Cultural mobility and diaspora: the case of Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock

My view of diaspora involves its cultural consequences and focuses on the problem of cultural mobility. Studies on diaspora and cultural mobility must be able to account for the tension between individual agency and social limitation in a new way. One can speak of creative tensions in religious, sexual, and specific cultural contexts in which the static quality is only an unstable moment because it is inscribed in a dynamic process which may experience moments of destruction of the existing and moments of creation of the new. Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock (1993) is an example of how literature deals with the concept of Diaspora, cultural mobility, and law, though from a subverted perspective. Operation Shylock is a case of the psychological examination of stolen identities. In this novel Roth discusses a fundamental historical problem in a paradoxical and ironic way, using a recurring figure in his novels, that of the doppelgänger. The problem of what kind of law should be applied pervades the novel. In fact the “real” Philip Roth would like to sue his double for being an impostor and he is meditating on what charge he can bring against him. Such a problem is also created by cultural mobility. If the cultural roots of each single Jewish group forming the State of Israel are called into question by the idea of resettlement, then the legal roots are part of the problem.