Operation Shylock: A Confession (36 page)

The Jews are in the way.

The moment I stepped out of the elevator, two teenagers, a boy and a girl, jumped up from where they were sitting in the lobby and came toward me, calling my name. The girl was redheaded, freckled, on the dumpy side, and she smiled shyly as she approached; the boy
was my height, a skinny, very serious, oldish-seeming boy, cavern-faced and scholarly-looking, who, in his awkwardness, seemed to be climbing over a series of low fences to reach me. “Mr. Roth!” He spoke out in a strong voice a little loud for the lobby. “Mr. Roth! We are two students in the eleventh grade of Liyad Ha-nahar High School in the Jordan Valley. I am Tal.° This is Deborah.°”

“Yes?”

Deborah then stepped forward to greet me, speaking as though she were beginning a public address. “We are a group of high school students that has found your stories very provocative in our English class. We read ‘Eli, the Fanatic’ and ‘Defender of the Faith.’ Both created question marks about the state of the American Jew. We wonder if it would be possible for you to visit us. Here is a letter to you from our teacher.”

“I’m in a hurry right now,” I said, accepting the envelope she handed me, which I saw was addressed in Hebrew. “I’ll read this and answer it as soon as I can.”

“Our class sent you last week, all the students, each one, a letter to the hotel,” Deborah said. “When we received no answer the class voted to send Tal and me on the bus to make our offer directly. We’ll be delighted if you accept our class’s offer.”

“I never got your class’s letters.” Because
he
had gotten them. Of course! I wondered what could possibly have constrained him from going out to their school and answering questions about his provocative stories. Too busy elsewhere? It horrified me to think about the invitations to speak he had received and accepted here if this was one he considered too inconsequential even to bother to decline. Schoolkids weren’t his style. No headlines in schoolkids. And no money. The schoolkids he left to me. I could hear him calming me down. “I wouldn’t dare to interfere in literary matters. I respect you too much as a writer for that.” And I needed calming down when I thought about him getting and opening the mail people thought they were addressing to me.

“First of all,” Tal was saying to me, “we would like to know how
you
live as a Jew in America, and how you have solved the conflicts you brought up in your stories. What’s with the ‘American dream’?
From the story ‘Eli, the Fanatic’ it seems like the only way of being a Jew in America is being a fanatic.
Is
it the only way? What about making aliyah? In Israel, in our society, the religious fanatics are seen in a negative way. You talk about suffering—”

Deborah saw my impatience with Tal’s on-the-spot inquiry and interrupted to tell me, softly now, quite charmingly in that very faintly off-ish English, “We have a beautiful school, near the Kinneret Lake, with a lot of trees, grass, and flowers. It’s a very beautiful place, under the Golan mountains. It is so beautiful it is considered to be Paradise. I think you would enjoy it.”

“We were impressed,” Tal continued, “by the beautiful style of literature you write, but still not all of the problems were solved in our mind. The conflict between the Jewish identity and being a part of another nation, the situation in the West Bank and Gaza, and the problem of double loyalty as in the Pollard case and its influence on the American Jewish community—”

I put a hand up to stop him. “I appreciate your interest. Right now I’ve got to be somewhere else. I’ll write your teacher.”

But the boy had come from the Jordan Valley on a very early bus to Jerusalem and had waited nervously in the lobby for me to wake up and get started, and he wasn’t prepared, having gotten up his head of steam, to back off yet. “What comes first,” he asked me, “nationality or Jewish identity? Tell us about your identity crisis.”

“Not right now.”

“In Israel,” he said, “many youngsters have an identity crisis and make
hozer b’tshuva
without knowing what they are getting into—”

A rather stern-looking, unsmiling man, very decorously—and, in this country, uncharacteristically—dressed in a dark double-breasted suit and tie, had been watching from a sofa only a few feet away as I tried to extricate myself and be on my way. He was seated with a briefcase in his lap, and now he came to his feet and, as he approached, addressed a few words to Deborah and Tal. I was surprised that he spoke Hebrew. From his looks as well as his dress I would have taken him for a northern European, a German, a Dutchman, a Dane. He spoke quietly but very authoritatively to the two teenagers, and when Tal responded, intemperately, in Hebrew, he listened without
flinching until the boy was finished and only then did he turn his cast-iron face to me, to say, in English, and in an English accent, “Please, forgive their audacity and accept them and their questions as a token of the tremendous esteem in which you are held here. I am David Supposnik,° an antiquarian. My office is in Tel Aviv. I too have come to bother you.” He handed me a card that identified him as a dealer in old and rare books, German, English, Hebrew, and Yiddish.

