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Operation Shylock: A Confession (ISBN 0-671-70376-5) is novelist Philip Roth's 19th book and was...

Operation Shylock: A Confession (ISBN 0-671-70376-5) is novelist Philip Roth's 19th book and was published in 1993. The novel follows narrator "Philip Roth" on a journey to Israel where he attends the trial of accused war criminal John Demjanjuk. At the same time, the character seeks out an impersonator who has appropriated his identity and used his celebrity to spread "Diasporism," a counter-Zionist ideology advocating the return of Israeli Jews to their countries of origin. The ensuing struggle between this doppelgänger-like stranger and "Roth", played against the backdrop of the Demjanjuk trial and the First Intifada, constitutes the book's main story. A major concern of Roth's fiction since the 1970s has been the relationship between a writer's life and work. Though this topic is thoroughly explored in Roth's series of Zuckerman novels, Operation Shylock even more radically attacks the distinction between life and art by making a fairly mimetic version of the author the protagonist of an obviously invented (though plausible) story. Yet despite this effort, separating the real from the fictional in Operation Shylock is not wholly impossible. Specifically: