to me, in assuming that my description of the Second World War has something in it of a child’s vision. Historical explanations, however, have been alien to me ever since I became aware of myself as an artist. And the Jewish experience in the Second World War was not “historical.” We came in contact with archaic mythical forces, a kind of dark subconscious the meaning of which we did not know, nor do we know it to this day. This world appears to be rational (with trains, departure times, stations, and engineers), but in fact these were journeys of the imagination, lies and ruses, which only deep, irrational drives could have invented. I didn’t understand, nor do I yet understand, the motives of the murderers.

I was a victim, and I try to understand the victim. That is a broad, complicated expanse of life that I’ve been trying to deal with for thirty years now. I haven’t idealized the victims. I don’t think that in Badenheim 1939 there’s any idealization either. By the way, Badenheim is a rather real place, and spas like that were scattered all over Europe, shockingly petit bourgeois and idiotic in their formalities. Even as a child I saw how ridiculous they were.

It is generally agreed, to this day, that Jews are deft, cunning, and sophisticated creatures, with the wisdom of the world stored up in them. But isn’t it fascinating to see how easy it was to fool the Jews? With the simplest, almost childish tricks they were gathered up in ghettos, starved for months, encouraged with false hopes, and finally sent to their death by train. That ingenuousness stood before my eyes while I was writing Badenheim. In that ingenuousness I found a kind of distillation of humanity. Their blindness and deafness, their obsessive preoccupation with themselves is an integral part of their ingenuousness. The murderers were practical, and they knew just what they wanted. The ingenuous person is always a shlimazl, a clownish victim of misfortune, never hearing the danger signals in time, getting mixed up, tangled up, and finally falling into the trap. Those weaknesses charmed me. I fell in love with them. The myth that the Jews run the world with their machinations turned out to be somewhat exaggerated.

ROTH: Of all your translated books, Tzili depicts the harshest reality and the most extreme form of suffering. Tzili, the simplest child of a poor Jewish family, is left alone when her family flees the Nazi invasion. The novel recounts her horrendous adventures in surviving and her excruciating loneliness among the brutal peasants for whom she works. The book strikes me as a counterpart to Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird. Though less grotesque, Tzili portrays a fearful child in a world even bleaker and more barren than Kosinski’s, a child moving in isolation through a landscape as uncongenial to human life as any in Beckett’s Molloy.

As a boy you wandered alone like Tzili after your escape, at age nine, from the camp. I’ve been wondering why, when you came to transform your own life in an unknown place, hiding out among the hostile peasants, you decided to imagine a girl as the survivor of this ordeal. And did it occur to you ever not to fictionalize this material but to present your experiences as you remember them, to write a survivor’s tale as direct, say, as Primo Levi’s depiction of his Auschwitz incarceration?

APPELFELD: I have never written about things as they happened. All my works are indeed chapters from my most personal experience, but nevertheless they are not “the story of my life.” The things that happened to me in my life have already happened, they are already formed, and time has kneaded them and given them shape. To write things as they happened means to enslave oneself to memory, which is only a minor element in the creative process. To my mind, to create means to order, sort out and choose the words and the pace that fit the work. The materials are indeed materials from one’s life, but, ultimately, the creation is an independent creature.

I tried several times to write “the story of my life” in the woods after I ran away from the camp. But all my efforts were in vain. I wanted to be faithful to reality and to what really happened. But the chronicle that emerged proved to be a weak scaffolding. The result was rather meager, an unconvincing imaginary tale. The things that are most true are easily falsified.

Reality, as you know, is always stronger than the human imagination. Not only that, reality can permit itself to be unbelievable, inexplicable, out of all proportion. The created work, to my regret, cannot permit itself all that.

The reality of the Holocaust surpassed any imagination. If I remained true to the facts, no one would believe me. But the moment I chose a girl, a little older than I was at that time, I removed “the story of my life” from the mighty grip of memory and gave it over to the creative laboratory. There memory is not the only proprietor. There one needs a causal explanation, a thread to tie things together. The exceptional is permissible only if it is part of an overall structure and contributes to an understanding of that structure. I had to remove those parts that were unbelievable from “the story of my life” and present a more credible version.

When I wrote Tzili I was about forty years old. At that time I was interested in the possibilities of naiveness in art. Can there be a naive modern art? It seemed to me that without the naiveté still found among children and old people and, to some extent, in ourselves, the work of art would be flawed. I tried to correct that flaw. God knows how successful I was.

Dear Philip,

I enraged you/you blitzed me. Every word I spoke — stupid/ wrong/unnatural. Had to be. Been dreading/dreaming this meeting since 1959. Saw your photo on Goodbye, Columbus/knew that my life would never be the same. Explained to everyone we were two different people/had no desire to be anyone but myself/wanted my fate/hoped your first book would be your last/wanted you to fail and disappear/thought constantly about your dying. IT WAS NOT WITHOUT RESISTANCE THAT I ACCEPTED MY ROLE: THE NAKED YOU/THE MESSIANIC YOU/THE SACRIFICIAL YOU. MY JEWISH PASSIONS SHIELDED BY NOTHING. MY JEWISH LOVING UNRESTRAINED.

LET ME EXIST. Do not destroy me to preserve your good name. I AM YOUR GOOD NAME. I am only spending the renown you hoard. You hide yourself/in lonely rooms/country recluse/anonymous expatriate/garreted monk. Never spent it as you should/might/wouldn’t/couldn’t: IN BEHALF OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE. Please! Allow me to be the public instrument through which you express the love for the Jews/the hatred for their enemies/that is in every word you ever wrote. Without legal intervention.

Judge me not by words but by the woman who bears this letter. To you I say everything stupidly. Judge me not by awkward words which falsify everything I feel/know. Around you I will never be a smith with words. See beyond words. I am not the writer/I am something else. I AM THE YOU THAT IS NOT WORDS.

Yours,

Philip Roth

The immediate physical reality of her was so strong and exciting — and unsettling — that it was a little like sitting across a table from the moon. She was about thirty-five, a voluptuously healthy-looking creaturely female around whose firm, rosy neck it wouldn’t have been inappropriate to tie the county fair’s first-prize ribbon — this was a biological winner, this was somebody who was well. Her whitish blond hair was worn casually pinned in a tousled bun at the back of her head, and she had a wide mouth, the warm interior of which she showed you, like a happy, panting dog, even when she wasn’t speaking, as though she were taking your words in through her mouth, as though another’s words were not received by the brain but processed — once past the small, even, splendidly white teeth and the pink, perfect gums — by the whole, radiant, happy-go-lucky thing. Her vivacious alertness, even her powers of concentration, seemed situated in the vicinity of her jaws; her eyes, beautifully clear and strongly focused though they were, did not appear to reach anywhere like so deep into the terrific ubiquity of all that hereness. She had the substantial breasts and the large round behind of a much heavier, less sprightly woman — she might, in another life, have been a fecund wet nurse from the Polish hinterlands. In fact, she was an oncology nurse and he had met her five years earlier, when he was first a cancer patient in a Chicago hospital. Her name was Wanda Jane “Jinx” Possesski,° and she aroused in me the sort of yearnings excited by the thought of a luxuriously warm fur coat on a freezing winter day: specifically, a craving to be enwrapped.

The woman by whom he wished to be judged was sitting across from me at a small table in the garden of the American Colony courtyard, beneath the charming arched windows of the old hotel. The violent morning rain squalls had subsided into little more than a sun shower while I was having lunch with Aharon, and now, at a few minutes before three, the sky was clear and the courtyard stones aglitter with light. It felt like a May afternoon, warm, breezy, lullingly serene, even though it was January of 1988 and we happened to be only a few hundred yards from where Israeli soldiers had teargassed a rock-throwing mob of young Arab boys just the day before. Demjanjuk was on trial for murdering close to a million Jews at Treblinka, Arabs were rising up against the Jewish authorities all over the Occupied Territories, and yet from where I was seated amid the lush shrubbery, between a lemon tree and an orange tree, the world could not have seemed any more enticing. Pleasant Arab waiters, singing little birds, a good cold beer — and this woman of his who evoked in me the illusion that nothing could be more durable than the perishable matter from which we are made.

All the while I read his dreadful letter she watched me as though she’d brought to the hotel directly from President Lincoln the original manuscript of the Gettysburg Address. The only reason I didn’t tell her, “This is as loony a piece of prose as I’ve ever received in my life,” and tear it into little pieces was because I didn’t want her to get up and go. I wanted to hear her talk, for one thing: it was my chance to find out more, only more lies perhaps, but then, enough lies, and maybe some truth would begin trickling through. And I wanted to hear her talk because of the beguilingly ambiguous timbre of her voice, which was harmonically a puzzle to me. The voice was like something you’ve gotten out of the freezer that’s taking its own sweet time to thaw: moist and spongy enough at the edges to eat, otherwise off-puttingly refrigerated down to its deep-frozen core. It was difficult to tell just how coarse she was, if there was a great deal going on in her or if maybe there was nothing at all and she was just a petty criminal’s obedient moll. Probably it was only my infatuation with the exciting fullness of such a female presence that led me to visualize a mist of innocence hanging over her bold carnality that might enable me to get somewhere. I folded the letter in thirds and slipped it into my inside pocket — what I should have done with his passport.

“It’s incredible,” she said. “Overwhelming. You even read the same way.”

“From left to right.”

“Your facial expressions, the way you take everything in, even your clothes — it’s uncanny.”

“But then everything is uncanny, is it not? Right down to our sharing the very same name.”

“And,” she said, smiling widely, “the sarcasm, too.”

“He tells me that I should judge him by the woman who bears his letter, but much as I’d like to, it’s hard, in my position, not to judge him by other things first.”

“By what he’s undertaken. I know. It’s so gigantic for Jews. For Gentiles, too. I think for everyone. The lives he’ll save. The lives he’s saved.”

“Already? Yes? Whose?”

“Mine, for one.”

“I thought it was you who was the nurse and he who was the patient — I thought you’d helped save him.”

“I’m a recovering anti-Semite. I was saved by A-S.A.”

“A-S.A.?”

“Anti-Semites Anonymous. The recovery group Philip founded.”

“It’s just one brainstorm after another with Philip,” I said. “He didn’t tell me about A-S.A.”

“He didn’t tell you hardly anything. He couldn’t. He’s so in awe of you, he got all bottled up.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say bottled up. I’d say unbottled up almost to a fault.”

“All I know is he came back in terrible shape. He’s still in bed. He says he disgraced himself. He came away thinking you hated him.”

“Why on earth would I hate Philip?”

“That’s why he wrote this letter.”

“And sent you to act as his advocate.”

“I’m not a big reader, Mr. Roth. I’m not a reader at all. When Philip was my patient I didn’t even know you existed, let alone that you were his look-alike. People are always mistaking him for you, everywhere we go — everywhere, everyone, except illiterate me. To me he was just the most intense person I’d ever met in my life. He still is. There’s no one like him.”

“Except?” I said, tapping my chest.

“I meant the way he’s set out to change the world.”

“Well, he’s come to the right place for that. Every year they treat dozens of tourists here who go around thinking themselves the Messiah and exhorting mankind to repent. It’s a famous phenomenon at the mental-health center — local psychiatrists call it ‘Jerusalem syndrome.’ Most of them think they’re the Messiah or God, and the rest claim to be Satan. You got off easy with Philip.”

But nothing I said, however disdainful or outright contemptuous of him, had any noticeable effect on the undampable conviction with which she continued extolling to me the achievements of this blatant fraud. Was it she suffering from that novel form of hysteria known as Jerusalem syndrome? The government psychiatrist who had entertained me with a witty exposition on the subject a few years back had told me that there are also Christians they find wandering out in the desert who believe themselves to be John the Baptist. I thought: his harbinger, Jinx the Baptist, mouthpiece for the Messiah in whom she’s discovered salvation and the exalted purpose of her life. “The Jews,” she said, staring straight out at me with her terribly gullible eyes, “are all he thinks about. Night and day, since his cancer, his life has been dedicated to the Jews.”

“And you,” I asked, “who believe in him so — are you now a Jew lover too?”

But I could not seem to say anything to impair her buoyancy, and for the first time I wondered if perhaps she was afloat on dope, if both of them were, and if that accounted for everything, including the very soulful smile my sharp words had evoked — if behind the audacious mystery of these two there was nothing but a pound of good pot.

“Philip lover, yes; Jew lover, no. Uh-uh. All Jinx can love, and it’s plenty for her, is no longer hating Jews, no longer blaming Jews, no longer detesting Jews on sight. No, I can’t say that Jinx Possesski is a lover of Jews or that Jinx Possesski ever will be. What I can say — okay? — is what I said: I’m a recovering anti-Semite.”

“And what’s that like?” I asked, thinking now that there was something not entirely unbelievable about her words and that I could do no better than to be still and listen.

“Oh, it’s a story.”

“How long are you in recovery?”

“Almost five years. I was poisoned by it. A lot, I think now, had to do with the job. I don’t blame the job, I blame Jinx — but still, there’s one thing about a cancer hospital: the pain is just something that you can’t imagine. When someone’s in pain, you almost want to run out of the room, screaming to get the pain medication. People have no idea, they really and truly have no idea, what it is like to have pain like that. Their pain is so outrageous, and everyone is afraid of dying. There’s a lot of failure in cancer — you know, it’s not a maternity ward. On a maternity ward, I might never have found out the truth about myself. It might never have happened to me. You want to hear all this?”

“If you want to tell me,” I said. What I wanted to hear was why she loved this fraud.

“I got drawn into people’s suffering,” she said. “I couldn’t help it. If they cry, I hold their hand, I hug them — if they cry, I cry. I hug them, they hug me — to me there’s no way not to. It’s like you were their savior. Jinx could do no wrong. But I can’t be their savior. And that got to me after a while.” The nonsensically happy look slipped suddenly from Jinx’s face and she was convulsed by a rush of tenderness that left her for a moment unable to go on. “These patients …” she said, her voice completely deiced now and as soft through and through as a small child’s, “… they look at you with those eyes. …” The magnitude of the emotions she was reckoning with took me by surprise. If this is an act, then she’s Sarah Bernhardt. “They look at you with those eyes, they’re so wide open — and they grab, they grab — and I give, but I can’t give them life. … After a while,” she went on, the emotion subsiding into something sad and rueful, “I was just helping people to die. Make you more comfortable. Give you more pain medication. Give you a back massage. Turn you a certain way. Anything. I did a lot for patients. I always went one beyond the medical thing. ‘You wanna play cards, you wanna smoke a little marijuana?’ The patients were the only thing that meant anything to me. After a day when maybe three people died, you bagged the last person — ‘This is it,’ you say, ‘I’m fuckin’ tired of puttin’ a fuckin’ tag on someone’s toe!’” How violently the moods wavered! One little word was enough to turn her around — and the little word in this case was it. “This is it,” and she was as radiant with a crude, bold, coarse forcefulness as she had been stricken just the minute before by all that anguishing heartache. What there was to subject her to him I still couldn’t say, but what might subordinate a man to her I had no difficulty perceiving: everything existed in such generous portions. Not since I had last read Strindberg could I remember having run across such a tantalizing layer cake of female excitement. The desire I then suppressed — to reach out and cup her breast — was only in part the urge men have perpetually to suppress when the fire is suddenly lit in a public place: beneath the soft, plump mass of breast I wanted to feel, against my palm, the power of that heart.

“You know,” she was saying, “I’m sick and tired of turning someone over and thinking that this is not going to affect me! ‘Tag ’em and wrap’em. Have you tagged them and wrapped them yet? Tag ’em and wrap ’em up.’ ‘No, because the family hasn’t come yet. Get the fuckin’ family here so we can tag ’em and wrap ’em, and get the hell out of here!’ I OD’d on death, Mr. Roth. Because,” and again she could not speak, so felled was she by these memories “… because there was too much death. It was too much dying, you know? And I just couldn’t handle myself. I turned on the Jews. The Jewish doctors. Their wives. Their kids. And they were good doctors. Excellent doctors, excellent surgeons. But I’d see the photographs framed on their desks, the kids with tennis rackets, the wives by the pool, I’d hear them on the phone, making dates for the evening like nobody on the floor was dying — planning for their tennis, their vacations, their trips to London and Paris, ‘We’re staying at the Ritz, we’re eating at the Schmitz, we’re going to back up a truck and empty out Gucci’s,’ and I’d freak out, man, I’d go off on a real anti-Semitic binge. I worked on the gastric floor — stomach-liver-pancreatic floor. Two other nurses about the same age, and it was like an infection that went from me to them. At our nursing station, which was great, we had the greatest music, a lot of rock ’n’ roll, and we gave each other a tremendous amount of support, but we were all, like, calling in sick a lot, and I was yakking and yakking about the Jews more and more. We were all young there, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five — five days a week, and you worked overtime and every night you stayed late. You stayed late because these people were so sick, and I’d think about those Jewish doctors home with their wives and their kids — even when I was away from the floor, it wouldn’t leave me. I was on fire with it. The Jews, the Jews. When we’d work evenings, all three of us together, we’d get home, smoke a joint, definitely smoke a joint — couldn’t wait to roll it. We made piña coladas. Anything. All night. If we didn’t drink at home we’d get dressed up or throw our makeup on and go out, Near North, Rush Street, the scene. Go to all the bars. Sometimes you met people and you went on dates and you fucked — okay? — but not really as an outlet. The outlet for the dying was pot. The outlet for the dying was the Jews. With me anti-Semitism was in the family. Is it hereditary, environmental, or strictly a moral flaw? A topic of discussion at A-S.A. meetings. The answer? We don’t care why we have it, we are here to admit that we have it and help each other get rid of it. But in me I think I had it for all the reasons you can. My father hated them, to begin with. A boiler engineer in Ohio. I heard it growing up but it was like wallpaper, it never meant a thing before I was a cancer nurse. But once I started — okay? — I couldn’t stop. Their money. Their wives. Those women, those faces of theirs — those hideous Jewish faces. Their kids. Their clothes. Their voices. You name it. But mostly the look, the Jewish look. It didn’t stop. I didn’t stop. It got to the point that the resident, this one doctor, Kaplan, he didn’t like to look you in the eyes that much — he would say something about a patient and all I saw were those Jewish lips. He was a young guy but already he had the underslung jaw like the old Jews get, and the long ears, and those real liver lips — the whole bit that I couldn’t stand. That’s how I went berserk. That’s when I hit bottom. He was scared because he was not used to giving so much pain medication. He was scared the patient would suffer respiratory arrest and die. But she was a woman my age — so young, so young. She had cancer that went everywhere. And she was just in so much pain. She was in so much pain. Mr. Roth, a terrific amount of pain.” And the tears were streaming onto her face, the mascara running, and the impulse I now suppressed was not to palpate her large, warm breast or to measure the warlike strength of the heart beneath but to take her two hands from the tabletop and enclose them in mine, those transgressive, tabooless nurse’s hands, so deceptively clean and innocent-seeming, that had nonetheless been everywhere, swathing, spraying, washing, wiping, freely touching everywhere, handling everything, open wounds, drainage bags, every running orifice, as naturally as a cat pawing a mouse. “I had to get out of cancer. I didn’t want to be a cancer nurse. I just wanted to be a nurse, anything. I was screaming at him, at Kaplan, at those fucking Jew lips, ‘You better fucking give us the pain medication we need! Or we are going to get the attending and he’s going to be pissed off at you for waking him up! Get it! Get it now!’ You know,” she said, surprisingly childishly. “You know? You know?”

