Operation Shylock: A Confession

Of course, it's not new.

Philip Roth did it brilliantly in The Counterlife and Operation Shylock and Marcel Proust.

It's nothing but autofiction.

You know, go all the way back to Rousseau, going back to that first Confessions, that autobiography, which may also be largely made up or at least partly made up.

that? That novel was Counterlife.

which was the novel before Operation Shylock, which as I was engaging with the literature of the doppelganger, I kept reading that I really had to read Operation Shylock, which I couldn't do because I had sworn that I would never again read another novel by Philip Roth.

But finally I broke down because it was on so many lists of the best doppelganger novels of all time.

So just say this because first of all, Operation Shylock is set in Jerusalem in the West Bank and it is about Messianic Jews who are trying to rebuild the third temple and hasten the Messiah's return.

He has a double who is running around Jerusalem trying to engineer a reverse exodus.

At any rate, At one point in the novel, Philip Roth says it's too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous.

So I guess what we're sort of doing in this section is take this seriously.

When I wrote Doppelganger, I quoted Philip Roth and Operation Shylock, where he has this line where he says, it's too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous.

By the way, he was talking about Messianic Judaism in that novel.

And a lot of the people who I wrote about in Doppelganger at the time were just kind of marginal fringe figures like RFK Jr.

[laughs]

... and its Operation Shylock.

Um, but I think that this is the sort of a- another kind of uncanniness of our moment, is it's so, it's so absurd, and it's also been so, um, told and retold in fictional form that it's almost hard to believe when it is real.

Yeah.