“The annual teaching of your story ‘Eli, the Fanatic’ is always an experience for the high school students,” Supposnik said. “Our pupils are mesmerized by Eli’s plight and identify wholly with his dilemma despite their innate contempt for all things fanatically religious.”

“Yes,” agreed Deborah while Tal, resentful, remained silent.

“Nothing would give the students greater pleasure than a visit from you. But they know it is unlikely and that is why this young man has seized the opportunity to interrogate you here and now.”

“It’s not been the worst interrogation of my life,” I replied, “but I’m in a rush this morning.”

“I’m sure that, if you could see your way, in response to his questions, to sending a collective reply to all the students in the class, that would be sufficient and they would be extremely flattered and grateful.”

Deborah spoke up, obviously feeling as bullied as Tal did by the outsider’s unsought intervention. “But,” she said to me, pleadingly, “they would still prefer if you
came.”

“He has explained to you,” said Supposnik, no less brusque now with the girl than he’d been with the boy, “that he has business in Jerusalem. That is quite enough. A man cannot be in two places at one time.”

“Goodbye,” I said, extending my hand, and it was shaken first by Deborah, then reluctantly by Tal before, finally, they turned and left.

Who can’t be in two places at one time? Me? And who is this Supposnik and why has he forced those youngsters out of my life if not to force himself in?

What I saw was a man with a long head, deep-set, smallish light-colored eyes, and a strongly molded forehead from which his light brown hair was combed straight back close to the skull—an officer
type, a colonial officer who might have trained at Sandhurst and served here with the British during the Mandate. I would never have had him pegged as a dealer in rare Yiddish books.

Crisply, reading my mind, Supposnik said, “Who I am and what I want.”

“Quickly, yes, if you don’t mind.”

“In just fifteen minutes I can make everything clear.”

“I don’t have fifteen minutes.”

“Mr. Roth, I wish to enlist your talent in the struggle against anti-Semitism, a struggle to which I know you are not indifferent. The Demjanjuk trial is not irrelevant to my purpose. Is that not where you are hurrying off to?”

“Is it?”

“Sir, everybody in Israel knows what you are doing here.”

Just then I saw George Ziad walk into the hotel and approach the front desk.

“Please,” I said to Supposnik, “one moment.”

At the desk, where George embraced me, I found he was at the same pitch of emotion as when I’d left him the evening before.

“You’re all right,” he whispered. “I thought the worst.”

“I’m fine.”

He would not let me free myself. “They detained you? They questioned you? Did they beat you?”

“They never detained me. Beat me? Of course not. It was all a big mistake. George,
relax,”
I told him but was only able to secure my release by pressing my fists against his shoulders until we were finally an arm’s length apart.

The desk clerk, a young man who hadn’t been on duty when I’d checked in, said to me, “Good morning, Mr. Roth. How are things this morning?” Very jovially, he said to George, “This is no longer the lobby of the King David Hotel, it’s the rabbinical court of Rabbi Roth. All his fans won’t leave him alone. Every morning, they are lining up, the schoolchildren, the journalists, the politicians—we have had nothing like it,” he said, with a laugh, “since Sammy Davis, Jr., came to pray at the Wailing Wall.”

“The comparison is too flattering,” I said. “You exaggerate my importance.”

“Everyone in Israel wants to meet Mr. Roth,” the clerk said.

Hooking my arm in his, I led George away from the desk and the desk clerk. “Is this the best place for you to be, this hotel?”

“I had to come. The phone is no use here. Everything is tapped and taped and will turn up either at my trial or at yours.”

“George, come off it. Nobody’s putting me on trial. Nobody beat me. That’s all ridiculous.”

“This is a military state, established by force, maintained by force, committed to force and repression.”

“Please, I don’t see it that way. Stop. Not now. No slogans. I’m your friend.”

“Slogans? They didn’t demonstrate to you last night that this is a police state? They could have shot you, Philip, then and there, and blamed the Arab driver. These are the great specialists in assassination. That is no slogan, that is the truth. They train assassins for fascist governments all over the world. They have no compunctions about whom they murder. Opposition from a Jew is intolerable to them. They can murder a Jew they don’t like as easily as they murder one of us. They can and they
do.”