You know, like, okay? — and still there was enough persuasiveness there to make you know.

“She was young,” she told me, “strong. Their will is very, very strong. It’ll keep them going forever, despite as much pain as they can endure. Even more pain than they can endure and they endure. It’s horrible. So you give them more medication because their heart is so strong and their will is so strong. They’re in pain, Mr. Roth — you have to give them something! You know? You know?”

“I do now, yes.”

“They need an almost elephant dose of morphine, the people that are so young.” And she made none of the effort she had the moment before to hide her weeping in her shoulder or to pause and steady herself. “They’re young — it’s doubly bad! I shouted at Dr. Kaplan, ‘I will not allow someone to be cruel to someone who is dying!’ So he got it for me. And I gave it to her.” Momentarily she seemed to see herself in the scene, to see herself giving it to her, to that woman her own age, “so young, so young.” She was there again. Maybe, I thought, she’s always there and that’s why she’s with him.

“What happened?” I asked her.

Weakly — and this was no weakling — but very weakly she finally answered, all the while looking down at the hands that I persisted in envisioning everywhere, hands that she once must have washed two hundred times a day. “She died,” she said.

When she looked up again she was smiling sadly, certifying with that smile that she was out of cancer now, that all the dying, though it hadn’t stopped, though it never stopped, no longer required that she smoke pot and down piña coladas and hate the likes of Dr. Kaplan and me. “She was going to die anyway, she was ready to die, but she died on me. I killed her. Her skin was beautiful. You know? She was a waitress. A good person. An outgoing person. She told me she wanted six children. But I gave her morphine and she died. I went berserk. I went to the bathroom and I went hysterical. The Jews! The Jews! The head nurse came in. She was the reason why you see me here and not in jail. Because the family was very bad. They came in screaming. ‘What happened? What happened?’ Families get so guilt-ridden because they can’t do anything and they don’t want her to die. They know that she’s suffering horribly, that there’s no hope, yet when she dies, ‘What happened? What happened?’ But the head nurse was, like, so good, a great woman, and she held me. ‘Possesski, you gotta get out of here.’ It took me a year. I was twenty-six years old. I got transferred. I got on the surgical floor. There’s always hope on the surgical floor. Except there’s a procedure called ‘open and close.’ Where you open them up and the doctor won’t even attempt anything. And they stay and they die. They die! Mr. Roth, I couldn’t get away from death. Then I met Philip. He had cancer. He was operated on. Hope! Hope! Then the pathology report. Three lymph nodes are involved. So I’m, like, ‘Oh, my God.’ I didn’t want to get attached. I tried to stop myself. You always try to stop yourself. That’s what the cursing is all about. The tough talk isn’t so tough, you know? You think it’s cold. It’s not cold at all. That happened with Philip. I thought I hated him. Okay, I wanted to hate him. I should have learned from that girl I killed. Stay away. Look at his looks. But instead I fell in love with him, I fell in love with his looks, with every flicking Jewish thing about him. That talk. Those jokes. That intensity. The imitations. Crazy with life. He was the one patient ever who gave me more strength than I gave them. We fell in love.”

Just then, through the large window opposite me, I noticed Demjanjuk’s legal team in the lobby beyond the courtyard — they too must be guests here in this East Jerusalem hotel and on their way either to or from the afternoon session. I recognized Sheftel first, the Israeli lawyer, and then the other two; with them, still dressed impeccably in suit and tie, as though he were lawyer number four, was Demjanjuk’s tall young son. Jinx looked to see what had diverted my attention from her life’s searing drama of death and love.

“Know why Demjanjuk continues lying?” she asked.

“Is he lying?”

“Is he! The defense has nothing.”

“Sheftel looks awfully cocky to me.”

“Bluff, all bluff — there’s no alibi at all. The alibi’s proved false a dozen times over. And the card, the Trawniki card, it’s got to be Demjanjuk’s — it’s his picture, his signature.”

“And not a fake?”

“The prosecution has proved it’s not fake. And those old people on the witness stand, the people who cleaned out the gas chambers for him, the people who worked alongside him every day, it’s overwhelming, the case against him. Anyway, Demjanjuk knows they know. He acts like a stupid peasant but he’s a cunning bastard and no fool. He knows he’ll be hanged. He knows it’s coming to him, too.”

“So why does he continue to lie?”

She jerked a thumb toward the lobby, a brusque little gesture that took me by surprise after the impassioned vulnerability of her aria, something she’d probably learned to mime, along with the anti-Semitism, from the boiler engineer, her father. And what she was saying about the trial I figured she must be miming too, for these were no longer words stained with her blood but words she repeated as though she didn’t even believe in the meaning of words. Parroting her hero, I thought, as the adoring mate of a hero will.

“The son,” she explained. “He wants the son to be good and not to know. Demjanjuk’s lying for the son. If Demjanjuk confessed, that boy would be finished. He wouldn’t have a chance.” One of those hands of hers settled familiarly on my arm, one of those hands whose history of besmirchment by the body’s secretions I could not stop myself envisioning; and for me, in that raw contact, there was such a shock of intimacy that I felt momentarily absorbed into her being, very like what an infant must feel back when the mother’s hands aren’t mere appendages but the very incarnation of her whole warm, wonderful big body. Resist, I thought, this overtempting presence — these are not two people with your interests at heart!

“Talk to him. Sit down and talk to Philip, please.”

“‘Philip’ and I have nothing to talk about.”

“Oh, don’t,” she begged me, and as her fingers closed on me even more tightly, the pressure of her thumb in the crook of my arm triggered a rush of just about everything urging me in the wrong direction, “please, don’t. …”

“Don’t what?”

“Undermine what he is doing!”

“It’s not I who is doing the undermining.”

“But the man,” she cried, “is in remission!”

Even under less excitable conditions, “remission” is not a word easy to ignore, any more than “guilty” or “innocent” is in the courtroom when pronounced by the jury foreman to the judge.

I said, “Remission from cancer is nothing that I am against, for him or anyone. I am not even against his so-called Diasporism. I have no interest in those ideas either way. What I am against is his entangling our two lives and confusing people about who is who. What I cannot permit and what I will not permit is his encouraging people to believe that he is me. That must stop!”

“It will — okay? It’ll stop.”

“Will it? How do you know?”

“Because Philip told me to tell you that it would.”

“Yes, did he? Why didn’t you then? Why didn’t he, in that letter — that completely idiotic letter!” I said, angrily remembering the vacuous pithiness, the meaningless dissonance, the hysterical incoherence of that life-and-death longhand, remembering all those stupid slashes only vaguely disguising what I surmised he’d as soon do with me.

“You’re misunderstanding him,” she pleaded. “It will stop. He’s sick about how this has upset you. What happened has sent him reeling. I mean with vertigo. I mean literally he can’t stand up. I left him there in bed. He crashed, Mr. Roth, completely.”

“I see. He thought I wouldn’t mind. He thought the interviews with the journalists would just roll off my back.”

“If you would meet with him one more time —”

“I met with him. I’m meeting with you,” I said, and pulled my arm out from beneath her hand. “If you love him, Miss Possesski, and are devoted to him, and want to avoid the sort of trouble that might possibly endanger the health of a cancer patient in remission, then you’d be well advised to stop him now. He must stop using my name now. This is as far as I go with meetings.”

“But,” she said, her voice heating up and her hands clenched in anger, “that’s like asking you to stop using his name.”

“No, no, not at all! Your patient in remission is a liar. Whatever great motives may be motivating him, he happens to be lying through his teeth! His name is not the same as mine, and if he told you that it was, then he lied to you, too.”

Just the contortion of her mouth caused me instinctively to raise a hand to ward off a blow. And what I caught with that hand was a fist quite hard enough to have broken my nose. “Prick!” she snarled. “Your name! Your name! Do you ever, ever, ever think of anything other than your fucking name!”

Interlocked on the tabletop now, our fingers began a fight of their own; her grip was anything but girlish, and even pressing with all my strength, I was barely able to keep her five fingers immobilized between mine. Meanwhile I kept an eye on the other hand.

“You’re asking the wrong man,” I said. “The question is, ‘Does he?’”

Our struggle was being watched by the hotel waiters. A group of them had gathered just inside the windowed door to the lobby so as to look on at what must have struck them as a lovers’ quarrel, no more or less dangerous — and entertaining — than that, a touch of comic relief from the violence in the street, and probably not a little pornographically piquant.

“You should be a tenth as selfless, a hundredth as selfless! Do you know many dying men? Do you know many dying men whose thoughts are only for saving others? Do you know many people kept alive on a hundred and fifty pills a day who could begin to do what he is doing? What he went through in Poland just to see Walesa! I was worn out. But Philip would not be stopped, not by anything. Dizzy spells that would fell a horse and still he doesn’t stop! He falls down, he gets up, he keeps going. And the pain — he is like trying to excrete his own insides! The people we have to see before we even get to Walesa! It wasn’t the shipyards where we met him. That’s just stuff for the papers. It was way the hell out and beyond. The car rides, the passwords, the hiding places — and still this man does not stop! Eighteen months ago every last doctor gave him no more than six months to live — and here he is, in Jerusalem, alive! Let him have what keeps him alive! Let this man go on with his dream!”

“The dream that he is me?”

“You! You! Nothing in your world but you! Stop stroking my hand! Let go of my hand! Stop coming on with me!”

“You tried to hit me with that hand.”

“You are trying to seduce me! Let me go!”

She was wearing a belted blue poplin raincoat over a short denim skirt and a white ribbed sweater, a very youthful outfit, and it made her appear, when our fingers fell apart and she rose in a fury from her chair, rather statuesquely pubescent, a woman’s fullness coyly displayed in mock-maidenly American disguise.

In the features of one of the young waiters huddled up to the glass of the lobby door I saw the feverish look of a man who hopes with all his heart that the long-awaited striptease is about to begin. Or perhaps, when her hand reached down into her raincoat pocket, he thought that he was going to witness a shooting, that the voluptuous woman was about to pull a gun. And as I was still completely in the dark about what this couple was after and what they were truly contriving to do, my expectations were all at once no more realistic than his. In coming to Jerusalem like this, refusing to consider seriously an impostor’s more menacing meaning, heeding only my desperate yearning to be intact and entire, to prove that I was unimpaired by that ghastly breakdown and once again a robust, forceful, undamaged man, I had made the biggest, stupidest mistake yet, even more unfortunate a mistake than my lurid first marriage and one from which, it appeared, there was to be no escape. I should have listened to Claire.

But what the voluptuous woman pulled from her pocket was only an envelope. “You shit! The remission depends on this!” And hurling the envelope onto the table, she ran from the courtyard and out of the hotel through the lobby, where the thrill-seeking, mesmerized waiters were no longer to be seen.

Only when I began to read this second communication from him, which was composed in longhand like the first, did I realize how skillfully he had worked to make his handwriting resemble my own. Alone now, without all her radiant realness to distract me, I saw on this sheet of paper the pinched and twisted signs of my own impatient, overaccelerated left-handed scrawl, the same irregular slope climbing unevenly uphill, the o’s and e’s and α’s compressed and all but indistinguishable from i’s, the i’s themselves hastily undotted and the t’s uncrossed, the “The” in the heading atop the page a perfect replica of the “The” I’d been writing since elementary school, which looked more like “Fli.” It was, like mine, a hand in a hurry to be finished with writing abnormally into, rather than flowing right-handedly away from, the barrier of its own impeding torso. Of all the falsifications I knew of so far, including the phony passport, this document was far and away the most professional and even more infuriating to behold than the forgery of his conniving face. He’d even taken a crack at my style. At least the style wasn’t his, if that loonily cryptic, slash-bedecked letter she’d given me first was any sample of the prose that came to this counterfeiter “naturally.”

1. We admit that we are haters prone to prejudice and powerless to control our hatred.

2. We recognize that it is not Jews who have wronged us but we who hold Jews responsible for our troubles and the world’s evils. It is we who wrong them by believing this.

3. A Jew may well have shortcomings like any other human being, but the shortcomings we are here to be honest about are our own, i.e., paranoia, sadism, negativism, destructiveness, envy.

4. Our money problems are not of the Jews’ making but of our own.

5. Our job problems are not of the Jews’ making but of our own (so too with sexual problems, marital problems, problems in the community).

6. Anti-Semitism is a form of flight from reality, a refusal to think honestly about ourselves and our society.

7. Inasmuch as anti-Semites cannot control their hatred, they are not like other people. We recognize that even to drop a casual anti-Semitic slur endangers our struggle to rid ourselves of our sickness.

8. Helping to detoxify others is the cornerstone of our recovery. Nothing will so much ensure immunity from the illness of anti-Semitism as intensive work with other anti-Semites.

9. We are not scholars, we do not care why we have this dreadful illness, we come together to admit that we have it and to help one another get rid of it.

10. In the fellowship of A-S.A. we strive to master the temptation to Jew hatred in all its forms.

4 JEWISH MISCHIEF

“Now suppose,” I said to Aharon when we met to resume our work over lunch the next day, “suppose this isn’t a stupid prank, isn’t an escapade of some crazy kind, isn’t a malevolent hoax; suppose, despite every indication to the contrary, these two are not a pair of con artists or crackpots — however astonishing the supposition, suppose that they are exactly what they present themselves to be and that every word they speak is the truth.” My resolve to compartmentalize my impostor, to keep coolly disengaged, and, while in Jerusalem, to remain concentrated solely on the assignment with Aharon had, of course, collapsed completely before the provocation of Wanda Jane’s visit. As Claire had forlornly predicted (as I who’d phoned him right off the bat in the guise of Pierre Roget, secretly had never doubted), the very absurdity of his impersonation was too tantalizing for me to be able to think of anything else quite so excitedly. “Aharon, suppose it is so. All of it. A man named XYZ happens to look like the twin of a well-known writer whose name, remarkably enough, is also XYZ. Perhaps some three or four generations back, before the millions of European Jews migrated en masse to America, they were rooted in the same Galician clan — and perhaps not. Doesn’t matter. Even if they share no common ancestry — and wildly unlikely as all the similarities might seem — such a coincidence could happen and in this instance it does. The duplicate XYZ is mistaken repeatedly for the original XYZ and naturally comes to take a more than passing interest in him. Whether he then develops his interest in certain Jewish contradictions because these figure prominently in the writer’s work or whether they engage him for biographical reasons of his own, the duplicate finds in Jews a source for fantasies no less excessive than those of the original. For instance: Because the duplicate XYZ believes that the state of Israel, as currently constituted, is destined to be destroyed by its Arab enemies in a nuclear exchange he invents Diasporism, a program that seeks to resettle all Israeli Jews of European origin back in those countries where they or their families were residents before the outbreak of the Second World War and thereby to avert ‘a second Holocaust.’ He’s inspired to pursue its implementation by the example of Theodor Herzl, whose plan for a Jewish national state had seemed no less utopian and antihistorical to its critics some fifty-odd years before it came to fruition. Of the numerous strong arguments against his utopia, none is more of an impediment than the fact that these are countries in which Jewish security and well-being would be perennially menaced by the continuing existence of European anti-Semitism, and it’s with this problem still obstructing him that he enters the hospital as a cancer patient and finds himself being nursed by Jinx Possesski. He is ill, Jewish, and battling to live, and she is not only pantingly alive but rabidly anti-Semitic. A volcanic drama of repulsion and attraction ensues — bitter cracks, remorseful apologies, sudden clashes, tender reconciliations, educational tirades, furtive fondlings, weeping, embraces, wrenching emotional confusion, and then, late one night, there comes the discovery, the revelation, the breakthrough. Sitting at the foot of the bed in the dark hospital room where, struggling miserably against the dry heaves, he is on the chemotherapy intravenous drip, the nurse discloses to her suffering patient the miseries of her consuming disease. She tells it all as she never has before, and while she does, XYZ comes to realize that there are anti-Semites who are like alcoholics who actually want to stop but don’t know how. The analogy to alcoholism continues to deepen the longer he listens to her. But, of course, he thinks — there are occasional anti-Semites, who engage in nothing more really than a little anti-Semitism as a social lubricant at parties and business lunches; moderate anti-Semites, who can control their anti-Semitism and even keep it a secret when they have to; and then there are the all-out anti-Semites, the real career haters, who may perhaps have begun as moderate anti-Semites but who eventually are consumed by what turns out in them to be a progressively debilitating disease. For three hours Jinx confesses to him her helplessness before the most horrible feelings and thoughts about Jews, to the murderous malice that engulfs her whenever she has so much as to speak with a Jew, and all the while he is thinking, She must be cured. If she is cured, we are saved! If I can save her, I can save the Jews! I must not die! I will not die! When she has finished, he says to her softly, ‘Well, at last you’ve told your story.’ Weeping wretchedly, she replies, ‘I don’t feel any better for it.’ ‘You will,’ he promises her. ‘When? When?’ ‘In time,’ answers XYZ, and then he asks if she knows another anti-Semite who is ready to give it up. She isn’t even sure, she meekly replies, that she is ready to herself, and even if she thinks herself ready, is she able? It isn’t with him as it is with other Jews — she’s in love with him and this miraculously washes away all hatred. But with the other Jews, it’s automatic, it just rises up in her at the mere sight of them. Perhaps if she could steer clear of Jews for just a little while … but in this hospital, with all its Jewish doctors, Jewish patients, and Jewish families, with the Jewish crying, the Jewish whispering, the Jewish screaming. … He says to her, ‘An anti-Semite who cannot meet, or mix with, Jews still has an anti-Semitic mind. However far from Jews you flee, you will take it with you. The dream of eluding the anti-Semitic feelings by escaping from Jews is only the reverse of cleansing yourself of these feelings by ridding the earth of all Jews. The only shield against your hatred is the program of recovery that we have begun in this hospital tonight. Tomorrow night bring with you another anti-Semite, another of the nurses who knows in her heart what anti-Semitism is doing to her life.’ For what he is thinking now is that, like the alcoholic, the anti-Semite can only be cured by another anti-Semite, while what she is thinking is that she does not want her Jew to absolve another anti-Semite of her anti-Semitism but craves that loving forgiveness for herself alone. Isn’t one anti-Semitic woman enough? Must he have all the anti-Semitic women in the world begging his Jewish forgiveness, confessing to their Gentile rottenness, admitting to him that he is superior and they are slime? Tell me, girls, your dirty goy secrets. It’s this that turns the Jew on! But the next evening, from the nurses’ station where they play all the wonderful rock ’n’ roll, she brings to him not just one anti-Semitic woman besides herself but two. The room is dark but for the night lamp shining at the side of the sickbed where he lies gaunt, silent, greenishly pale, so miserable he is not even sure any longer whether he is conscious or comatose, whether the three nurses are seated in a row at the foot of his bed saying what he thinks he hears them saying or it is all a deathbed delirium and the three are tending him in the final awful moments of his life. ‘I am an anti-Semite like Wanda Jane,’ whispers one of the weeping nurses. ‘I need to discuss my anger with Jews. …’”

Here I found myself laughing as uproariously as I had when I’d left Jinx’s savior and my impostor in the hotel dining room the day before, and, for the moment, I could go no further.

“What’s so hilarious?” asked Aharon, smiling at my laughter. “His mischief or yours? That he pretends to be you or that you now pretend to be him?”

“I don’t know. I suppose what’s most hilarious is my distress. Define ‘mischief,’ please.”

“To a mischief-maker like you? Mischief is how some Jews get involved in living.”

“Here,” I said, and, laughing still, laughing with the foolish, uncontrollable laughter of a child who no longer can remember what it was that started him off, I handed him a copy of “The Ten Tenets of A-S.A.” “This is what she left with me.”

“So,” said Aharon, as he held between two fingers the document whose margins were filled with my scrawl, “you are his editor, too.”

“Aharon, who is this man?” I asked, and waited and waited for the laughter to subside. “What is he?” I went on when I could speak again. “He gives off none of the aura of a real person, none of the coherence of a real person. Or even the incoherence of a real person. Oh, it’s all plenty incoherent, but incoherent in some wholly artificial way: he emanates the aura of something absolutely spurious, almost the way that Nixon did. He didn’t even strike me as Jewish — that seemed as false as everything else and that’s supposed to be at the heart of it all. It isn’t just that what he calls by my name has no connection to me; it doesn’t seem to have any to him, either. A mismade artifact. No, even that puts it too positively.”

“A vacuum,” said Aharon. “A vacuum into which is drawn your own gift for deceit.”

“Don’t exaggerate. More like a vacuum cleaner into which is sucked my dust.”

“He has less talent for impersonating you than you have — maybe that’s the irritation. Substitute selves? Alter egos? The writer’s medium. It’s all too shallow and too porous for you, without the proper weight and substance. Is this the double that is to be my own? An aesthetic outrage. The great wonders performed on the golem by Rabbi Liva of Prague you are now going to perform on him. Why? Because you have a better conception of him than he does. Rabbi Liva started with clay; you begin with sentences. It’s perfect,” said Aharon, with amusement, and all the while reading my marginal commentary on the Ten Tenets. “You are going to rewrite him.”

What I had noted in the margins was this: “Anti-Semites come from all walks of life. This is too complicated for them. 1. Each tenet must not convey more than one idea. First tenet shouldn’t have both hatred and prejudice. Powerless to control is a redundancy — powerless over or can’t control. 2. No logic to progression. Should unfold from general to specific, from acceptance to action, from diagnosis to program of recovery to joy of living TOLERANT. 3. Avoid fancy words. Sounding like a highbrow. Drop negativism, endangers, intensive, immunity. Anything bookish bad for your purpose (generally true throughout life).” And on the reverse side of the sheet, which Aharon had now turned over and begun to read, I’d tried recasting the first few A-S.A. tenets in a simpler style, so that A-S.A. members (should there be any such!) could actually utilize them. I’d taken my inspiration from something Jinx had said to me — “We don’t care why we have it, we are here to admit that we have it and help each other get rid of it.” Jinx has got the tone, I thought: blunt and monosyllabic. Anti-Semites come from all walks of life.

1. We admit [I’d written] that we are haters and that hatred has ruined our lives.

2. We recognize that by choosing Jews as the target for our hatred, we have become anti-Semites and that all our thoughts and actions have been affected by this prejudice.

3. Coming to understand that Jews are not the cause of our troubles but our own shortcomings are, we become ready to correct them.

4. We ask our fellow anti-Semites and the Spirit of Tolerance to help us overcome these defects.

5. We are willing to fully apologize for all the harm caused by our anti-Semitism.…

While Aharon was reading my revisions we were approached by a very slight, elderly cripple who seesawed toward us on two aluminum forearm crutches from the nearby table where he’d been eating. There was generally a contingent of the elderly eating their lunch in the clean, quiet café of the Ticho House, which was tucked away from the heavy Jaffa Street traffic behind a labyrinth of pinkish stone walls. The fare was simple and inexpensive and, afterward, you could take your coffee or tea on the terrace outside or on a bench beneath the tall trees in the garden. Aharon had thought it would be a tranquil place to hold our conversations undisturbed, without the distractions of the city intruding.

When the old man had made it to our table, he did not speak until he had cumbersomely uncrated his hundred meager pounds of limbs and torso onto the chair to the side of me and sat there waiting, it would seem, for a wildly fluttering heartbeat to decelerate, all the while, through the heavy lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses, determining the meaning of my face. He had that alarming boiled look of someone suffering from a skin disease, and the word to express the meaning of his face seemed to me to be “ordeal.” He wore a heavy cardigan sweater buttoned up beneath his plain blue suit and, under the sweater, a starched white shirt and bow tie, very neat and businesslike — how a decorous neighborhood tradesman might attire himself in an underheated appliance shop.

“Roth,” he said. “The author.”

“Yes.”

Here he removed his hat to reveal a microscopically honeycombed skull, a perfectly bald surface minutely furrowed and grooved like the shell of a hard-boiled egg whose dome has been fractured lightly by the back of a spoon. The man’s been dropped, I thought, and reassembled, a mosaic of smithereens, cemented, sutured, wired, bolted.…

“May I ask your name, sir?” I said. “This is Aharon Appelfeld, the Israeli author. You are?”

“Get out,” he said to Aharon. “Get out before it happens. Philip Roth is right. He is not afraid of the crazy Zionists. Listen to him. You have family? Children?”

“Three children,” Aharon replied.

“This is no place for Jewish children. Enough dead Jewish children. Take them while they’re alive and go.”

“Have you children?” Aharon asked him.

“I have no one. I came to New York after the camps. I gave to Israel. That was my child. I lived in Brooklyn on nothing. Work only, and ninety cents on the dollar to Israel. Then I retired. Sold my jewelry business. Came here. And every day I am living here I want to run away. I think of my Jews in Poland. The Jew in Poland had terrible enemies too. But because he had terrible enemies did not mean he could not keep his Jewish soul. But these are Jews in a Jewish country without a Jewish soul. This is the Bible all over again. God prepares a catastrophe for these Jews without souls. If ever there will be a new chapter in the Bible you will read how God sent a hundred million Arabs to destroy the people of Israel for their sins.”

“Yes? And was it for their sins,” Aharon asked, “that God sent Hitler?”

“God sent Hitler because God is crazy. A Jew knows God and how He operates. A Jew knows God and how, from the very first day He created man, He has been irritated with him from morning till night. That is what it means that the Jews are chosen. The goyim smile: God is merciful, God is loving, God is good. Jews don’t smile — they know God not from dreaming about Him in goyisch daydreams but from living all their lives with a God Who does not ever stop, not once, to think and reason and use His head with His loving children. To appeal to a crazy, irritated father, that is what it is to be a Jew. To appeal to a crazy, violent father, and for three thousand years, that is what it is to be a crazy Jew!” Having disposed of Aharon, he turned back to me, this crippled old wraith who should have been lying down somewhere, in the care of a doctor, surrounded by a family, his head at rest on a clean white pillow until he could peacefully die. “Before it’s too late, Mr. Roth, before God sends to massacre the Jews without souls a hundred million Arabs screaming to Allah, I wish to make a contribution.”

It was the moment for me to tell him that if that was his intention, he had the wrong Mr. Roth. “How did you find me?” I asked.

“You were not at the King David so I came for my lunch. I come every day here for my lunch — and here, today, is you.” Speaking of himself, he added grimly, “Always lucky.” He removed an envelope from his breast pocket, a process that, because of his bad tremor, one had to wait very patiently for him to complete, as though he were a struggling stammerer subduing the nemesis syllable. There was more than enough time to stop him and direct his contribution to the legitimate recipient, but instead I allowed him to hand it to me.

“And what is your name?” I asked again, and with Aharon looking on, I, without so much as the trace of a tremor, slipped the envelope into my own breast pocket.

“Smilesburger,” he replied, and then began the pathetic drama of returning his hat to the top of his head, a drama with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

“Own a suitcase?” he asked Aharon.

“Threw it away,” Aharon gently replied.

“Mistake.” And with that Mr. Smilesburger hoisted himself painfully upward, uncoiling from the chair until at last he was wavering dangerously before us on his forearm crutches. “No more suitcases,” he said, “no more Jews.”

His sallying forth from the café, on no legs and no strength and those crutches, was another pathetic drama, this one reminiscent of a lone peasant working a muddy field with a broken-down, primitive plow.

I withdrew from my jacket pocket the long white envelope containing Smilesburger’s “contribution.” Painstakingly printed across the face of the envelope, in those wavering oversized letters children first use to scrawl cat and dog, was the name by which I had been known all my life and under which I had published the books to which Jinx’s savior and my impostor now claimed authorship in cities as far apart as Jerusalem and Gdansk.

“So this is what it’s about,” I said. “Bilking the senile out of their dough — shaking down old Jews for money. What a charming scam.” While slicing open the envelope with a table knife, I asked Aharon, “What’s your guess?”

“A million dollars,” he replied.

“I say fifty. Two twenties and a ten.”

Well, I was wrong and Aharon was right. Hiding as a child from his murderers in the Ukrainian woods while I was still on a Newark playground playing fly-catcher’s-up after school had clearly made him less of a stranger than I to life in its more immoderate manifestations. Aharon was right: a numbered cashier’s check, drawn on the Bank of Israel in New York, for the sum of one million dollars, and payable to me. I looked to be sure that the transaction had not been postdated to the year 3000, but no, it bore the date of the previous Thursday — January 21, 1988.

“This makes me think,” I said, handing it across the table to him, “of Dostoyevsky’s very greatest line.”

“Which line is that?” Aharon asked, examining the check carefully, back and front.

“Do you remember, in Crime and Punishment, when Raskolnikov’s sister, Dunya, is lured to Svidrigailov’s apartment? He locks her in with him, pockets the key, and then, like a serpent, sets out to seduce her, forcibly if necessary. But to his astonishment, just when he has her helplessly cornered, this beautiful, well-bred Dunya pulls a pistol out of her purse and points it at his heart. Dostoyevsky’s greatest line comes when Svidrigailov sees the gun.”

“Tell me,” said Aharon.

“‘This,’ said Svidrigailov, ‘changes everything.’”

Aharon took a bus back home around two, though only after we had gone ahead and, at my insistence, tried our best to ignore the Smilesburger check and to begin the conversation about Badenheim 1939 that later evolved into the written exchange transcribed above. And I headed off on foot toward the central produce market and the dilapidated working-class neighborhood just behind it, to meet my cousin Apter at the room in his landlady’s house in a little alley in Ohel-Moshe, thinking while I walked that Mr. Smilesburger’s wasn’t the first million donated to a Jewish cause by a well-fixed Jew, that a million was peanuts, really, when it came to Jewish philanthropy, that probably in this very city not a week went by when some American Jew who’d made a bundle in real estate or shopping malls didn’t drop by to schmooze at the office of the mayor and, on the way out, happily hand over to him a check twice as big as mine. And not just fat cats gave and gave — even obscure old people like Smilesburger were leaving small fortunes to Israel all the time. It was part of a tradition of largesse that went back to the Rothschilds and beyond, staggering checks written out to Jews imperiled or needy in ways that their prosperous benefactors had either survived or, as they saw it, miraculously eluded against all the historical odds. Yes, there was a well-known, well-publicized context in which both this donor and his donation made perfectly ordinary sense, even if, in personal terms, I still didn’t know what had hit me.

My thoughts were confused and contradictory. Surely it was time to turn to my lawyer, to get her to contact local counsel (or the local police) and begin to do what had to be done to disentangle the other one from me before some new development made into a mere trifle the million-dollar misunderstanding at the Ticho House. I told myself to get to a phone and call New York immediately, but instead I wandered circuitously toward the old market on Agrippas Street, under the auspices of a force stronger than prudence, more compelling even than anxiety or fear, something that preferred this narrative to unfold according to his, and not my, specifications — a story determined this time without any interference from me. Perhaps that was my reconstituted sanity back in power again, the calculated detachment, the engrossed neutrality of a working writer that, some half-year earlier, I was sure had been impaired forever. As I’d explained to Aharon the day before, there was nothing I coveted so much, after those months of spinning like a little stick in the subjectivist whirlpool of a breakdown, as to be desubjectified, the emphasis anywhere but on my own plight. Let his hisness drive him nuts — my myness was to be shipped off on a sabbatical, one long overdue and well earned. With Aharon, I thought, self-obliteration’s a cinch, but to annihilate myself while this other one was running freely about … well, triumph at that and you will dwell in the house of the purely objective forever.

But then why, if “engrossed neutrality” is the goal, accept this check in the first place, a check that can only mean trouble?

The other one. The double. The impostor. It only now occurred to me how these designations unwittingly conferred a kind of legitimacy on this guy’s usurping claims. There was no “other one.” There was one and one alone on the one hand and a transparent fake on the other. This side of madness and the madhouse, doubles, I thought, figure mainly in books, as fully materialized duplicates incarnating the hidden depravity of the respectable original, as personalities or inclinations that refuse to be buried alive and that infiltrate civilized society to reveal a nineteenth-century gentleman’s iniquitous secret. I knew all about these 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, nor was this double a character in anything other than the vernacular sense of that word. Registered in suite 511 at the King David Hotel was not the other me, the second me, the irresponsible me, the deviant me, the opposing me, the delinquent, turpitudinous me embodying my evil fantasies of myself — I was being confounded by somebody who, very simply, was not me, who had nothing to do with me, who called himself by my name but had no relation to me. To think of him as a double was to bestow on him the destructive status of a famously real and prestigious archetype, and impostor was no improvement; it only intensified the menace I’d conceded with the Dostoyevskyan epithet by imputing professional credentials in duplicitous cunning to this … this what? Name him. Yes, name him now! Because aptly naming him is knowing him for what he is and isn’t, exorcising and possessing him all at once. Name him! In his pseudonymity is his anonymity, and it’s that anonymity that’s killing me. Name him! Who is this preposterous proxy? Nothing like namelessness to make a mystery of nothing. Name him! If I alone am Philip Roth, he is who?

Moishe Pipik.

But of course! The anguish I could have saved myself if only I’d known. Moishe Pipik — a name I had learned to enjoy long before I had ever read of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Golyadkin the First and Golyadkin the Second, a name that more than likely had not been uttered in my presence since I was still a child small enough to be engrossed by the household drama of all our striving relatives, their tribulations, promotions, illnesses, arguments, etc., back when one or another of us pint-sized boys, having said or done something thought to be definingly expressive of an impish inner self, would hear the loving aunt or the mocking uncle announce, “Is this a Moishe Pipik!” Always a light little moment, that — laughter, smiles, commentary, clarification, and the spoiled spotlit one, in the center suddenly of the family stage, atingle with prideful embarrassment, delighted by the superstar billing but abashed a little by the role that did not seem quite to accord with a boychild’s own self-imaginings. Moishe Pipik! The derogatory, joking nonsense name that translates literally to Moses Bellybutton and that probably connoted something slightly different to every Jewish family on our block — the little guy who wants to be a big shot, the kid who pisses in his pants, the someone who is a bit ridiculous, a bit funny, a bit childish, the comical shadow alongside whom we had all grown up, that little folkloric fall guy whose surname designated the thing that for most children was neither here nor there, neither a part nor an orifice, somehow a concavity and a convexity both, something neither upper nor lower, neither lewd nor entirely respectable either, a short enough distance from the genitals to make it suspiciously intriguing and yet, despite this teasing proximity, this conspicuously puzzling centrality, as meaningless as it was without function — the sole archaeological evidence of the fairy tale of one’s origins, the lasting imprint of the fetus who was somehow oneself without actually being anyone at all, just about the silliest, blankest, stupidest watermark that could have been devised for a species with a brain like ours. It might as well have been the omphalos at Delphi given the enigma the pipik presented. Exactly what was your pipik trying to tell you? Nobody could ever really figure it out. You were left with only the word, the delightful playword itself, the sonic prankishness of the two syllabic pops and the closing click encasing those peepingly meekish, unobtrusively shlemielish twin vowels. And all the more rapturously ridiculous for being yoked to Moishe, to Moses, which signaled, even to small and ignorant boys overshadowed by their big wage-earning, wisecracking elders, that in the folk language of our immigrant grandparents and their inconceivable forebears there was a strong predisposition to think of even the supermen of our tribe as all kind of imminently pathetic. The goyim had Paul Bunyan and we had Moishe Pipik.

I was laughing my head off in the Jerusalem streets, laughing once again without restraint, hilariously laughing all by myself at the simple obviousness of the discovery that had turned a burden into a joke — “Is this a Moishe Pipik!” I thought, and felt all at once the return of my force, of the obstinacy and mastery whose strong resurgence I had been waiting and waiting on for so many months now, of the effectiveness that was mine back before I was ever on Halcion, of the gusto that was mine before I’d ever been poleaxed by any calamity at all, back before I had ever heard of contradiction or rejection or remorse. I felt what I’d felt way, way back, when, because of the lucky accident of a happy childhood, I didn’t know I could be overcome by anything — all the endowment that was originally mine before I was ever impeded by guilt, a full human being strong in the magic. Sustaining that state of mind is another matter entirely, but it sure is wonderful while it lasts. Moishe Pipik! Perfect!

When I reached the central market it was still crowded with shoppers and, for a few minutes, I stopped to stroll through the produce-piled aisles, captivated by that stir of agitated, workaday busyness that makes open-air markets, wherever they are, so enjoyable to wander around in, particularly when you’re clearing your head of a fog. Neither the stallkeepers shouting in Hebrew the price of their bargains while nimbly bagging what had just been sold nor the shoppers, speeding through the maze of stalls with the concentrated alacrity of people intent on getting the most for the least in the shortest possible amount of time, appeared to be in any way worried about being blown sky-high, and yet every few months or so, in this very market, an explosive device, hidden by the PLO in a refuse pile or a produce crate, was found by the bomb squad and defused or, if it wasn’t, went off, maiming and killing whoever was nearby. What with violence between armed Israeli soldiers and angry Arab mobs flaring up all over the Occupied Territories and tear-gas canisters being lobbed back and forth only a couple of miles away in the Old City, it would have seemed only human had shoppers begun to shy away from risking life and limb in a target known to be a terrorist favorite. Yet the animation looked to me as intense as ever, the same old commotion of buying and selling testifying to just how palpably bad life has to become for people to ignore something as fundamental as getting supper on the table. Nothing could appear to be more human than refusing to believe extinction possible so long as you were encircled by luscious eggplants and ripe tomatoes and meat so fresh and pink that it looked good enough to wolf down raw. Probably the first thing they teach at terrorist school is that human beings are never less heedful of their safety than when they are out gathering food. The next best place to plant a bomb is a brothel.

