Despite the difficulties encountered by the reader in attempting to separate Roth's delicately thin wall between the real and the fictional, the novel does present a number of sharply defined issues. In earlier works, Roth had created and focused upon Alexander Portnoy and Nathan Zuckerman, for example, as Jewish men; in Operation Shylock, however, the writer concerns himself with an entire Jewish nation, Israel. Thus, beneath Roth's fictional camouflage one finds the 1988 trial of John Demjanjuk, the Cleveland autoworker extradited to Jerusalem and accused of operating the gas chambers at Treblinka; Palestinian Arabs comb the streets of Jerusalem at night for rocks with which to supply young children to hurl the next day at Israeli soldiers on the West Bank. The reader sifts through major and minor characters that have, actually, appeared in newspapers and on television screens: Israeli soldiers at work on the West bank...