"Censor It Out": The Missing Chapters of Operation Shylock

Abstract

Abstract: This essay considers how specific instances of censorship and self-censorship may have influenced Roth's choice of a "missing chapter" as a powerful ending for Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993). By drawing from recently disclosed archive material at the Philip Roth Personal Library, I provide evidence of the author responding to the contemporary debate over free speech and reconstruct how his references to recent occurrences of textual suppression shaped his "unfinished" novel. I focus primarily on three sources that Roth read for research during the composition of Operation Shylock : The Sanctity of Speech (1986) by Yisroel Kolman Krohn and Yisroel Meir Shain, On Clowns (1992) by Norman Manea, and "Truth Whereby Nations Live" (1988) by Peretz Kidron—all in Roth's Personal Library at the Newark Public Library. A comparison with selected passages from these and other nonfictional texts reveals Roth's career-long interest in how different forms of political, social, and textual repression have been working in the context of Jewish writing and across Jewish institutions, in the US and abroad. It also underscores that the novel—far from being merely self-referential—was meant to represent censorship as accurately as in the historical examples one could easily find outside the book, in the political events of the late twentieth century.