At the end of a row of butcher stalls I saw a woman on her knees beside one of the metal trash cans where the butchers threw their leavings, a large, round-faced woman, about forty or so, wearing glasses and dressed in clothes that hardly looked like a beggar’s. The tidy ordinariness of her attire was what had drawn my attention to her, kneeling there on the sticky cobblestones — wet with smelly leakage from the stalls, runny by mid-afternoon with a thin mash of garbagey muck — and fishing through the slops with one hand while holding a perfectly respectable handbag in the other. When she realized that I was watching her, she looked up and, without a trace of embarrassment — and speaking not in Hebrew but in accented English — explained, “Not for me.” She then resumed her search with a fervor so disturbing to me, with gestures so convulsive and a gaze so fixed, that I was unable to walk off.

“For whom then?” I asked.

“For my friend,” she said, foraging deep down into the bucket as she spoke. “She has six children. She said to me, ‘If you see anything …’”

“For soup?” I asked.

‘Yes. She puts something in with it — makes soup.”

Here, I thought to say to her, here is a check for a million dollars. Feed your friend and her children with this. Endorse it, I thought, and give it to her. Whether she’s crazy or sane, whether there is or is not a friend, all of that is immaterial. She is in need, here is a check — give it to her and go. I am not responsible for this check!

“Philip! Philip Roth!”

My first impulse was not to turn around and acknowledge whoever thought he had recognized me but to rush away and get lost in the crowd — not again, I thought, not another million. But before I could move, the stranger was already there beside me, smiling broadly and reaching out for my hand, a smallish, boxy, middle-aged man, dark-complexioned, with a sizable dark mustache and a heavily creased face and an arresting shock of snowy white hair.

“Philip,” he said warmly even though I withheld my hand and cautiously backed off — “Philip!” He laughed. “You don’t even know me. I’m so fat and old and lined with my worries, you don’t even remember me! You’ve grown only a forehead — I’ve grown this ridiculous hair! It’s Zee, Philip. It’s George.”

“Zee!”

I threw my arms around him while the woman at the garbage pail, transfixed all at once by the two of us embracing, uttered something aloud, angrily said something in what was no longer English, and abruptly darted away without having scavenged anything for her friend — and without the million dollars either. Then, from some fifty feet away, she turned back and, pointing now from a safe distance, began to shout in a voice so loud that everywhere people looked to see what the problem was. Zee too looked — and listened. And laughed, though without much amusement, when he found out that the problem was him. “Another expert,” he explained, “on the mentality of the Arab. Their experts on our mentality are everywhere, in the university, in the military, on the street corner, in the market —”

“Zee” was for Ziad, George Ziad,° whom I hadn’t seen in more than thirty years, since the mid-fifties, when we’d lived for a year down the corridor from each other in a residence hall for divinity students at the University of Chicago, where I was getting my M.A. in English and George was a graduate student in the program called Religion and Art. Most of the twenty or so rooms in the Disciples Divinity House, a smallish neo-Gothic building diagonally across from the main university campus, were rented by students affiliated with the Disciples of Christ Church, but since there weren’t always enough of them to fill the place, outsiders like the two of us were allowed to rent there as well. The rooms on our floor were bright with sunlight and inexpensive, and, despite the usual prohibitions that obtained everywhere in university living quarters back then, it wasn’t impossible, if you had the courage for it, to slip a girl through your door late in the evening. Zee had had the courage and the strong need for it too. In his early twenties, he had been a very lithe, dapperly dressed young man, small but romantically handsome, and his credentials — a Harvard-educated Egyptian enrolled at Chicago to study Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard — made him irresistible to all those Chicago coeds avid for cross-cultural adventure.

“I live here,” George answered when I asked what he was doing in Israel. “In the Occupied Territories. I live in Ramallah.”

“And not in Cairo.”

“I don’t come from Cairo.”

“You don’t? But didn’t you?”

“We fled to Cairo. We came from here. I was born here. The house I grew up in is still exactly where it was. I was more stupid than usual today. I came to look at it. Then, still more stupidly, I came here — to observe the oppressor in his natural habitat.”

“I didn’t know any of this, did I? That you came from Jerusalem?”

“It was not something I talked about in 1955.1 wanted to forget all that. My father couldn’t forget, and so I would. Weeping and ranting all day long about everything he had lost to the Jews: his house, his practice, his patients, his books, his art, his garden, his almond trees — every day he screamed, he wept, he ranted, and I was a wonderful son, Philip. I couldn’t forgive him his despair for the almond trees. The trees particularly enraged me. When he had the stroke and died, I was relieved. I was in Chicago and I thought, ‘Now I won’t have to hear about the almond trees for the rest of my life. Now I can be who I am.’ And now the trees and the house and the garden are all I can think about. My father and his ranting are all I can think about. I think about his tears every day. And that, to my surprise, is who I am.”

“What do you do here, Zee?”

Smiling at me benignly, he answered, “Hate.”

I didn’t know what to reply and so said nothing.

“She had it right, the expert on my mentality. What she said is true. I am a stone-throwing Arab consumed by hate.”

Again I offered no reply.

His next words came slowly, tinged with a tone of sweet contempt.

“What do you expect me to throw at the occupier? Roses?”

“No, no,” he finally said when I continued to remain silent, “it’s the children who do it, not the old men. Don’t worry, Philip, I don’t throw anything. The occupier has nothing to fear from a civilized fellow like me. Last month they took a hundred boys, the occupiers. Held them for eighteen days. Took them to a camp near Nablus. Boys eleven, twelve, thirteen. They came back brain-damaged. Can’t hear. Lame. Very thin. No, not for me. I prefer to be fat. What do I do? I teach at a university when it is not shut down. I write for a newspaper when it is not shut down. They damage my brain in more subtle ways. I fight the occupier with words, as though words will ever stop them from stealing our land. I oppose our masters with ideas — that is my humiliation and shame. Clever thinking is the form my capitulation takes. Endless analyses of the situation — that is the grammar of my degradation. Alas, I am not a stone-throwing Arab — I am a word-throwing Arab, soft, sentimental, and ineffective, altogether like my father. I come to Jerusalem to stand and look at the house where I was a boy. I remember my father and how his life was destroyed. I look at the house and want to kill. Then I drive back to Ramallah to cry like him over all that is lost. And you — I know why you are here. I read it in the papers and I said to my wife, ‘He hasn’t changed.’ I read aloud to my son just two nights ago your story ‘The Conversion of the Jews.’ I said, ‘He wrote this when I knew him, he wrote this at the University of Chicago, he was twenty-one years old, and he hasn’t changed at all.’ I loved Portnoy’s Complaint; Philip. It was great, great! I assign it to my students at the university. ‘Here is a Jew,’ I tell them, ‘who has never been afraid to speak out about Jews. An independent Jew and he has suffered for it too:’ I try to convince them that there are Jews in the world who are not in any way like these Jews we have here. But to them the Israeli Jew is so evil they find it hard to believe. They look around and they think, What have they done? Name one single thing that Israeli society has done! And, Philip, my students are right — who are they? what have they done? The people are coarse and noisy and push you in the street. I’ve lived in Chicago, in New York, in Boston, I’ve lived in Paris, in London, and nowhere have I seen such people in the street. The arrogance! What have they created like you Jews out in the world? Absolutely nothing. Nothing but a state founded on force and the will to dominate. If you want to talk about culture, there is absolutely no comparison. Dismal painting and sculpture, no musical composition, and a very minor literature — that is what all their arrogance has produced. Compare this to American Jewish culture and it is pitiable, it is laughable. And yet they are not only arrogant about the Arab and his mentality, they are not only arrogant about the goyim and their mentality, they are arrogant about you and your mentality. These provincial nobodies look down on you. Can you imagine it? There is more Jewish spirit and Jewish laughter and Jewish intelligence on the Upper West Side of Manhattan than in this entire country — and as for Jewish conscience, as for a Jewish sense of justice, as for Jewish heart … there’s more Jewish heart at the knish counter at Zabar’s than in the whole of the Knesset! But look at you! You look great. Still so thin! You look like a Jewish baron, like a Rothschild from Paris.”

“Do I really? No, no, still an insurance man’s son from New Jersey.”

“How is your father? How is your mother? How is your brother?” he asked me, excitedly.

The metamorphosis that, physically, had all but effaced the boy I’d known at Chicago was nothing, I had come to realize, beside an alteration, or deformation, far more astonishing and grave. The gush, the agitation, the volubility, the frenzy barely beneath the surface of every word he babbled, the nerve-racking sense he communicated of someone aroused and decomposing all at the same time, of someone in a permanent state of imminent apoplexy … how could that be Zee, how could this overweight, overwrought cyclone of distress possibly have been the cultivated young gentleman we all so admired for his suavity and his slick composure? Back then I was still a crisscross of personalities, a grab bag of raw qualities, strands of street-corner boyishness still inextricably interwoven with the burgeoning high-mindedness, while George had seemed to me so successfully imperturbable, so knowing in the ways of life, so wholly and impressively formed. Well, to hear him tell it now, I’d had him wrong in every way: in reality he’d been living under an ice cap, a son trying in vain to stanch the bleeding of a wronged and ruined father, with his wonderful manners and his refined virility not only masking the pain of dispossession and exile but concealing even from himself how scorched he was by shame, perhaps even more so than the father.

Emotionally, his voice quaking, Zee said to me, “I dream of Chicago. I dream of those days when I was a student in Chicago.”

“Yes, we were lively boys.”

“I dream about Walter Schneeman’s Red Door Book Shop. I dream about the University Tavern. I dream about the Tropical Hut. I dream about my carrel in the library. I dream about my courses with Preston Roberts. I dream about my Jewish friends, about you and Herb Haber and Barry Targan and Art Geffin — Jews who could not conceive of being Jews like this! There are weeks, Philip, when I dream of Chicago every single night!” Taking my hands tightly in his and shaking them as though they were a set of reins, he said suddenly, “What are you doing? What are you doing right this minute?”

I was, of course, on my way to visit Apter at his room, but I decided not to tell this to George Ziad in the state of agitation he was in. The previous evening I had spoken briefly on the phone with Apter, assuring him once again that the person identified as me at the Demjanjuk trial a week earlier had merely been someone who looked like me and that I had arrived in Jerusalem only the day before and would come to see him at his stall in the Old City the very next afternoon. And here, like virtually every other man I seemed to meet in Jerusalem, Apter had begun to cry. Because of the violence, he told me, because of the Arabs throwing stones, he was too frightened to leave his room and I must come to see him there:

I did not want to tell George that I had a cousin here who was an emotionally impaired Holocaust survivor, because I did not want to hear him tell me how it was the Holocaust survivors, poisoned by their Holocaust pathology, against whose “will to dominate” the Palestinians had for over four decades now been struggling to survive.

“Zee, I have time for just a quick cup of coffee — then I’ve got to run.

“Coffee where? Here? In the city of my father? Here in the city of my father they’ll sit down right next to us — they’ll sit in my lap.” He said this while pointing to two young men standing beside a fruit vendor’s stall only some ten or fifteen feet away. They were wearing jeans and talking together, two short, strongly built fellows I would have assumed were market workers taking a few minutes off for a smoke had Zee not said, “Israeli security. Shin Bet. I can’t even go into a public toilet in the city of my father that they don’t come in next to me and start pissing on my shoes. They’re everywhere. Interrogate me at the airport, search me at customs, intercept my mail, follow my car, tap my phone, bug my house — they even infiltrate my classroom.” He began to laugh very loudly. “Last year, my best student, he wrote a wonderful Marxist analysis of Moby Dick — he was Shin Bet too. My only ‘A.’ Philip, I cannot sit and have coffee here. Triumphant Israel is a terrible, terrible place to have coffee. These victorious Jews are terrible people. I don’t just mean the Kahanes and the Sharons. I mean them all, the Yehoshuas and the Ozes included. The good ones who are against the occupation of the West Bank but not against the occupation of my father’s house, the ‘beautiful Israelis’ who want their Zionist thievery and their clean conscience too. They are no less superior than the rest of them — these beautiful Israelis are even more superior. What do they know about ‘Jewish,’ these ‘healthy, confident’ Jews who look down their noses at you Diaspora ‘neurotics’? This is health? This is confidence? This is arrogance. Jews who make military brutes out of their sons — and how superior they feel to you Jews who know nothing of guns! Jews who use clubs to break the hands of Arab children — and how superior they feel to you Jews incapable of such violence! Jews without tolerance, Jews for whom it is always black and white, who have all these crazy splinter parties, who have a party of one man, they are so intolerant one of the other — these are the Jews who are superior to the Jews in the Diaspora? Superior to people who know in their bones the meaning of give-and-take? Who live with success, like tolerant human beings, in the great world of crosscurrents and human differences? Here they are authentic, here, locked up in their Jewish ghetto and armed to the teeth? And you there, you are ‘unauthentic,’ living freely in contact with all of mankind? The arrogance, Philip, it is insufferable! What they teach their children in the schools is to look with disgust on the Diaspora Jew, to see the English-speaking Jew and the Spanish-speaking Jew and the Russian-speaking Jew as a freak, as a worm, as a terrified neurotic. As if this Jew who now speaks Hebrew isn’t just another kind of Jew — as if speaking Hebrew is the culmination of human achievement! I’m here, they think, and I speak Hebrew, this is my language and my home, and I don’t have to go around thinking all the time, ‘I’m a Jew but what is a Jew?’ I don’t have to be this kind of self-questioning, self-hating, alienated, frightened neurotic. And what those so-called neurotics have given to the world in the way of brainpower and art and science and all the skills and ideals of civilization, to this they are oblivious. But then to the entire world they are oblivious. For the entire world they have one word: goy! ‘I live here and I speak Hebrew and all I know and see are other Jews like me and isn’t that wonderful!’ Oh, what an impoverished Jew this arrogant Israeli is! Yes, they are the authentic ones, the Yehoshuas and the Ozes, and tell me, I ask them, what are Saul Alinsky and David Riesman and Meyer Schapiro and Leonard Bernstein and Bella Abzug and Paul Goodman and Allen Ginsberg, and on and on and on and on? Who do they think they are, these provincial nobodies! Jailers! This is their great Jewish achievement — to make Jews into jailers and jet-bomber pilots! And just suppose they were to succeed, suppose they were to win and have their way and every Arab in Nablus and every Arab in Hebron and every Arab in the Galilee and in Gaza, suppose every Arab in the world, were to disappear courtesy of the Jewish nuclear bomb, what would they have here fifty years from now? A noisy little state of no importance whatsoever. That’s what the persecution and the destruction of the Palestinians will have been for — the creation of a Jewish Belgium, without even a Brussels to show for it. That’s what these ‘authentic’ Jews will have contributed to civilization — a country lacking every quality that gave the Jews their great distinction! They may be able to instill in other Arabs who live under their evil occupation fear and respect for their ‘superiority,’ but I grew up with you people, I was educated with you people, by you people, I lived with real Jews, at Harvard, at Chicago, with truly superior people, whom I admired, whom I loved, to whom I did indeed feel inferior and rightly so — the vitality in them, the irony in them, the human sympathy, the human tolerance; the goodness of heart that was simply instinctive in them, people with the Jewish sense of survival that was all human, elastic, adaptable, humorous, creative, and all this they have replaced here with a stick! The Golden Calf was more Jewish than Ariel Sharon, God of Samaria and Judea and the Holy Gaza Strip! The worst of the ghetto Jew combined with the worst of the bellicose, belligerent goy, and that is what these people call ‘authentic’! Jews have a reputation for being intelligent, and they are intelligent. The only place I have ever been where all the Jews are stupid is Israel. I spit on them! I spit on them!” And this my friend Zee proceeded to do, spat on the wet, gritty marketplace pavement while looking defiantly at the two toughs in jeans he’d identified as Israeli security, neither of whom happened to be looking our way or, seemingly, to be concerned with anything other than their own conversation.

Why did I drive with him to Ramallah that afternoon instead of keeping my date with Apter? Because he told me so many times that I had to? Had to see with my own eyes the occupier’s mockery of justice; had to observe with my own eyes the legal system behind which the occupier attempted to conceal his oppressive colonizing; had to post-pone whatever I was doing to visit with him the army courtroom where the youngest brother of one of his friends was being tried on trumped-up charges and where I would witness the cynical corruption of every Jewish value cherished by every decent Diaspora Jew.

The charge against his friend’s brother was of throwing Molotov cocktails at Israeli soldiers, a charge “unsupported by a single shred of evidence, unsubstantiated, another filthy lie.” The boy had been picked up at a demonstration and then “interrogated.” Interrogation consisted of covering his head with a hood, soaking him alternately with hot and cold showers, then making him stand outside, whatever the weather, the hood still over his head, enshrouding his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth — hooded like that for forty-five days and forty-five nights until the boy “confessed.” I had to see what this boy looked like after those forty-five days and forty-five nights. I had to meet George’s friend, one of the most stalwart opponents of the occupation, a lawyer, a poet, a leader whom, of course, the occupier was trying to silence by arresting and torturing his beloved kid brother. I had to, George charged me, the veins strung out like cables in his neck and his fingers in motion all the while, rapidly flexing open and shut as though there were something in the palm of each hand out of which he was squeezing the last bit of life.

We were standing beside George’s car, which he’d left parked on a tiny side street a few blocks up from the market. The car had been ticketed and two policemen were waiting not far away and asked to see George’s identity card, the car’s registration, and his driver’s license as soon as he stepped up and, making rather a show of his indifference, acknowledged the West Bank plates as his. Using George’s key, the police methodically searched the trunk and beneath the seats and opened the glove compartment to examine its contents, and meanwhile, pretending to be oblivious to them, to be completely unintimidated by them, unharassed, unafraid, unhumiliated, George, like a man on the brink of a seizure, continued to tell me what I had to do.

The corruption of every Jewish value cherished by every decent Diaspora Jew … It was this fulsome praise of Diaspora Jews, whose excessiveness simply would not stop, that had finally convinced me that our meeting in the marketplace had been something other than sheer coincidence. His adamant insistence that I accompany him now to the occupier’s travesty of a courtroom made me rather more certain that George Ziad had been following me — the me, that is, who he thought I had become — than that those two who’d been smoking and gabbing together beside the fruit vendor’s stall in the market were Shin Bet agents who’d been following him. And this, the very best reason for my not doing what he told me I had to do, was exactly why I knew I had to do it.

Adolescent audacity? Writerly curiosity? Callow perversity? Jewish mischief? Whatever the impulse that informed my bad judgment, being mistaken for Moishe Pipik for the second time in less than an hour made yielding to his importuning as natural to me, as irresistible for me, as accepting Smilesburger’s donation had been at lunch.

