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January 28, 2005/Shevat 18 5765, Vol. 57, No. 22
Roth rewrites history, recalls his own
VICKI CABOT
Contributing Editor
Philip Roth has stoked his imagination with historic possibility and written a literary tour de force that tweaks political sensibility as it tugs on personal sentiment. Released to much fanfare late last year, "The Plot Against America" (Houghton Mifflin, $26 hardcover) raises many more questions, and interesting possibilities, than the obvious, "What if?"
Roth hangs the story on the disturbing premise that flying ace, staunch isolationist and suspected Nazi sympathizer Charles A. Lindbergh has been elected president. He stuns Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 election and heralds in a new era of national politics. Nazi influence pervades, religious liberties dim, a genteel anti-Semitism takes hold. It is a sinister rewrite of history, when American Jewish families are targeted as part of a government resettlement program and eventually mob violence erupts in the streets.
And yet, Roth uses the literary "what if" device to convey more the "what" - rather than the "if" - of his proposition. He grounds his fictive account with an affecting view of Jewish life in America as Hitler's fanaticism grips Europe and its Jews are marched off to the death camps.
Roth, in a familiar ploy, plays himself in the book. This time, he is a 7-year-old boy, still safe in the bosom of his family, with father, Herman, mother, Bess, and older brother, Sandy. He is secure in his neighborhood, the Weequahic section of Newark, N.J., with its largely ethnic population including many first-generation Jews.
Roth's father plays his role assiduously, the lower-middle-class head of household with barely a grade school education who is making ends meet working as an insurance agent.
His wife, Bess, who would have gone to teacher's college but for the expense, is a devoted and efficient homemaker. The stability of their lives is upended, and its surety at risk, with Lindbergh's election.
Roth writes of the cries that echoed up and down the street at 4 a.m. when neighbors, glued to their radios, hear of Lindbergh's nomination.
"'No!' was the word that awakened us, 'No!' being shouted in a man's loud voice from every house on the block. It can't be. No. Not for president of the United States.'"
"Not in America" was the refrain. Not in their America.
Roth subtly draws the picture of their post-Depression, prewar America, when families such as his strived to get ahead, when they dealt with the undercurrents of discrimination and anti-Semitism stoically, even as educational, professional and social opportunities were limited by quotas and restrictions. Despite that reality, they still thought themselves fortunate to be American, proud to be American. Americans first, Jews second.
"At the newsstand out front of the corner candy store," writes Roth of his neighborhood, "ten times more customers bought the Racing Form than the Yiddish daily, the Forvitz."
Roth points up the gathering storm of anti-Semitism - and Herman Roth's stubborn refusal to see it - when he tells of a family trip to the nation's capital soon after Lindbergh's inauguration. The trip, planned months before, is almost ruined by the hotel that suddenly can't find the family's reservation, the outburst at the Lincoln Memorial and the stranger who calls the patriarch a "loudmouth Jew," the angry scuffle at a restaurant after another exchange. He returns home chastened.
But as the political situation deteriorates under President Lindbergh, Herman Roth loses his job when he refuses to relocate his family to Kentucky, and Bess Roth urges her husband to consider fleeing to Canada. And when angry mobs threaten the peace and security of their neighborhood, the elder Roth accepts a gun from his downstairs neighbor just in case he should need it.
Yet it is the family's unwavering commitment to one another that propels the story forward and gives it its resonance - and relevance. Herman Roth refuses to uproot his family to keep his job, even as he must work nights in his brother's produce business to support the family. His wife stolidly defends her husband, even as his anger and confusion grow, his words becoming more strident, his actions more worrisome. The reader sees Bess quietly whispering in her husband's ear to calm him, gently holding on to his arm to restrain him.
And there is the unavoidable family strife caused by the no-good nephew who goes to fight the war and comes back without a leg; the estranged aunt who marries a rabbi who has cozied up with Lindbergh and alienates her family.
And through it all, Philip Roth maintains his clear-eyed gaze, offering the astute perspectives of a 7-year-old boy even as his world is coming apart.
The turmoil and unpredictability of Roth's imaginative world could easily be transferred to today, where the upheaval in the Middle East has unleashed its share of discomforting anti-Semitism. Blaming the Jews, whether for the war in Europe, or the war in Israel, echoes the same age-old refrain. And looking to the current war in Iraq, the issue of isolationist or internationalist still resounds, as do concerns about constraints on civil liberties as governmental authority expands.
Roth marries a made-up rendition of history with a profoundly felt nostalgia for days past. He is not saying, "Look at what could have happened." Rather he is saying, "Look at how far we have come - and at how far we have yet to go."
Contact the writer here
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