“Zee, Zee, you’re way over the top, man. The trouble last night was the driver, stopping and starting his car, flashing his light—it was a comedy of errors. The guy had to take a shit. He aroused the suspicion of this patrol. It all meant nothing, means nothing, was nothing.”

“In Prague it means something to you, in Warsaw it means something to you—only here you, even you, fail to understand what it means. They are out to frighten you, Philip. They are out to scare you to death. What you are preaching here is anathema to them—you are challenging them at the very heart of their Zionist lie. You are the opposition. And the opposition they ‘neutralize.’”

“Look,” I said, “talk coherently to me. This is not making sense. Let me get rid of this guy and then you and I will have to have a talk.”

“Which guy? Who is he?”

“An antiquarian from Tel Aviv. A rare-book dealer.”

“You know him?”

“No. He came here to see me.”

All the while I explained, George looked boldly across the lobby to where Supposnik had taken a seat on the sofa, waiting for me to return.

“He’s the police. He’s Shin Bet.”

“George, you’re in a bad way. You’re overwrought and you’re going to explode. This is not the police.”

“Philip, you are an innocent! I won’t have them brutalizing you, not you too!”

“But I’m
fine
. Stop this, please. Look, this is the texture of things over here. I don’t have to tell you that. There is rough stuff on the roads. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. There is a mix-up, all right, but that’s between you and me, I’m afraid. You are not responsible. If anyone is responsible, I am responsible. You and I have to have a talk. You’re confused about why I’m here. Something most unusual has been happening and I haven’t been at all clever dealing with it. I confused you and Anna yesterday—I acted very stupidly at your house. Unforgivably so. Let’s not talk now. You’ll come with me—I have to be at the Demjanjuk trial, you’ll come with me and in the taxi I’ll explain everything. This has all gotten out of hand and the fault is largely mine.”

“Philip, while this court for Demjanjuk is carefully weighing evidence for the benefit of the world press, scrutinizing meticulously, with all kinds of experts, the handwriting and the photograph and the imprint of the paper clip and the age of the ink and the paper stock, while this charade of Israeli justice is being played out on the radio and the television and in the world press, the death penalty is being enacted all over the West Bank. Without experts. Without trials. Without justice. With live bullets. Against innocent people. Philip,” he said, speaking very quietly now, “there is somebody for you to talk to in Athens. There is somebody in Athens who believes in what you believe in and what you want to do. Somebody with money who believes in Diasporism for the Jews and justice for the Palestinians. There are people who can help you in Athens. They are Jews but they are our friends. We can arrange a meeting.”

I am being recruited, I thought, recruited by George Ziad for the PLO.

“Wait. Wait here,” I said. “We have to talk. Is it better for you to wait here or outside?”

“No, here,” he said, smiling ruefully, “here it is positively ideal for me. They wouldn’t dare to beat an Arab in the lobby of the King David Hotel, not in front of all the liberal American Jews whose money props up their fascist regime. No, here I’m much safer than in my house in Ramallah.”

I made the mistake then of returning to explain politely to Supposnik that he and I would not be able to continue our conversation. He did not give me a chance, however, to say even one word, but for ten minutes stood barely half a foot from my chest delivering his lecture entitled “Who I Am.” Each time I retreated an inch, preparatory to ducking away, he drew an inch closer to me, and I realized that short of shouting at him or striking him or streaking out of the lobby as fast as I could, I would have to hear him out. There was a commanding incongruousness about this Teutonically handsome Tel Aviv Jew who’d taught himself to speak English in the impeccable accent of the educated English upper class, and something also touchingly absurd about the bookish erudition of his hotel-lobby lecture and the pedantic donnish air with which it was so beautifully articulated. If I hadn’t felt that I was needed urgently elsewhere, I might have been more entertained than I was; in the circumstances, I was, in fact, far more entertained than I should have been, but this is a professional weakness and accounts for any number of my mistakes. I am a relentless collector of scripts. I stand around half-amazed by these audacious perspectives, I stand there excited, almost erotically, by these stories so unlike my own, I stand listening like a five-year-old to some stranger’s most fantastic tale as though it were the news of the week in review, stupidly I stand there enjoying all the pleasures of gullibility while I ought instead to be either wielding my great skepticism or running for my life. Half-amazed with Pipik, half-amazed with Jinx, and now this Shylock specialist whom half-amazing George Ziad had identified for me as a member of the Israeli secret police.