George never stopped talking; he couldn’t stop. An unbridled talker. An inexhaustible talker. A frightening talker. All the way out to Ramallah, even at the roadblocks, where not only his identification papers but now mine as well were checked over by the soldiers and where, each and every time, the trunk of the car was once again examined and the seats removed and the contents of the glove compartment emptied onto the road, he lectured me on the evolution of that guilt-laden relationship of American Jews to Israel which the Zionists had sinisterly exploited to subsidize their thievery. He had figured it out, thought it all through, even published an influential essay in a British Marxist journal on “The Zionist Blackmailing of American Jewry,” and, from the sound of it, all that publishing the essay had achieved was to leave him more degraded and enraged and ground down. We drove by the high-rise apartment buildings of Jerusalem’s northern Jewish suburbs (“A concrete jungle — so hideous what they build here! These aren’t houses, they are fortresses! The mentality is everywhere! Machine-sawed stone facing — the vulgarity of it!”); out past the large nondescript modern stone houses built before the Israeli occupation by wealthy Jordanians, which struck me as more vulgar by far, crowned as each was with an elongated TV aerial kitschily replicating the Eiffel Tower; and finally into the dry, stone-strewn valley of the countryside. And as we drove, embittered analysis streamed forth unabated, of Jewish history, Jewish mythology, Jewish psychosis and sociology, each sentence delivered with an alarming air of intellectual wantonness, the whole a pungent ideological mulch of overstatement and lucidity, of insight and stupidity, of precise historical data and willful historical ignorance, a loose array of observations as disjointed as it was coherent and as shallow as it was deep — the shrewd and vacuous diatribe of a man whose brain, once as good as anyone’s, was now as much a menace to him as the anger and the loathing that, by 1988, after twenty years of the occupation and forty years of the Jewish state, had corroded everything moderate in him, everything practical, realistic, and to the point. The stupendous quarrel, the perpetual emergency, the monumental unhappiness, the battered pride, the intoxication of resistance had rendered him incapable of even nibbling at the truth, however intelligent he still happened to be. By the time his ideas wormed their way through all that emotion, they had been so distorted and intensified as only barely to resemble human thought. Despite the unremitting determination to comprehend the enemy, as though in understanding them there was still, for him, some hope, despite the thin veneer of professorial brilliance, which gave even his most dubious and bungled ideas a certain intellectual gloss, now at the core of everything was hatred and the great disabling fantasy of revenge.

And I said nothing, did not so much as challenge one excessive claim or do anything to clarify his thinking or to take exception where I knew he didn’t know what he was talking about. Instead, employing the disguise of my own face and name, I listened intently to all the suppositions spawned by his unbearable grievance, to the suffering spilling out of him in every word; I studied him with the coldhearted fascination and intense excitement of a well-placed spy.

Here is a condensation of his argument, a good deal more cogent for being summarized. I won’t describe the collisions and the pileups that George only narrowly avoided while he held forth. Suffice it to say that, even without an uprising under way and violence breaking out everywhere, it is extremely hazardous to sit beside a man making a long speech at the wheel of a car. On the drive that afternoon between Jerusalem and Ramallah, there was not a half-mile without its excitements. George did not always fulminate looking straight ahead.

In summary, then, George’s lecture on that topic I could not really remember having chosen to shadow me like this, from birth to death; the topic whose obsessive examination I had always thought I could someday leave behind; the topic whose persistent intrusion into matters high and low it was not always easy to know what to make of; the pervasive, engulfing, wearying topic that encapsulated the largest problem and most amazing experience of my life and that, despite every honorable attempt to resist its spell, appeared by now to be the irrational power that had run away with my life — and, from the sound of things, not mine alone … that topic called the Jews.

First — according to George’s historical breakdown of the cycle of Jewish corruption — were the pre-Holocaust, postimmigration years of 1900 to 1939: a period of renouncing the Old Country for the New; of dealienization and naturalization, of extinguishing the memories of families and communities abandoned, of forgetting parents left to age and die without their most adventurous children to comfort and console them — the feverish period of toiling to construct in America, and in English, a new life and identity as Jews. After this, the period of calculated amnesia, 1939 to 1945, the years of the immeasurable catastrophe, when, with lightning speed, those families and communities from which the newly, incompletely Americanized Jews had voluntarily severed their strongest ties were quite literally obliterated by Hitler. The destruction of European Jewry registered as a cataclysmic shock on American Jews not only because of its sheer horror but also because this horror, viewed irrationally through the prism of their grief, seemed to them in some indefinable way ignited by them — yes, instigated by the wish to put an end to Jewish life in Europe that their massive emigration had embodied, as though between the bestial destructiveness of Hitlerian anti-Semitism and their own passionate desire to be delivered from the humiliations of their European imprisonment there had existed some horrible, unthinkable interrelationship, bordering on complicity. And a misgiving very similar, an undivulgeable self-denunciation perhaps even more ominous, could be imputed to the Zionists and their Zionism. For were the Zionists without contempt for Jewish life in Europe when they embarked for Palestine? Didn’t the militants who pioneered the Jewish state feel an even more drastic revulsion for the Yiddish-speaking masses of the shtetl than did those practical-minded immigrants who’d managed their escape to America without the blight of an ideology like Ben-Gurion’s? Admittedly, migration, and not mass murder, was the solution proposed by Zionism; nevertheless, disgust for their own origins these Zionists made manifest in a thousand ways, most tellingly in choosing as the official tongue of the Jewish state the language of the remote biblical past rather than the shaming European vulgate that issued from the mouths of their powerless forebears.

So: Hitler’s slaughter of all those millions whom these Jews had unwittingly abandoned to their fate, the destruction of the humiliating culture whose future they had wanted no part of, the annihilation of the society that had compromised their virility and restricted their development — this left the unimperiled Jews of America as well as Israel’s defiantly bold founding fathers with a legacy not only of grief but of inexpungible guilt so damning as to warp the Jewish soul for decades thereafter, if not for centuries to come.

Following the catastrophe came the great period of postwar normalization, when the emergence of Israel as a haven for the surviving remnant of European Jewry coincided precisely with the advance of assimilation in America; the period of renewed energy and inspiration, when the Holocaust was itself still only dimly perceived by the public at large and before it had infested all of Jewish rhetoric; the years before the Holocaust had been commercialized by that name, when the most popular symbol for what had been endured by European Jewry was a delightful adolescent up in the attic diligently doing her homework for her daddy and when the means for contemplating everything more horrible were still generally undiscovered or suppressed, when in Israel it would be years before a holiday was officially proclaimed to commemorate the six million dead; the period when Jews everywhere wished to be known even to themselves for something more vitalizing than their victimization. In America it was the age of the nose job, the name change, the ebbing of the quota system, and the exaltations of suburban life, the dawn of the era of big corporate promotions, whopping Ivy League admissions, hedonistic holidays, and all manner of dwindling prohibitions — and of the emergence of a corps of surprisingly goylike Jewish children, dopey and confident and happy in ways that previous generations of anxious Jewish parents had never dared to imagine possible for their own. The pastoralization of the ghetto, George Ziad called it, the pasteurization of the faith. “Green lawns, white Jews — you wrote about it. You crystallized it in your first book. That’s what the hoopla was all about. 1959. The Jewish success story in its heyday, all new and thrilling and funny and fun. Liberated new Jews, normalized Jews, ridiculous and wonderful. The triumph of the untragic. Brenda Patimkin dethrones Anne Frank. Hot sex, fresh fruit, and Big Ten basketball — who could imagine a happier ending for the Jewish people?”

Then 1967: the Israeli victory in the Six Day War. And with this, the confirmation not of Jewish dealienization or of Jewish assimilation or of Jewish normalization but of Jewish might, the cynical institutionalization of the Holocaust begins. It is precisely here, with a Jewish military state gloating and triumphant, that it becomes official Jewish policy to remind the world, minute by minute, hour by hour, day in and day out, that the Jews were victims before they were conquerors and that they are conquerors only because they are victims. This is the public-relations campaign cunningly devised by the terrorist Begin: to establish Israeli military expansionism as historically just by joining it to the memory of Jewish victimization; to rationalize — as historical justice, as just retribution, as nothing more than self-defense — the gobbling up of the Occupied Territories and the driving of the Palestinians off their land once again. What justifies seizing every opportunity to extend Israel’s boundaries? Auschwitz. What justifies bombing Beirut civilians? Auschwitz. What justifies smashing the bones of Palestinian children and blowing off the limbs of Arab mayors? Auschwitz. Dachau. Buchenwald. Belsen. Treblinka. Sobibor. Belsec. “Such falseness, Philip, such brutal, cynical insincerity! To keep the territories has for them one meaning and only one meaning: it is to display the physical prowess that made the conquest possible! To rule the territories is to exercise a prerogative hitherto denied — the experience of oppressing and victimizing, the experience now of ruling others. Power-mad Jews is what they are, is all that they are, no different from the power-mad everywhere, except for the mythology of victimization that they use to justify their addiction to power and their victimizing of us. The famous joke has it exactly right. ‘There’s no business like Shoah business.’ During the period of their normalization there was the innocent symbol of little Anne Frank, that was poignant enough. But now, in the era of their greatest armed might, now at the height of their insufferable arrogance, now there are sixteen hours of Shoah with which to pulverize audiences all over the world, now there is ‘Holocaust’ on NBC once a week, starring as a Jew Meryl Streep! And the American Jewish leaders who come here, they know this Shoah business very well — they arrive here from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, these officials of the Jewish establishment, and to those few Israelis who still have some truthfulness in them and some self-respect, who still know how to utter something other than the propaganda and the lies, they say, ‘Don’t tell me how the Palestinians are becoming accommodating. Don’t tell me how the Palestinians have legitimate claims. Don’t tell me how the Palestinians are oppressed and that an injustice has been done. Stop that immediately! I cannot raise money in America with that. Tell me about how we are threatened, tell me about terrorism, tell me about anti-Semitism and the Holocaust!’ And this explains why there is the show trial of this stupid Ukrainian — to reinforce the cornerstone of Israeli power politics by bolstering the ideology of the victim. No, they will not stop describing themselves as victims and identifying themselves with the past. But it is not exactly as though the past has been ignored — the very existence of this state is evidence of that. By now surely this obsessive narrative of theirs has come to violate their sense of reality — it certainly violates ours. Don’t tell us about their victimization! We are the last people in the world to understand that! Of course Ukrainian anti-Semitism is real. There are many causes that we all know, having to do with the role the Jews played there in the economic structure, with the cynical role assigned to them by Stalin in the farm collectivization — all this is clear. But whether this stupid Ukrainian is Ivan the Terrible is not at all clear, it can’t be clear after forty years, and so, if you have any honesty as a nation, any respect left at all for the law, you let him go. If you must have your vengeance, you send him back to the Ukraine and let the Russians deal with him — that should be satisfaction enough. But to try him here in the courtroom and over the radio and on the television and in the papers, this has only one purpose — a public-relations stunt à la the Holocaust-monger Begin and the gangster Shamir; public relations to justify Jewish might, to justify Jewish rule by perpetuating into the next one hundred millennia the image of the Jewish victim. But is public relations the purpose of a system of criminal justice? The criminal-justice system has a legal purpose, not a public-relations purpose. To educate the public? No, that’s the purpose of an educational system. I repeat: Demjanjuk is here to maintain the mythology that is this country’s lifeblood. Because without the Holocaust, where are they? Who are they? It is through the Holocaust that they sustain their connection to world Jewry, especially to privileged, secure American Jewry, with its exploitable guilt over being unimperiled and successful. Without the connection to world Jewry, where is their historical claim to the land? Nowhere! If they were to lose their custodianship of the Holocaust, if the mythology of the dispersion were to be exposed as a sham — what then? What happens when American Jews shed their guilt and come to their senses? What happens when American Jews realize that these people, with their incredible arrogance, have taken on a mission and a meaning that is utterly preposterous, that is pure mythology? What happens when they come to realize that they have been sold a bill of goods and that, far from being superior to Diaspora Jewry, these Zionists are inferior by every measure of civilization? What happens when American Jews discover that they have been duped, that they have constructed an allegiance to Israel on the basis of irrational guilt, of vengeful fantasies, above all, above all, based on the most naive delusions about the moral identity of this state? Because this state has no moral identity. It has forfeited its moral identity, if it ever had any to begin with. By relentlessly institutionalizing the Holocaust it has even forfeited its claim to the Holocaust! The state of Israel has drawn the last of its moral credit out of the bank of the dead six million — this is what they have done by breaking the hands of Arab children on the orders of their illustrious minister of defense. Even to world Jewry it will be clear: this is a state founded on force and maintained by force, a Machiavellian state that deals violently with the uprising of an oppressed people in an occupied territory, a Machiavellian state in, admittedly, a Machiavellian world, but about as saintly as the Chicago Police Department. They have advertised this state for forty years as essential to the existence of Jewish culture, people, heritage; they have tried with all their cunning to advertise Israel as a no-choice reality when, in fact, it is an option, to be examined in terms of quality and value. And when you dare to examine it like this, what do you actually find? Arrogance! Arrogance! Arrogance! And beyond the arrogance? Nothing! And beyond the nothing — more arrogance! And now it is there for the whole world to see every night on television — a primitive capacity for sadistic violence that has finally put the lie to all their mythology! ‘The Law of the Return’? As if any self-respecting civilized Jew would want to ‘return’ to a place like this! ‘The Ingathering of the Exiles’? As if ‘exile’ from Jewishness begins to describe the Jewish condition anywhere but here! ‘The Holocaust’? The Holocaust is over. Unbeknownst to them, the Zionists themselves officially declared it over three days ago at Manara Square in Ramallah. I will take you there and show you the place where the decree was written. A wall where the soldiers took innocent Palestinian civilians and clubbed and beat them to a pulp. Forget the publicity stunt of that show trial. The end of the Holocaust is written on that wall in Palestinian blood. Philip! Old friend! All your life you have devoted to saving the Jews from themselves, exposing to them their self-delusions. All your life, as a writer, ever since you began writing those stories out at Chicago, you have been opposing their flattering self-stereotypes. You have been attacked for this, you have been reviled for this, the conspiracy against you in the Jewish press began at the beginning and has barely let up to this day, a smear campaign the likes of which has befallen no Jewish writer since Spinoza. Do I exaggerate? All I know is that if a goy publicly insulted a Jew the way they have publicly insulted you, the B’nai B’rith would be screaming from every pulpit and every talk show, ‘Anti-Semitism!’ They have called you the filthiest names, charged you with the most treacherous acts of betrayal, and yet you continue to feel responsible to them, to fear for them, you persist, in the face of their self-righteous stupidity, to be their loving, loyal son. You are a great patriot of your people, and because of this, much of what I have been saying has angered and offended you. I see it in the set of your face, I hear it in your silence. You think, He is crazy, hysterical, reckless, wild. And what if I am — wouldn’t you be? Jews! Jews! Jews! How can I not think continually about Jews! Jews are my jailers, I am their prisoner. And, as my wife will tell you, there is nothing I have less talent for than being a prisoner. My talent was to be a professor, not a slave to a master. My talent was to teach Dostoyevsky, not to live drowning in spite and resentment like the underground man! My talent was to explicate the interminable monologues of his seething madmen, not to turn into a seething madman whose own interminable monologues he cannot stifle even in his sleep. Why don’t I restrain myself if I know what I’m doing to myself? My poor wife asks this question every day. Why can’t we move back to Boston before the stroke that killed the ranting father kills the ranting son? Why? Because I, who will not capitulate, am a patriot too, who loves and hates his defeated, cringing Palestinians probably in the same proportion that you, Philip, love and hate your smug, self-satisfied Jews. You say nothing. You are shocked to see debonair Zee in a state of blind, consuming rage, and you are too ironical, too worldly, too skeptical to accept with graciousness what I am about to tell you now, but, Philip, you are a Jewish prophet and you always have been. You are a Jewish seer, and with your trip to Poland you have taken a visionary, bold, historical step. And for it you will now be more than just reviled in the press — you will be threatened, you will be menaced, you may very well be physically attacked. I wouldn’t doubt that they will even try to arrest you — to implicate you in some criminal act and put you in jail to shut you up. These are ruthless people here, and Philip Roth has dared to fly directly in the face of their national lie. For forty years they have been dragging Jews from all over the world, making payoffs, cutting deals, bribing officials in a dozen different countries so as to get their hands on more and more Jews and drag them here to perpetuate their myth of a Jewish homeland. And now comes Philip Roth to do everything he can to encourage these same Jews to stop squatting on somebody else’s land and to leave this make-believe country of theirs before these unregenerate, power-mad, vengeful Zionists implicate the whole of world Jewry in their brutality and bring a catastrophe down upon the Jews from which they will never recover. Old friend, we need you, we all need you, the occupiers as much as the occupied need your Diaspora boldness and your Diaspora brains. You are not in bondage to this conflict, you are not helpless in the grip of this thing. You come with a vision, a fresh and brilliant vision to resolve it — not a lunatic utopian Palestinian dream or a terrible Zionist final solution but a profoundly conceived historical arrangement that is workable, that is just. Old friend, dear, dear old friend — how can I serve you? How can we serve you? We are not without our resources. Tell me what we must do and we will do it.”

5 I AM PIPIK

The Ramallah military court lay within the walls of a jail built by the British during the Mandate, a low, concrete, bunkerlike complex whose purpose it would have been hard to misconstrue — it was a punishment just to look at it. The jail was perched atop a bald, sandy hill at the edge of the city, and we turned at the roundabout at the foot of the hill and drove up to the high chain fence, topped by a double roll of barbed wire, that enclosed the outermost perimeter of the four or five acres separating the jail from the road below. George and I got out of the car and approached the gate to present our papers to one of three armed guards. Without speaking, the guard examined them and handed them back, and we were permitted to advance another hundred feet to a second gatehouse, where a submachine gun jutting out the window was aimed at whatever ascended the drive. The gun was manned by a grim, unshaven young soldier, who eyed us soberly while we handed our papers over to another guard, who tossed them onto his desk and, with a truculent gesture, indicated that we could go on.

“Sephardic boys,” George told me as we continued toward a side door of the jail. “Moroccans. The Ashkenazis prefer to keep their hands clean. They get their darker brethren to do their torturing for them. The ignorant Arab haters from the Orient furnish the refined Ashkenazis with a very useful, all-purpose proletarian mob. Of course when they lived in Morocco they didn’t hate Arabs. They lived harmoniously with Arabs for a thousand years. But the white Israelis have taught them that, too — how to hate the Arabs and how to hate themselves. The white Israelis have turned them into their thugs.”

The side door was guarded by a pair of soldiers who, like those we’d just encountered, looked to have been recruited from the meanest city streets. They let us through without a word, and we stepped into a shabby courtroom barely large enough for a couple of dozen spectators. Occupying half the seats were more Israeli soldiers, who weren’t carrying weapons that I could see but who didn’t appear as though they’d have much trouble putting down a disturbance with just their bare hands. In scruffy fatigues and combat boots, their shirt collars open and their heads bare, they sat lazily sprawled about but nonetheless looking very proprietary with their arms spread to either side along the back rail of the wooden benches. My first impression was of young toughs lolling in the outer lobby of an employment agency that specialized in placing bouncers.

On the raised dais at the front of the courtroom, between two large Israeli flags pinned to the wall behind him, sat the judge, a uniformed army officer in his thirties. Slender, slightly balding, clean-shaven, carefully turned out, he listened to the proceedings with the perspicacious air of a mild, judicious person — one of “us.”

In the second row down from the dais, a seated spectator gestured toward George, and we two slipped quietly in beside him. No soldiers sat in this row. They had grouped themselves together further back, near a door at the rear of the room, which I saw opened onto the detention area for the defendants. Before the door was pulled shut, I glimpsed an Arab boy. You could read the terror on his face even from thirty feet away.

We had joined the poet-lawyer whose brother was accused of throwing Molotov cocktails and whom George had described as a formidable opponent of the Israeli occupation. When George introduced us he took my hand and pressed it warmly. Kamil° was his name, a tall, mustached man, skeletally thin, with the molten, black, meaningful eyes of what they used to call a ladies’ man and a manner that reminded me of the persuasively debonair disguise that George had worn back when he was Zee in Chicago.

Kamil explained to George, in English, that his brother’s case had still not been heard. George lifted a finger toward the dock to greet the brother, a boy of about sixteen or seventeen whose vacant expression suggested to me that he was, at least for the moment, paralyzed more by boredom than by fear. Altogether there were five Arab defendants in the dock, four teenagers and a man of about twenty-five whose case had been argued since morning. Kamil explained to me in a whisper that the prosecution was trying to renew the detention order of the older defendant, an alleged thief said to have stolen two hundred dinars, but that the Arab policeman testifying for the prosecution had only just arrived in the court. I looked to where the policeman was being cross-examined by the defense lawyer, who, to my surprise, wasn’t an Arab but an Orthodox Jew, an imposingly bearded bear of a man, probably in his fifties, wearing a skullcap along with his black legal gown. The interpreter, seated at the center of the proceedings just down from the judge, was a Druze, Kamil told me, an Israeli soldier who spoke Arabic and Hebrew. The lawyer for the prosecution was, like the judge, an army officer in uniform, a delicate-looking young fellow who had the air of someone engaged in an exceedingly tiresome task, though momentarily he seemed amused, as did the judge, by a remark of the policeman’s just translated by the interpreter.

My second Jewish courtroom in two days. Jewish judges. Jewish laws. Jewish flags. And non-Jewish defendants. Courtrooms such as Jews had envisioned in their fantasies for many hundreds of years, answering longings even more unimaginable than those for an army or a state. One day we will determine justice!

Well, the day had arrived, amazingly enough, and here we were, determining it. The unidealized realization of another hope-filled human dream.

My two companions focused only briefly on the cross-examination; soon George had a pad in his hand and was making notes to himself while Kamil was once again whispering directly into my face, “My brother has been given an injection.”

I thought at first that he’d said “injunction.”

“Meaning what?” I asked.

“An injection.” He illustrated by pressing his thumb into my upper arm.

“For what?”

“For nothing. To weaken his constitution. Now he aches all over. Look at him. He can barely hold his head up. A sixteen-year-old,” he said, plaintively unfurling his hands before him, “and they have made him sick with an injection.” The hands indicated that this was what they did and there was no way to stop them. “They use medical personnel. Tomorrow I’ll go complain to the Israeli medical society. And they will accuse me of libel.”

“Maybe he got an injection from medical personnel,” I whispered back, “because he was already ill.”

Kamil smiled as you smile at a child who plays with its toys while, in the hospital, one of its parents is dying. Then he put his lips to my ear to hiss, “It is they who are ill. This is how they suppress the revolt of the nationalist core. Torturing in ways that don’t leave marks.” He motioned toward the policeman on the witness stand. “Another sham. The case goes on and on only to extend our agony. This is the fourth day this has happened. They think that if they frustrate us long enough we will run away to live on the moon.”

The next time Kamil turned to whisper to me, he took my hand in his as he spoke. “Everywhere I meet people from South Africa,” he whispered. “I talk to them. I ask them questions. Because this gets so much like that every day.”

Kamil’s whispering was beginning to get on my nerves, as was the role in which I’d cast myself for whatever perverse and unexplained reason. How can we serve you? Either Kamil was working to recruit me as an ally against the Jews or he was testing to see if my usefulness was anything like George had surmised it to be on the basis of my visit with Lech Walesa. I thought, I’ve been putting myself in difficulties like this all my life but, up till now, by and large in fiction. How exactly do I get out of this?

Again there was the pressure of Kamil’s shoulder against my own and his warm breath on my skin. “Is this not correct? If it weren’t that Israel was Jewish —”

There was the sharp smack of a gavel striking, the judge’s way of suggesting to Kamil that perhaps it was time to shut up. Kamil, imperturbable, sighed and, crossing his hands in his lap, bore his reprimand in a state of ruminative meditation for about two minutes. Then he was at my ear again. “If it weren’t that Israel was Jewish, would not the same American Jewish liberals who are so identified with its well-being, would they not condemn it as harshly as South Africa for how it treats its Arab population?”

I chose again not to reply, but this discouraged him no more than the gavel had. “Of course, South Africa is irrelevant now. Now that they are breaking hands and giving their prisoners medical injections, now one thinks not of South Africa but of Nazi Germany.”

Here I turned my face to his as instinctively as I would hit the brake if something darted out in front of my car. And gazing altogether unaggressively at me were those liquid eyes with that bottomless eloquence which was all opacity to me. I had only to nod sympathetically, to nod and arrange my face in my gravest expression, in order to carry on the masquerade — but what was the purpose of this masquerade? If it had ever had a purpose, I was too provoked by my taunter’s reckless rhetoric to remember what it was and get on with the act. I’d heard enough. “Look,” I said, starting quiet and low but, surprisingly, as the words came, all at once flaring out of control, “Nazis didn’t break hands. They engaged in industrial annihilation of human beings. They made a manufacturing process of death. Please, no metaphors where there is recorded history!”

With that I sprang to my feet, but as I pushed past George’s legs the judge swung the gavel, twice this time, and in the row at the back four soldiers promptly stood and I saw the armed guard at the door toward which I was headed move to block my way. Then the perspicacious judge, speaking in English, ringingly announced to the courtroom, “Mr. Roth is morally appalled by our neocolonialism. Make way. The man needs air.” He spoke next in Hebrew and the guard blocking the door moved aside and I pushed the door open and stepped into the yard. But I had barely a moment to begin to figure out how I was going to find my way back to Jerusalem on my own before everyone I had left behind came pouring through the door after me. Everyone but George and Kamil. Had they been arrested? When I peered back through the open door I saw that the prisoners had been removed from the dock and, except at the dais, the room was empty. And there beside the chair of the army judge, who’d apparently called a recess in order to address them privately, stood my two missing companions. The judge happened at the moment to be listening and not speaking. It was George who was speaking. Foaming. Kamil stood quietly beside him, a very tall man with his hands in his pockets, an attacker whose onslaught was tamed by a cunning camouflaged to look just like forbearance.

The defense lawyer, the large bearded man in the skullcap, industriously smoked a cigarette only a few feet away from me. He smiled when I turned his way, a smile with a needle in it. “So,” he said, as though before we had even exchanged a word we had already reached a stalemate. He lit a second cigarette with the butt of his first and, after a little frenzy of deep inhalations, spoke again. “So you’re the one they’re all talking about.”

Inasmuch as he’d seen me tête-à-tête in the courtroom with the locally renowned brother of an Arab defendant and had to have assumed from that, however incorrectly, that my bias, if I had one, couldn’t be entirely antithetical to his, I was unprepared for the flagrant disdain. Another antagonist. But mine or Pipik’s? As it turned out, a little of each.

“Yes, you open your mouth,” he said, “and whatever comes out, the whole world takes notice. The Jews begin to beat their breasts. ‘Why is he against us? Why isn’t he for us?’ That must be a wonderful feeling, its mattering so much what you are for or against.”

“A better feeling, I assure you, than being a lawyer pleading petty- theft cases out in the sticks.”

“A two-hundred-and-fifty-pound Orthodox Jewish lawyer. Don’t minimize my insignificance.”

“Go away,” I said.

“You know, when the schmucks here get on me for defending Arabs, I don’t usually bother to listen. ‘It’s a living,’ I tell them. ‘What do you expect from a shyster like me?’ I tell them that the Arab respects a fat man, a fat man can screw them really good. But when George Ziad brings to this courtroom his celebrity leftists, then I seem to myself nearly as despicable as they are. At least you have the excuse of self-advancement. How will you get to Stockholm without your Third World credentials?”

“Of course. All a part of the assault on the prize.”

“The glamorous one, their courtroom bard, has he told you yet about the burning building? ‘If you jump out of a burning building, you may land on the back of a man who happens to be walking along the street. That is a bad enough accident. You then don’t have to start beating him over the head with a stick. But that is what is happening on the West Bank. First they landed on people’s backs, in order to save themselves, and now they are beating them over the head.’ So folkloric. So very authentic. Hasn’t he taken you by the hand yet? He will, very stirringly, when you are ready to go. This is when Kamil gets the Academy Award. ‘You will leave here and forget, and she will leave here and forget, and George will leave here, and for all I know perhaps even George will forget. But the one who receives the strokes, he has an experience different from that of the one who counts the strokes.’ Yes, they have a great catch in you, Mr. Roth. A Jewish Jesse Jackson — worth a thousand Chomskys. And here they are,” he said, looking to where George and Kamil had stepped through the courtroom door and into the yard, “the world’s pet victims. What is their dream? Palestine or Palestine and Israel too? Ask them sometime to try and tell you the truth.”

What George and Kamil did first when they joined us was to shake the large lawyer’s hand; in turn he offered each a cigarette, and when I refused one, he lit himself another and began to laugh, a harsh, tearing noise with cavernous undertones that did not bring good tidings from the bronchial tubes; another thousand packs and he might never again have to endure the sickly naiveté of celebrity leftists like Jesse Jackson and me. “The eminent author,” he explained to George and Kamil, “doesn’t know what to make of our cordiality.” To me he then confided, “This is the Middle East. We all know how to lie with a smile. Sincerity is not of this world, but these native boys make a specialty of underdoing it. That’s something you find out about Arabs — perfectly natural in both roles at the same time. So convincing one way — just like you when you write — and then, the next moment, someone will walk out of the room, they’ll turn around and be just the opposite.”

“And how do you account for this?” I asked him.

“One’s interest allows anything. Very, very basic. Comes from the desert. That blade of grass is mine and my animal is going to get it or die. It’s my animal or your animal. That’s where interest begins and it justifies all duplicity. There is in Islam this idea of taqiya. Generally called in English ‘dissimulation.’ It’s especially strong in Shi’ite Islam but it’s all over Islamic culture. Doctrinally speaking, dissimulation is part of Islamic culture, and the permission to dissimulate is widespread. The culture doesn’t expect that you’ll speak in a way that endangers you and certainly not that you’ll be candid and sincere. You would be considered foolish to do that. People say one thing, adopt a public position, and are then quite different on the inside and privately act in a totally different way. They have an expression for this: ‘the shifting sands’ — ramál mutaharrika. An example. For all their bravado about opposing Zionism, throughout the Mandate they sold land to the Jews. Not just their run-of-the-mill opportunists but also their big leadership. But they have a wonderful proverb to justify this as well. Ad-daroori lih achkaam. ‘Necessity has its own rules.’ Dissimulation, two-facedness, secretiveness — all highly regarded values among your friends,” he told me. “They don’t think that other people have to know what is really on their minds. Very different from Jews, you see, telling everything that’s on their minds to everyone nonstop. I used to think that God has given the Jew the Arab to bedevil his conscience and keep it Jewish. I know better since meeting George and the bard. God sent us the Arab so we could learn from him how to refine our own deviousness.”

“And why,” George asked him, “did God give the Arab the Jew?”

“To punish him,” the lawyer answered. “You know that better than anyone. To punish him, of course, for falling away from Allah. George is a great sinner,” he said to me. “He can tell you some entertaining stories about falling away.”

“And Shmuel° is a greater actor even than I am a sinner,” said George. “In our communities he plays the role of a saint — a Jew who defends the Arab’s civil rights. To be represented by a Jewish lawyer — this way there is at least a chance in the courtroom. Even Demjanjuk thinks this way. Demjanjuk fired his Mr. O’Brien and hired Sheftel because he too is deluded enough to think it will help. I heard the other day that Demjanjuk told Sheftel, ‘If I had a Jewish lawyer to begin with, I’d never be in this trouble now.’ Shmuel, admittedly, is no Sheftel. Sheftel is the antiestablishment superstar — he’ll squeeze those Ukrainians for all they’re worth. He’ll make half a million on this Treblinka guard. That isn’t the humble way of Saint Shmuel. Saint Shmuel doesn’t care how little he is paid by his impoverished defendants. Why should he? He receives his paycheck elsewhere. It isn’t enough that Shin Bet corrodes our life here by buying an informer in every family. It isn’t enough to play the serpent like that with people already oppressed and, you would think, humiliated quite enough already. No, even the civil-rights lawyer must be a spy, even that they must corrupt.”

“George is not fair to his informers,” the Jewish lawyer told me. “Yes, there are a great many of them, but why not? It is a traditional occupation in this region, one at which its practitioners are marvelously adept. Informing has a long and noble history here. Informing goes back not just to the British, not just to the Turks, it goes all the way back to Judas. Be a good cultural relativist, George — informing is a way of life here, no less deserving of your respect than the way of life indigenous to any society. You spent so many years abroad as an intellectual playboy, you were away so long from your own people, that you judge them, if I may say so, almost with the eyes of a condescending Israeli imperialist dog. You speak of informing, but informing offers a little relief from all that humiliation. Informing lends status, informing offers privileges. You really should not be so quick to slit the throats of your collaborators when collaborating is one of your society’s most estimable achievements. It is actually on the order of an anthropological crime to burn their hands and stone them to death — and for someone in your shoes, it is stupid as well. Since everybody in Ramallah already suspects everyone else of informing, some foolish hothead might someday be so misguided as to take you for a collaborator and slit your throat too. What if I were to spread the rumor myself? I might not find doing that too unpleasant.”

“Shmuel,” George replied, “do what you do, spread false rumors if you like —”

While their bantering continued, Kamil stood apart smoking in silence. He did not seem even to be listening, nor was there any reason why he should have been, since this bitter little vaudeville turn was clearly for the sake of my, and not his, education.

The soldiers who’d been smoking together at the other end of the yard started back toward the courtroom door and, after expectorating into the dust from behind one hand, the lawyer Shmuel, too, abruptly headed off without another insult for any of us.

Kamil said to me, now that Shmuel had gone, “I mistook you for somebody else.”

Who this time? I wondered. I waited to hear more but for a while there was nothing more and his thoughts appeared to be elsewhere again. “There are too many things to do,” he finally explained, “in not enough time. We are all overworked and overstrained. No sleep begins to make you stupid.” A grave apology — and the gravity I found as unnerving as everything else about him. Because his rage wasn’t flaring up in your face every two minutes, it struck me as more fearsome than George’s to be near. It was like being in the vicinity of one of those bombs they unearth during urban excavations, the big ones that have lain unexploded since World War II. I imagined — as I didn’t when thinking about George — that Kamil could do a lot of damage when and if he ever went off.

“Whom did you mistake me for?” I asked.

He surprised me by smiling. “Yourself.”

I did not like this smile from a man who I surmised never horsed around. Did he know what he was saying or was he saying that he had nothing more to say? All this performing didn’t mean that a play was in progress; it meant the opposite.

“Yes,” I said, feigning friendliness, “I can see how you might be misled. But I assure you that I am no more myself than anyone else around here.”

Something in that response made him promptly turn even more severe-looking than before the dubious gift of that smile. I really couldn’t understand what he was up to. Kamil spoke as though in a code known only to himself; or perhaps he was just trying to frighten me.

“The judge,” George said, “has agreed that his brother should go to the hospital. Kamil is staying to be sure it happens.”

“I hope nothing’s wrong with your brother,” I said, but Kamil continued to look at me as though I were the one who had given the boy the injection. Now that he had apologized for having mistaken me for somebody else, he seemed to have concluded that I was even more contemptible than the other guy.

“Yes,” Kamil replied. “You are sympathetic. Very sympathetic. It is difficult not to be sympathetic when you see with your own eyes what is being perpetrated here. But let me tell you what will happen to your sympathy. You will leave here, and in a week, two weeks, a month at the most, you will forget. And Mr. Shmuel the lawyer, he will go home tonight and, even before he is in the front door, before he has even eaten his dinner and played with his children, he will forget. And George will leave here and perhaps even George will forget. If not today, tomorrow. George forgot once before.” Angrily he pointed back to the jail, but his voice was exceedingly gentle when he said, “The one who receives the strokes has an experience different from that of the one who counts the strokes.” And with that went back to where his brother was a prisoner of the Jews.

George wanted to telephone his wife to tell her he would shortly be home with a guest, so we walked around to a door at the front of the complex, where there was no one standing guard, and George simply pushed it open and went in, with me following closely behind. I was astonished that a Palestinian like George and a perfect stranger like me could just start down the corridor without anyone’s stopping us, especially when I remembered that no one had checked at any point to see if we were armed. In an office at the end of the corridor, three female soldiers, Israeli girls of about eighteen or nineteen, were typing away, their radio tuned to the standard rock stuff — we had only to roll a grenade through the open door to take our revenge for Kamil’s brother. How come no one seemed alert to this possibility? One of the typists looked up when he asked in Hebrew if he could use the phone. She nodded perfunctorily, “Shalom, George,” and that’s when I thought, He is a collaborator.

George, speaking English, was telling his wife how he’d run into me in Jerusalem, the great friend he hadn’t seen since 1955, and I looked at the posters on the walls of the dirty, drab little room, tacked up probably by the soldier-typists to help them forget where they worked — there was a travel poster from Colombia, a poster of little ducklings swimming cutely in a lily pond, a poster of wildflowers growing abundantly in a peaceful field — and all the while I pretended to be engaged by them and nothing more, I was thinking, He’s an Israeli spy — and who he is spying on is me. Only what kind of spy can he be if he doesn’t know that I’m not the right me? And why should Shmuel have exposed him if Shmuel works for Shin Bet himself? No, he’s a spy for the PLO. No, he’s a spy for no one. No one’s a spy. I’m the spy!

