Promised Land(s): Zion, America, and American Jewish Writers

The Counterlife features Nathan Zuckerman as its narrator and comic hero, an established American-Jewish writer searching life for its meanings, including its possible Jewish meanings. There are endless debates in this novel about the Jewish condition, debates that usually take the form of intra-familial quarrels. In its exposure of Jewish contentiousness at its most extreme, the novel builds on nothing so much as the Jewish proclivity for impassioned, disputatious talk. And what talk! The exchanges between characters in The Counterlife are conversational slugfests, talks-to-the-kill between brothers who are locked in a struggle for what [Philip Roth] calls "the imagination of the Jew" (146). All the tumult and dissension in the Jewish soul comes to the fore in these encounters, which center on a range of imaginative projects for renewing or reversing both personal biography and collective Jewish fate. Roth gathers these schemes under the fictional rubric of the "counterlife" -- a term meant to designate the penchant for impersonation or self-invention, for projecting desirable alternative existences. Furthermore, he understands Zionism itself as a counterlife project: the "taking upon oneself, rather than leaving to others, responsibility for one's survival as a Jew" (53). Through Nathan Zuckerman, Roth extends this notion to embrace "family Zionism," that "unpolitical, unideological" form of Zionism "enacted by my immigrant grandparents in coming, at the turn of the century, to America" (54). At key moments in The Counterlife this "family Zionism" is contrasted with contemporary currents of political Zionism, as represented by Jews on the polar extremes of Israeli society. And, in the stacked deck of this novel, the American Jew comes off looking pretty good. In the words of Shuki Elchanan, a Tel Aviv intellectual and one of Roth's memorable Israeli characters: The Counterlife is clearly not a book that is calculated to please most Israelis. It is tame, however, in comparison with Operation Shylock, which poses a far more radical reply to the challenges of territorial Zionism, namely "Diasporism," by which term Roth means nothing less than the evacuation of Israel's Ashkenazi population and the return of the European Jews to their countries of origin. This crazy scheme is presented by a deranged character, an impersonator of the author who is living out his own loony version of a counterlife under the pseudonym "Philip Roth." This "second" Philip Roth ha