Read Operation Shylock: A Confession for Free Online

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