Where everything is words, you’d think I’d have some mastery and know my way around, but all this churning hatred, each man a verbal firing squad, immeasurable suspicions, a flood of mocking, angry talk, all of life a vicious debate, conversations in which there is nothing that cannot be said … no, I’d be better off in the jungle, I thought, where a roar’s a roar and one is hard put to miss its meaning. Here I had only the weakest understanding of what might underlie the fighting and the shadow fighting; nor was my own behavior much more plausible to me than anyone else’s.

As we walked together down the hill and out past the guarded gatehouses, George berated himself for having imposed the miseries of the occupation on his wife and his son, neither of whom had the fortitude for a frontline existence, even though for Anna° there was compensation of a sort in living virtually next door to the widowed father whose failing health had been such a source of anxiety to her in America. He was a wealthy Ramallah businessman, nearly eighty, who had seen that Anna was sent to the best schools from the time she was ten, first, in the mid-fifties, to a Christian girls’ school in Beirut, after that to the United States, where she’d met and married George, who was also Christian. Anna had worked for years as a layout artist with a Boston advertising agency; here she ran a workshop for the production of propaganda posters, leaflets, and handouts, an operation whose clandestine nature took its toll in a daily dose of nagging medical problems and a weekly bout of migraines. Her abiding fear was of the Israelis coming at night and arresting not her but their fifteen-year-old son, Michael.°

Yet for George himself had there been a choice? In Boston he’d held the line against Israel’s defenders at the Middle East seminars in Coolidge Hall, he obstinately opposed his Jewish friends even when it meant ruining his own dinner parties, he wrote op-ed pieces for the Globe and went on WGBH whenever Chris Lydon wanted someone to battle for three minutes with the local Netanyahu on his show; but idealistically resisting the occupier from the satisfying security of his tenured American professorship turned out to be even less tolerable to his conscience than the memory of going around all those years disavowing any connection to the struggle at all. Yet here in Ramallah, true to his duty, he worried continually about what returning with him was doing to Anna and, even more, to Michael, whose rebellion George hadn’t foreseen, though when he described it I wondered how he could have failed to. However heroic the cause had seemed to Michael amid the patriotic graffiti decorating his bedroom walls in suburban Newton, he felt now as only an adolescent son can toward what he sees as an obstacle to his self-realization raised by an obtuse father mandating an outmoded way of life. Most reluctantly, George was on the brink of accepting his father-in-law’s financial help and, at Anna’s insistence, sending Michael back to a New England boarding school for his remaining high school years. To George — who believed the boy was big enough to stay and be educated here in the hard truth of their lives, old enough now to share in the tribulation that was inescapably theirs and to embrace the consequences of being George’s son — the arguments with Michael were all the more punishing for being a reenactment of the bitter conflict that had alienated him from his own father and embittered them both.

My heart went out to Michael, however callow a youth he might be. The shaming nationalism that the fathers throw on the backs of their sons, each generation, I thought, imposing its struggle on the next. Yet that was their family’s big drama and the one that weighed on George Ziad like a stone. Here is Michael, whose entitlement, his teenage American instinct tells him, is to be a new ungrateful generation, ahistorical and free, and here is another father in the heartbreaking history of fathers, who expects everything blindly selfish in a young son to capitulate before his own adult need to appease the ghost of the father whom he had affronted with his own selfishness. Yes, making amends to father had taken possession of George and, as anyone knows who’s tried it, making amends to father is hard work — all that hacking through the undergrowth of stale pathology with the machete of one’s guilt. But George was out to settle the issue of self-division once and for all, and that meant, as it usually does, immoderation with a vengeance. Half-measures are out for these people — but hadn’t they always been for George? He wanted a life that merged with that of others, first, as Zee in Chicago, with ours and now all over again here with theirs — subdue the inner quarrel with an act of ruthless simplification — and it never worked. But sensibly occupying the middle ground in Boston hadn’t worked either. His life couldn’t seem to merge with anyone’s anywhere no matter what drastic experiment in remodeling he tried. Amazing, that something as tiny, really, as a self should contain contending subselves — and that these subselves should themselves be constructed of subselves, and on and on and on. And yet, even more amazing, a grown man, an educated adult, a full professor, who seeks self-integration!

Multiple selves had been on my mind for months now, beginning with my Halcion breakdown and fomented anew by the appearance of Moishe Pipik, and so perhaps my thinking about George was overly subjective; but what I was determined to understand, however imperfectly, was why whatever George said, even when, like a guy in a bar, he despaired about people as close to him as his wife and his child, didn’t seem to me quite to make sense. I kept hearing a man as out of his depth as he was out of control, convulsed by all his contradictions and destined never to arrive where he belonged, let alone at “being himself.” Maybe what it all came down to was that an academic, scholarly disposition had been overtaken by the mad rage to make history and that, his temperamental unfitness, rather than the urgency of a bad conscience, accounted for all this disjointedness I saw, the overexcitability, the maniacal loquacity, the intellectual duplicity, the deficiencies of judgment, the agitprop rhetoric — for the fact that amiable, subtle, endearing George Ziad had been turned completely inside out. Or maybe it just came down to injustice: isn’t a colossal, enduring injustice enough to drive a decent man mad?

Our pilgrimage to the bloodstained wall where Israeli soldiers had dragged the local inhabitants to break their bones and beat them into submission was thwarted by a ring of impassable roadblocks around the central square, and we had, in fact, to detour up through the outlying hills to reach George’s house at the other side of Ramallah. “My father used to weep nostalgically about these hills, too. Even in spring, he’d say, he could smell the almond blossoms. You can’t,” George told me, “not in spring — they bloom in February. I was always kind enough to correct his hyperbole. Why couldn’t he be a man about those trees and stop crying?”

In a tone of self-castigating resignation George wearily compiled an indictment of recollections like these all the way up, around, and down the back roads into the city — so perhaps I’d been right the first time, and it was remorse that, if not alone in determining the scale of this harsh transformation, intensified the wretched despair that polluted everything and had made hyperbole standard fare for George, too. For having sniped at a ruined father’s sentimental maunderings with a faultfinding adolescent’s spiteful tongue, Dr. Ziad’s little boy looked now to be paying the full middle-aged price and then some.

Unless, of course, it was all an act.

George’s was one of half a dozen stone houses separated by large patches of garden and clustered loosely around a picturesque old olive grove that stretched down to a small ravine — originally, during Anna’s early childhood, this had been a family compound full of brothers and cousins but most of them had emigrated by now. There was a biting chill in the air as it was getting to be dusk, and inside the house, in a tiny fireplace at the end of the narrow living room, a few sticks of wood were burning, a pretty sight but without effect against the chill pervasive dankness that went right to one’s bones. The place was cheerily fixed up, however, with bright textiles splashed about on the chairs and the sofa and several rugs with modernistic geometric designs scattered across the uneven stone floor. To my surprise I didn’t see books anywhere — maybe George felt his books were more secure at his university office — though there were a lot of Arabic magazines and newspapers strewn atop a table beside the sofa. Anna and Michael wore heavy sweaters as we sat close to the fire drinking our hot tea, and I warmed my hands on the cup, thinking, This aboveground cellar, after Boston. The cold smell of a dungeon on top of everything else. There was also the smell of a kerosene heater burning — one that might not have been in the best state of repair — but it seemed to be off in another room. This room opened through multipaned French doors onto the garden, and a four-bladed fan hung by a very long stem from an arched ceiling that must have been fifteen feet high, and though I could see how the place might have its charm once the weather grew warm, right now this wasn’t a home to inspire a mood of snug relaxation.

Anna was a tiny, almost weightless woman whose anatomy’s whole purpose seemed to be to furnish the housing for her astonishing eyes. There wasn’t much else to her. There were the eyes, intense and globular, eyes to see with in the dark, set like a lemur’s in a triangular face not very much larger than a man’s fist, and then there was the tent of the sweater enshrouding the anorexic rest of her and, peeping out at the bottom, two feet in baby’s running shoes. I would have figured as a mate for the George I’d known a nocturnal creature fuller and furrier than Anna, but perhaps when they’d met and married in Boston some two decades back there’d been more in her of the sprightly gamine than of this preyed-upon animal who lives by night — if you can call it living — and during the day is gone.

Michael was already a head taller than his father, an excruciatingly skinny, delicate brunette with marbleized skin, a prettyish boy whose shyness (or maybe just exasperation) rendered him mute and immobile. His father was explaining that Diasporism was the first original idea that he had heard from a Jew in forty years, the first that promised a solution based on honest historical and moral foundations, the first that acknowledged that the only just way to partition Palestine was by transferring not the population that was indigenous to the region but the population to whom this region had been, from the start, foreign and inimical … and all the while Michael’s eyes remained rigidly fixed on some invisible dot that compelled his entire attention and that was situated in the air about a foot above my knee. Nor did Anna appear to take much hope from the fact that Jewry’s leading Diasporist was visiting her home for tea. Only George, I thought, is so far gone, only he is so crazily desperate … unless it’s all an act.

Of course George understood that such a proposal would be received with nothing but scorn by the Zionists, whose every sacrosanct precept Diasporism exposed as fraudulent; and he went on to explain that even among Palestinians, who should be my ardent advocates, there would be those, like Kamil, lacking the imagination to grasp its political potential, who would stupidly misconstrue Diasporism as an exercise in Jewish nostalgia —

“So that was his take,” I said, daring to interrupt the unbridled talker who, it occurred to me, perhaps with his voice alone had reduced his wife to little more than those eyes and battered his son into silence. “A nostalgic Jew, dreaming Broadway dreams about a musical-comedy shtetl.”

“Yes. Kamil said to me, ‘One Woody Allen is enough.’”

“Did he? In the courtroom? Why Woody Allen?”

“Woody Allen wrote something in The New York Times,” George said. “An op-ed article. Ask Anna. Ask Michael. They read it and couldn’t believe their eyes. It was reprinted here. It ranks as Woody Allen’s best joke yet. Philip, the guy isn’t a shlimazl just in the movies. Woody Allen believes that Jews aren’t capable of violence. Woody Allen doesn’t believe that he is reading the papers correctly — he just can’t believe that Jews break bones. Tell us another one, Woody. The first bone they break in defense — to put it charitably; the second in winning; the third gives them pleasure; and the fourth is already a reflex. Kamil hasn’t patience for this idiot, and he figured you for another. But it doesn’t matter in Tunis what Kamil thinks in Ramallah about Philip Roth. It hardly matters any longer in Ramallah what Kamil thinks about anything.”

“Tunis?”

“I assure you that Arafat can differentiate between Woody Allen and Philip Roth.”

This was surely the strangest sentence I had ever heard spoken in my life. I decided to top it. If this is the way George wants to play it, then this is the way we shall go. I am not writing this thing. They are. I don’t even exist.

“Any meeting with Arafat,” I heard myself telling him, “must be completely secret. For obvious reasons. But I will meet with him, any place and any time, Tunis or anywhere, and tomorrow is none too soon. It might be communicated to Arafat that through the good offices of Lech Walesa it’s likely that I’ll be meeting secretly at the Vatican with the Pope, probably next month. Walesa is already committed to my cause, as you know. He maintains that the Pope will find in Diasporism not only a means of resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict but an instrument for the moral rehabilitation and spiritual reawakening of all of Europe. I am myself not as sanguine as he is about the boldness of this pope. It’s all well and good for His Holiness to be pro-Palestinian and to berate the Jews for appropriating property to which they have no legal right. It’s something else again to espouse the corollary of this position and to invite a million-plus Jews to consider themselves at home in the heart of Western Christendom. Yes, it would be something if the Pope were to call upon Europe publicly and openly to invite its Jews to return from their exile in Israel, and for him to mean it; if he were to call on Europe to confess to its complicity in their uprooting and destruction; if he were to call on Europe to purge itself of a thousand years of anti-Semitism and to make room in its midst for a vital Jewish presence to multiply and flourish there and, in anticipation of the third millennium of Christianity, to declare by proclamation in all its parliaments the right of the Jewish uprooted to resettle in their European homeland and to live as Jews there, free, secure, and welcome. That would be simply wonderful. But I have my doubts. Walesa’s Polish pope may even prefer Europe as Hitler passed it on to his European heirs — His Holiness may not really care to undo Hitler’s little miracle. But Arafat is another matter. Arafat —” On I went, usurping the identity of the usurper who had usurped mine, heedless of truth, liberated from all doubt, assured of the indisputable rightness of my cause — seer, savior, very likely the Jews’ Messiah.

So this is how it’s done, I thought. This is how they do it. You just say everything.

No, I didn’t stop for a very long time. On and on and on, obeying an impulse I did nothing to quash, ostentatiously free of uncertainty and without a trace of conscience to rein in my raving. I was telling them about the meeting of the World Diasporist Congress to take place in December, fittingly enough in Basel, the site of the first World Zionist Congress just ninety years ago. At that first Zionist Congress there had been only a couple of hundred delegates — my goal was to have twice that many, Jewish delegations from every European country where the Israeli Ashkenazis would soon resume the European Jewish life that Hitler had all but extinguished. Walesa, I told them, had already agreed to appear as keynote speaker or to send his wife in his behalf if he concluded that he could not safely leave Poland. I was talking about the Armenians, suddenly, about whom I knew nothing. “Did the Armenians suffer because they were in a Diaspora? No, because they were at home and the Turks moved in and massacred them there.” I heard myself next praising the greatest Diasporist of all, the father of the new Diasporist movement, Irving Berlin. “People ask where I got the idea. Well, I got it listening to the radio. The radio was playing ‘Easter Parade’ and I thought, But this is Jewish genius on a par with the Ten Commandments. God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave to Irving Berlin ‘Easter Parade’ and ‘White Christmas.’ The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ — the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity — and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow. Gone is the gore and the murder of Christ — down with the crucifix and up with the bonnet! He turns their religion into schlock. But nicely! Nicely! So nicely the goyim don’t even know what hit ’em. They love it. Everybody loves it. The Jews especially. Jews loathe Jesus. People always tell me Jesus is Jewish. I never believe them. It’s like when people used to tell me Cary Grant was Jewish. Bullshit. Jews don’t want to hear about Jesus. And can you blame them? So — Bing Crosby replaces Jesus as the beloved Son of God, and the Jews, the Jews, go around whistling about Easter! And is that so disgraceful a means of defusing the enmity of centuries? Is anyone really dishonored by this? If schlockified Christianity is Christianity cleansed of Jew hatred, then three cheers for schlock. If supplanting Jesus Christ with snow can enable my people to cozy up to Christmas, then let it snow, let it snow, let it snow! Do you see my point?” I took more pride, I told them, in “Easter Parade” than in the victory of the Six Day War, found more security in “White Christmas” than in the Israeli nuclear reactor. I told them that if the Israelis ever reached a point where they believed their survival depended not merely on breaking hands but on dropping a nuclear bomb, that would be the end of Judaism, even if the state of Israel should survive. “Jews as Jews will simply disappear. A generation after Jews use nuclear weapons to save themselves from their enemies, there will no longer be people to identify themselves as Jews. The Israelis will have saved their state by destroying their people. They will never survive morally after that; and if they don’t, why survive as Jews at all? They barely have the wherewithal to survive morally now. To put all these Jews in this tiny place, surrounded on all sides by tremendous hostility — how can you survive morally? Better to be marginal neurotics, anxious assimilationists, and everything else that the Zionists despise, better to lose the state than to lose your moral being by unleashing a nuclear war. Better Irving Berlin than Ariel Sharon. Better Irving Berlin than the Wailing Wall. Better Irving Berlin than Holy Jerusalem! What does owning Jerusalem, of all places, have to do with being Jews in 1988? Jerusalem is by now the worst thing that could possibly have happened to us. Last year in Jerusalem! Next year in Warsaw! Next year in Bucharest! Next year in Vilna and Cracow! Look, I know people call Diasporism a revolutionary idea, but it’s not a revolution that I’m proposing, it’s a retroversion, a turning back, the very thing Zionism itself once was. You go back to the crossing point and cross back the other way. Zionism went back too far, that’s what went wrong with Zionism. Zionism went back to the crossing point of the dispersion — Diasporism goes back to the crossing point of Zionism.”

My sympathies were entirely with George’s wife. I didn’t know which was more insufferable to her, the fervor with which I presented my Diasporist blah-blah or the thoughtfulness with which George sat there taking it in. Her husband had finally stopped talking — only to listen to this! Either to warm herself or to contain herself she’d enwrapped herself in her own arms and, like a woman on the brink of keening, she began almost imperceptibly rocking and swaying to and fro. And the message in those eyes of hers couldn’t have been plainer: I was more than even she could bear, she who had by now borne everything. He suffers enough without you Shut up. Go away. Disappear.

All right, I’ll address this woman’s fears directly. Wouldn’t Moishe Pipik? “Anna, I’d be skeptical too if I were you. I’d be thinking, just as you are, This writer is one of those writers with no grasp on reality. This is all the nonsensical fantasy of a man who understands nothing. This is not even literature, let alone politics, this is a fable and a fairy tale. You are thinking of the thousand reasons why Diasporism can only fail, and I am telling you that I know the thousand reasons, I know the million reasons. But I am also here to tell you, to tell George, to tell Kamil, to tell whoever here will listen that it cannot fail because it must not fail, because the absurdity is not Diasporism but its alternative: Destruction. What people once thought about Zionism you are now thinking about Diasporism: an impossible pipe dream. You are thinking that I am just one more victim of the madness here that is on both sides — that this mad, crazy, tragic predicament has engulfed my sanity too. I see how miserable I am making you by exciting expectations in George that you know to be utopian and beyond implementation — that George, in his heart of hearts, knows to be utopian. But let me show you both something I received just a few hours ago that may cause you to think otherwise. It was given to me by an elderly survivor of Auschwitz.”

I removed from my jacket the envelope containing Smilesburger’s check and handed it to Anna. “Given to me by someone as desperate as you are to bring this maddening conflict to a just and honorable and workable conclusion. His contribution to the Diasporist movement.”

When Anna saw the check, she began to laugh very softly, as though this were a private joke intended especially for her amusement.

“Let me see,” said George, but for the moment she would not relinquish it. Wearily he asked her, “Why do you laugh? I prefer that, mind you, to the tears, but why do you laugh like this?”

“From happiness. From joy. I’m laughing because it’s all over. Tomorrow the Jews are going to line up at the airline office to get their one-way tickets for Berlin. Michael, look.” And she drew the boy close to her to show him the check. “Now you will be able to live in wonderful Palestine for the rest of your life. The Jews are leaving. Mr. Roth is the anti-Moses leading them out of Israel. Here is the money for their airfare.” But the pale, elongated, beautiful boy, without so much as glancing at the check in his mother’s hand, clenched his teeth and pulled away violently. This did not stop Anna, however — the check was merely the pretext she needed to deliver her diatribe. “Now there can be a Palestinian flag flying from every building and everybody can stand up and salute it twenty times a day. Now we can have our own money, with Father Arafat’s portrait on our very own bills. In our pockets we can jingle coins bearing the profile of Abu Nidal. I’m laughing,” she said, “because Palestinian Paradise is at hand.”

“Please,” George said, “this is the royal road to the migraine.” He motioned impatiently for her to hand him my check. Pipik’s check.

“Another victim who can’t forget,” said Anna, meanwhile studying the face of the check with those globular eyes as though there at last she might find the clue to why fate had delivered her into this misery. “All these victims and their horrible scars. But, tell me,” she asked, and as simply as a child asks why the grass is green, “how many victims can possibly stand on this tiny bit of soil?”

“But he agrees with you,” her husband said. “That is why he is here.”

“In America,” she told me, “I thought I had married a man who had left all this victimization behind, a man of cultivation who knew what made life rich and full. I didn’t think I had married another Kamil, who can’t start being a human being until the occupation is over. These perpetual little brothers, claiming they can’t live, they can’t breathe, because somebody is casting a shadow over them! The moral childishness of these people! A man with George’s brain, strangling on spurious issues of loyalty! Why aren’t you loyal,” she cried, wildly turning on George, “to your intellect? Why aren’t you loyal to literature? People like you” — meaning me as well — “run for their lives from backwater provinces like this one. You ran, you were right to run, both of you, as far as you could from the provincialism and the egocentricity and the xenophobia and the lamentations, you were not poisoned by the sentimentality of these childish, stupid ethnic mythologies, you plunged into a big, new, free world with all your intellect and all your energy, truly free young men, devoted to art, books, reason, scholarship, to seriousness —”

“Yes, to everything noble and elevated. Look,” said George, “you are merely describing two snobbish graduate students — and we were not so pure even then. You paint a ridiculously naive portrait that would have struck us as laughable even then.”

“Well, all I mean,” she answered contemptuously, “is that you couldn’t possibly have been as idiotic as you are now.”

“You just prefer the high-minded idiocy of universities to the low-minded idiocy of political struggle. No one says it isn’t idiotic and stupid and perhaps even futile. But that is what it’s like, you see, for a human being to live on this earth.”

“No amount of money,” she said, ignoring the condescension to address me again about my check, “will change a single thing. Stay here, you’ll see. There is nothing in the future for these Jews and these Arabs but more tragedy, suffering, and blood. The hatred on both sides is too enormous, it envelops everything. There is no trust and there will not be for another thousand years. ‘To live on this earth.’ Living in Boston was living on this earth —” she angrily reminded George. “Or isn’t it ‘life’ any longer when people have a big, bright apartment and quiet, intelligent neighbors and the simple civilized pleasure of a good job and raising children? Isn’t it ‘life’ when you read books and listen to music and choose your friends because of their qualities and not because they share your roots? Roots! A concept for cavemen to live by! Is the survival of Palestinian culture, Palestinian people, Palestinian heritage, is that really a ‘must’ in the evolution of humanity? Is all that mythology a greater must than the survival of my son?”

“He’s going back,” George quietly replied.

“When? When?” She shook the check in George’s face. “When Philip Roth collects a thousand more checks from crazy Jews and the airlift to Poland begins? When Philip Roth and the Pope sit down together in the Vatican and solve our problems for us? I will not sacrifice my son to any more fanatics and their megalomaniacal fantasies!”

“He will go back,” George repeated sternly.

“Palestine is a lie! Zionism is a lie! Diasporism is a lie! The biggest lie yet! I will not sacrifice Michael to more lies!”

George phoned to downtown Ramallah for a taxi to come to his house to drive me to Jerusalem. The driver was a weathered-looking old man who seemed awfully sleepy given that it was only seven in the evening. I wondered aloud if this was the best George could do.

First George told him in Arabic where to take me, then, in English, he said, “He’s used to the checkpoints, and the soldiers there are familiar with him. You’ll get back all right.”

“To me he looks a little the worse for wear.”

“Don’t worry,” George said. He had wanted, in fact, to take me back himself, but in their bedroom, where Anna had gone to lie down in the dark, she had warned George that if he dared to go off in the evening to drive to Jerusalem and back, neither she nor Michael would be there when he returned, if he returned and didn’t wind up beaten to death by the army or shot by vigilante Jews. “It’s the migraine talking,” George explained. “I don’t want to make it worse.”

“I’m afraid,” I said, “I already have.”

“Philip, we’ll speak tomorrow. There are many things to discuss. I’ll come in the morning. I want to take you somewhere. I want you to meet someone. You will be free in the morning?”

I had arranged a meeting with Aharon, I had somehow to get to see Apter, but I said, “For you, yes, of course. Say goodbye to Michael for me. And to Anna. …”

“He’s in there holding her hand.”

“Maybe this is all too much for him.”

“It does begin to look that way.” He closed his eyes and pressed his fingers to his forehead. “My stupidity,” he moaned. “My fucking stupidity!”

At the door he embraced me. “Do you know what you’re doing? Do you know what it’s going to mean for you when the Mossad finds out you’ve met with Arafat?”

“Arrange the meeting, Zee.”

“Oh, you’re the best of them!” he said emotionally. “The very best!”

Bullshit artist, I thought, actor, liar, fake, but all I did was return the embrace with no less fervent duplicitousness than was being proffered.

To circumvent the Ramallah roadblocks, which still barred the entrance to the city center and access to the telltale bloodstained wall, the taxi driver took the circuitous route through the hills that George had used earlier to get home. There were no lights to be seen anywhere once we were headed away from the complex of stone houses at the edge of the ravine, no cars appeared on the hillside roads, and for a long time I kept my eyes fixed on the path cut by our headlamps and was too apprehensive to think of anything other than making it safely back to Jerusalem. Shouldn’t he be driving with his brights on? Or were those feeble beams the brights? Going back with this old Arab, I thought, had to be a mistake but so was coming out with George, so, surely, was everything I had just said and done. This little leave I had taken not merely of my senses but of my life was inexplicable to me — it was as though reality had stopped and I had gotten off to do what I did and now I was being driven along these dark roads to where reality would be waiting for me to climb back on board and resume doing what I used to do. Had I even been present? Yes, yes, I most certainly had been, hidden no more than an inch or two behind that mild exercise in malicious cynicism. And yet I could swear that my carrying-on was completely innocent. The lengths I had gone to to mislead George hadn’t seemed to me any more underhanded than if we’d been two children at play in a sand-pile, no more insidious and about as mindless — for one of the few times in my life I couldn’t really satirize myself for thinking too much. What had I yielded to? How did I get here? The rattling car, the sleepy driver, the sinister road … it was all the unforeseen outcome of the convergence of my falseness with his, dissimulation to match dissimulation … unless George hadn’t been dissimulating, unless the only act was mine! But could he possibly have taken that blather seriously about Irving Berlin? No, no — here’s what they’re up to: They’re thinking of the infantile idealism and immeasurable egoism of all those writers who step momentarily onto the vast stage of history by shaking the hand of the revolutionary leader in charge of the local egalitarian dictatorship; they’re thinking of how, aside from flattering a writer’s vanity, it lends his life a sense of significance that he just can’t seem to get finding the mot juste (if he even comes anywhere close to finding it one out of five hundred times); they’re thinking that nothing does that egoism quite so much good as the illusion of submerging it for three or four days in a great and selfless, highly visible cause; they’re thinking along the lines that Shmuel the lawyer had been thinking when he observed that it might just be that I’d come round to the courtroom in the clutches of “the world’s pet victims” to beef up my credentials for the big prize. They’re thinking of Jesse Jackson, of Vanessa Redgrave, smiling in those news photographs arm in arm with their leader, and of how, in the public-relations battle with the Jews, which well might decide more in the end than all of the terrorism would, a photograph in Time with a celebrity Jew might just be worth ten seconds of the leader’s precious time. Of course! They’re setting me up for a photo opportunity, and the looniness of my Diasporism is inconsequential — Jesse Jackson isn’t exactly Gramsci either. Mitterrand has Styron, Castro has Márquez, Ortega has Pinter, and Arafat is about to have me.

No, a man’s character isn’t his fate; a man’s fate is the joke that his life plays on his character.

We hadn’t yet reached the houses sporting their Eiffel Tower TV antennas but we were out of the hills and on the main road south to Jerusalem when the taxi driver spoke his first words to me. In English, which he did not pronounce with much assurance, he asked, “Are you a Zionist?”

“I’m an old friend of Mr. Ziad’s,” I replied. “We went to university together in America. He is an old friend.”

“Are you a Zionist?”

And who is this guy? I thought. This time I ignored him and continued looking out the window for some unmistakable sign, like those TV aerials, that we were approaching the outskirts of Jerusalem. Only what if we weren’t anywhere near the road to Jerusalem but on the road to somewhere else? Where were the Israeli checkpoints? So far we hadn’t passed one.

“Are you a Zionist?”

“Tell me,” I replied as agreeably as I could, “what you mean by a Zionist and I’ll tell you if I’m a Zionist.”

“Are you a Zionist?” he repeated flatly.

“Look,” I snapped back, thinking, Why don’t you just say no? “what business is that of yours? Drive, please. This is the road to Jerusalem, is it not?”

“Are you a Zionist?”

The car was now perceptibly losing speed, the road was pitch-black, and beyond it I could see nothing.

“Why are you slowing down?”

“Bad car. Not work.”

“It was working a few minutes ago.”

“Are you a Zionist?”

We were barely rolling along now.

“Shift,” I said, “shift the car down and give it some gas.”

But here the car stopped.

“What’s going on!”

He did not answer but got out of the car with a flashlight, which he began clicking on and off.

“Answer me! Why are you stopping out here like this? Where are we? Why are you flashing that light?”

I didn’t know whether to stay in the car or to jump out of the car or whether either was going to make any difference to whatever was about to befall me. “Look,” I shouted, leaping after him onto the road, “did you understand me? I am George Ziad’s friend!”

But I couldn’t find him. He was gone.

And this is what you get for fucking around in the middle of a civil insurrection! This is what you get for not listening to Claire and not turning everything over to lawyers! This is what you get for failing to comply with a sense of reality like everyone else’s! Easter Parade! This is what you get for your bad jokes!

“Hey!” I shouted. “Hey, you! Where are you?”

When there was no reply, I opened the driver’s door and felt around for the ignition: he’d left the keys. I got in and shut the door and, without hesitating, started the car, accelerating hard in neutral to prevent it from stalling. Then I pulled onto the road and tried to build up speed — there must be a checkpoint somewhere! But I hadn’t driven fifty feet before the driver appeared in the dim beam of the headlights waving one hand for me to stop and clutching his trousers around his knees with the other. I had to swerve wildly to avoid hitting him, and then, instead of stopping to let him get back in and drive me the rest of the way, I gunned the motor and pumped the gas pedal but nothing was able to get the thing to pick up speed and, only seconds later, the motor conked out.

Back behind me in the road I saw the flashlight wavering in the air, and in a few minutes the old driver was standing, breathless, beside the car. I got out and handed him the keys and he got back in and, after two or three attempts, started the motor, and we began to move off, jerkily at first, but then everything seemed to be all right and we were driving along once again in what I decided to believe was the right direction.

“You should have said you had to shit. What was I supposed to think when you just stopped the car and disappeared?”

“Sick,” he answered. “Stomach.”

“You should have told me that. I misunderstood.”

“Are you a Zionist?”

“Why do you keep asking that? If you mean Meir Kahane, then I am not a Zionist. If you mean Shimon Peres …” But why was I favoring with an answer this harmless old man with bowel problems, answering him seriously in a language he understood only barely … where the hell was my sense of reality? “Drive, please,” I said. “Jerusalem. Just get me to Jerusalem. And without talking!”

But we hadn’t got more than three or four miles closer to Jerusalem when he drove the car over to the shoulder, shut off the engine, took up the flashlight, and got out. This time I sat calmly in the back seat while he found himself some spot off the road to take another crap. I even began to laugh aloud at how I had exaggerated the menacing side of all this, when suddenly I was blinded by headlights barreling straight toward the taxi. Just inches from the front bumper, the other vehicle stopped, although I had braced for the impact and may even have begun to scream. Then there was noise everywhere, people shouting, a second vehicle, a third, there was a burst of light whitening everything, a second burst and I was being dragged out of the car and onto the road. I didn’t know which language I was hearing, I could discern virtually nothing in all that incandescence, and I didn’t know what to fear more, to have fallen into the violent hands of marauding Arabs or a violent band of Israeli settlers. “English!” I shouted, even as I tumbled along the surface of the highway. “I speak English!”

I was up and doubled over the car fender and then I was yanked and spun around and something knocked glancingly against the back of my skull and then I saw, hovering enormously overhead, a helicopter. I heard myself shouting, “Don’t hit me, God damn it, I’m a Jew!” I’d realized that these were just the people I’d been looking for to get me safely back to my hotel.

I couldn’t have counted all the soldiers pointing rifles at me even if I could have managed successfully to count — more soldiers even than there’d been in the Ramallah courtroom, helmeted and armed now, shouting instructions that I couldn’t have heard, even if their language was one I understood, because of the noise of the helicopter.

“I hired this taxi in Ramallah!” I shouted back to them. “The driver stopped to shit!”

“Speak English!” someone shouted to me.

“THIS IS ENGLISH! HE STOPPED TO MOVE HIS BOWELS!”

“Yes? Him?”

“The driver! The Arab driver!” But where was he? Was I the only one they’d caught? “There was a driver!”

“Too late at night!”

“Is it? I didn’t know.”

“Shit?” a voice asked.

“Yes — we stopped for the driver to shit, he was only flashing the flashlight —”

“To shit!”

“Yes!”

Whoever had been asking the questions began to laugh. “That’s all?” he shouted.

“As far as I know, yes. I could be wrong.”

“You are!”

Just then one of them approached, a young, heavyset soldier, and he had a hand extended toward mine. In his other hand was a pistol. “Here.” He gave me my wallet. “You dropped this.”

“Thank you.”

“This is quite a coincidence,” he said politely in perfect English, “I just today, this afternoon, finished one of your books.”

Thirty minutes later, I was safely at the door of my hotel, chauffeured there in an army jeep by Gal Metzler,° the young lieutenant who that very afternoon had read the whole of The Ghost Writer. Gal was the twenty-two-year-old son of a successful Haifa manufacturer who’d been in Auschwitz as a boy and with whom Gal had a relationship, he told me, exactly like the one Nathan Zuckerman had with his father in my book. Side by side in the jeep’s front seats, we sat in the parking area in front of the hotel while Gal talked to me about his father and himself, and while I was thinking that the only son I’d seen yet in Greater Israel who was not in conflict with his father was John Demjanjuk, Jr. There there was only harmony.

Gal told me that in six months he would be finishing four years as an army officer. Could he continue to maintain his sanity that long? He didn’t know. That’s why he was devouring two and three books a day — to remove himself every minute that he possibly could from the madness of this life. At night, he said, every night, he dreamed about leaving Israel after his time was up and going to NYU to study film. Did I know the film school at NYU? He mentioned the names of some teachers there. Did I know these people?

“How long,” I asked him, “will you stay in America?”

“I don’t know. If Sharon comes to power … I don’t know. Now I go home on leave, and my mother tiptoes around me as though I’m somebody just released from the hospital, as though I’m crippled or an invalid. I can stand only so much of it. Then I start shouting at her. ‘Look, you want to know if I personally beat anyone? I didn’t. But I had to do an awful lot of maneuvering to avoid it!’ She’s glad and she cries and it makes her feel better. But then my father starts shouting at the two of us. ‘Breaking hands? It happens in New York City every night. The victims are black. Will you go running from America because they break hands in America?’ My father says, ‘Take the British, put them here, face them with what we are facing — they would act out of morality? The Canadians would act out of morality? The French? A state does not act out of moral ideology, a state acts out of self-interest. A state acts to preserve its existence.’ ‘Then maybe I prefer to be stateless,’ I tell him. He laughs at me. ‘We tried it,’ he tells me. ‘It didn’t work out.’ As if I need his stupid sarcasm — as if half of me doesn’t believe exactly what he believes! Still I have to deal with women and children who look me in the eyes and scream. They look at me ordering my troops to take away their brothers and their sons, and what they see is an Israeli monster in sunglasses and boots. My father is disgusted with me when I say such things. He throws his dishes on the floor in the middle of the meal. My mother starts crying. I start crying. I cry! And I never cry. But I love my father, Mr. Roth, so I cry! Everything I’ve done in my life, I’ve done to make my father proud of me. That was why I became an officer. My father survived Auschwitz when he was ten years younger than I am now. I am humiliated that I can’t survive this. I know what reality is. I’m not a fool who believes that he is pure or that life is simple. It is Israel’s fate to live in an Arab sea. Jews accepted this fate rather than have nothing and no fate. Jews accepted partition and the Arabs did not. If they’d said yes, my father reminds me, they would be celebrating forty years of statehood too. But every political decision with which they have been confronted, invariably they have made the wrong choice. I know all this. Nine tenths of their misery they owe to the idiocy of their own political leaders. I know that. But still I look at my own government and I want to vomit. Would you write a recommendation for me to NYU?”

A big soldier armed with a pistol, a two-hundred-pound leader of men whose face was darkly stubbled with several days’ whiskers and whose combat uniform foully reeked of sweat, and yet, the more he recounted of his unhappiness with his father and his father’s with him, the younger and more defenseless he had seemed to me. And now this request, uttered almost in the voice of a child. “So —” I laughed — “that’s why you saved my life out there. That’s why you didn’t let them break my hands — so I could write your recommendation.”

“No, no, no,” he quickly replied, a humorless boy distressed by my laughter and even more grave now than he’d been before, “no — no one would have hurt you. Yes, it’s there, of course it’s there, I’m not saying it’s not there — some of the boys are brutal. Most because they are frightened, some because they know the others are watching and they don’t want to be cowards, and some because they think, ‘Better them than us, better him than me.’ But no, I assure you — you were never in real danger.”

“It’s you who’s in real danger.”

“Of falling apart? You can tell that? You can see that?”

“You know what I see?” I said. “I see that you are a Diasporist and you don’t even know it. You don’t even know what a Diasporist is. You don’t know what your choices really are.”

“A Diasporist? A Jew who lives in the Diaspora.”

“No, no. More than that. Much more. It is a Jew for whom authenticity as a Jew means living in the Diaspora, for whom the Diaspora is the normal condition and Zionism is the abnormality — a Diasporist is a Jew who believes that the only Jews who matter are the Jews of the Diaspora, that the only Jews who will survive are the Jews of the Diaspora, that the only Jews who are Jews are the Jews of the Diaspora —”

It would have been hard to say where I found the energy after what I’d been through in just forty-eight hours, but suddenly here in Jerusalem something was running away with me again and there seemed to be nothing I had more strength for than this playing-at-Pipik. That lubricious sensation that is fluency took over, my eloquence grew, and on I went calling for the de-Israelization of the Jews, on and on once again, obeying an intoxicating urge that did not leave me feeling quite so sure of myself as I may have sounded to poor Gal, torn in two as he was by the rebellious and delinquent feelings of a loyal, loving son.