Morality In Philip Roth's Operation Shylock

Operation Shylock is Philip Roth’s most complex, convoluted and baffling novel, in which he uses the device of the literary double to parallel his identity and history in the text’s two leading personages. He thereby causes the reader to ponder the provocative and probably insoluble conundrums of fiction’s relation to reality and of autobiography’s role in the working of the literary imagination.
Not only does the protagonistnarrator appear under the name, personal history, and likeness of the author as
Philip Roth, but from the book’s opening chapter, another man obtrudes with the same name and in the same likeness, with the same gestures and in identical attire. The narrator, Philip, decides to name his double Moishe Pipik, Yiddish for Moses

Pipik responds that Europe’s residual antiSemitism is outweighed by powerful currents of enlightenment and morality sustained by the memory of the Holocaust. Hence, a Diasporist movement would enable Europeans to cleanse their guilty consciences. Philip’s most caustic rebuttal to Pipik’s argument occurs later in the book:When the first hundred thousand Diasporist evacuees voluntarily surrender their criminal Zionist homeland to the suffering Palestinians and disembark on England’s green and pleasant land, I want to see with my very own eyes the welcoming committee of English goyim waiting on the platform with their champagne. They’re here! More Jews! Jolly good!’ No, fewer Jews is my sense of how Europe prefers things, as few of them as possible.
Flying to Jerusalem, Philip begins a searching interview, to be continued on several occasions in the book, with the distinguished Appelfeld, a Holocaust survivor whom he admires as a spiritual brother to his better self. (This interview was published by The New York Times in February, 1988.) He then attends the trial of
John Ivan Demjanjuk, the Ukrainianborn auto worker accused of being the monstrous guard “Ivan

Philip’s response to this bizarre doubling is a mixture of outrage, exasperation, fascination, and even amusement.
Operation Shylock: A Confession Summary (Masterpieces of
American Literature)
Hours later, Pipik sends Philip a pleading note: “LET ME EXIST. . . . I AM THE YOU THAT IS NOT
WORDS.” Its bearer is a wondrously voluptuous, midthirties blonde, Wanda Jane “Jinx” Possesski, an oncology nurse who has become Pipik’s loving companion. In due time, Jinx delivers her life story: hateful, strictly Catholic parents, then a runaway hippie life, abusive men, Christian fundamentalism, a nursing career. She became an antiSemite out of envy of Jewish cohesion, cleverness, sexual ease, and prosperity.
Then she met Pipik as a patient for cancer, now in remission. Thanks to him, she is a recovering antiSemite, saved by an organization he founded, AntiSemites
Anonymous. When Jinx reveals that Pipik had a penile implant so he could satisfy her, Philip cannot resist the temptation to outdo his double by implanting his unassisted virility on Jinx.
Pipik and Jinx leave Israel and end up in Roth’s Hackensack, New Jersey, where Pipik expires of his