Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World

Content Warning: This section discusses fascist ideology, genocide, medical experimentation, abuse of children with autism, eugenics, and antisemitism.

Philip Roth’s novel, Operation Shylock (1993), centers around two characters: a fictionalized Roth, whom Klein calls “Real Roth,” and his doppelganger, “Fake Roth.” Klein is drawn to this book because it encapsulates many of the experiences that she has been having with her own doppelganger. She relates to Real Roth’s feeling that his double has “taken his lifetime of words and ideas and turned them into a parody of themselves” (150). Though Klein knows that Wolf’s ideas are dangerous, she often struggles to take them seriously. Roth sums this feeling up perfectly: Wolf is “too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous” (151).

Unwilling to call Fake Roth by their shared first name, “Philip,” Real Roth refers to him as Moishe Pipik, with Pipik being a diminutive for a misbehaving child. Wolf’s appropriation and distortion of Klein’s ideas is a kind of “pipiking,” in which serious ideas become ridiculous. Pipiking is what right-wing politicians do when they co-opt phrases like “triggered,” “othered,” or “fake news,” which were originally important terms used to discuss trauma and capitalist power structures.