Counterlives

By DANIEL SCHIFRIN

Philip Roth's Zuckerman series is about to draw to a close. This October will see the publication of the final installment of Roth's masterwork. To whet your appetite, Roth-lovers, we present the following essay on The Counterlife.

Imagine for a moment that Jewish history—how Jews have seen themselves, and how others have seen the Jews—is a series of interconnected fantasies. A small desert tribe imagines that God chooses them to bring truth to humanity; God abandons them in the worst way, dispersing them throughout the world, inducing a fantasy of a messianic redeemer; a group of impatient Jewish rebels produce this messiah (later imagined to be killed by Jews from “the other shul”); Christians begin to see Jews as maniacally powerful; Jews vacillate for millennia between agreeing with them—Look at our brains! Look at our accomplishments!—; Nazis imagine Jews to be vermin; Israel is born and initially viewed as David fighting Goliath; the Palestinian political entity is born and convinces the world that David is actually Goliath.

The ordinariness of contemporary American Jewish life, however, implies the possibility of a counter-history in which grounded reality, not fantasy, determines the future of Judaism.

Many Jews believe, along with the protagonist in Phillip Roth’s The Counterlife, Henry Zuckerman, that it is possible to be “a Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.”  But recent events in Israel suggest that such an unselfconscious Judaism is still impossible, in part because the fantasies we, and others, have about Israel are still too strong.

The Counterlife, about a secular New Jersey dentist who moves to the West Bank, was written just as Intifada I was getting under way, before Oslo, before Jews felt safe enough to allow the reality of Palestinian suffering to puncture their (partial) fantasy of an autonomous state based on moral principles. Intifada II somehow sent us back in time, to a period when the moral high ground appeared to be exclusively on our side. We  hear more and more that the situation is morally clear, that there is an unambiguous good and bad. That might very well turn out to be the case. But the fact is that fantasies that American Jews have about Israel; that Israelis have about themselves; and that American Christians, Europeans and Arabs have about Jews and Israel, are still very much at the center of how people think about current events.

If this sounds confusing, it is. One of Roth’s main points is that modern Jewish history is so complex, and the fantasies that American Jews, Israelis and non-Jews have of each other so convoluted, that figuring out an “answer” to the “Jewish problem” is as much about interpreting fantasies as it is about hard-nosed diplomacy.

Most of these tenacious, ongoing fantasies have to do, as it turns out, with erasing history. There are Arabs who want to regain their dignity from the Crusaders by creating a Judenrein Middle East, believing that no Arab in Damascus, Riyadh, or Baghdad could possible live in dignity while Israel occupies an inch of “Arab” land. And there are Jews who want to either transfer Arabs out of the West Bank, as if they hadn’t lived there for centuries, or live with them as if they were merely another language group in a Mediterranean Switzerland And as a Jewish nut in The Counterlife tells us, Europeans want the Holocaust to go away by pretending that Israelis are as fascist and bloody as the Europeans themselves have been.

For most American Jews, Israel remains the place where Jews have been able to take their gloves off and unselfconsciously express their pride, anger, hate, bitterness and righteousness. Gil Troy, in his book Why I am a Zionist, explains that many American Jews have a very superficial and emotional connection to Israel, “long on aggressiveness and short on substance, who have more edge than commitment.” Or as one of Roth’s characters explains, Israeli violence and toughness is the flip side—and the most primal extension of—the Jewish-American experience of social, sexual, and political freedom.

The Counterlife is a book of embedded fantasies with one clear-eyed idea—that fantasies must be understood if people, or peoples, want to make changes in their lives. As a novelist, and a comic provocateur, Roth has no interest in providing specific political solutions. But fifteen years later, his book offers a valuable lesson in how political solutions come about. How else to explain why extremists on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, people who believe in a world that can never be, and who embody the most primal fantasies of their people, may be determining the future of the Middle East.

Reprinted with permission from the AVI CHAI Bookshelf, where birthright israel alumni can order free books and periodicals.