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`The Plot Against America'
Two years of the nation's history are boldly re-imagined in Philip's Roth's
latest novel.
ADAM BEGLEY
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A
little more than 15 years ago, Philip Roth published a
slim, peculiar book called The Facts: A Novelist's
Autobiography, which consisted of a brief let-
ter from "Roth" to his fictional alter ego,
Zuckerman; an airbrushed memoir of the author's
first 55 years; and, finally, a long letter to "Roth" from
Zuckerman picking apart the airbrushed memoir.
Zuckerman is especially dismissive of the sweet chapter
(called "Safe at Home") about young Philip's boyhood in the
"peaceful ... haven" of the Weequahic section of Newark.
Quoth Zuckerman: "[Y]ou are evidently in a mood to idealize
the confining society that long ago ceased impinging on your
spirit and to sentimentalize people who now inhabit either
New Jersey cemeteries or Florida retirement communities."
Roth's new novel, The Plot Against America (Houghton
Mifflin, $26; 391 pp.), could be called The Count acts: It
begins in November 1940 with the landslide election of
Charles A. Lindbergh as presi-
dent of the United States, and
builds quietly, ominously,
until the fall of 1942, when
the assassination of Walter
Winchell unleashes a national
cataclysm.
Lindbergh President?
Winchell assassinated? Yes,
we're in the what-if world of
counterfactual history, neatly
engineered by Roth to trans-
form the peaceful haven of
Weequahic into a site of "per-
petual fear" and the safe,
charmed boyhood of young
Philip Roth into a nightmar-
ish, blood-splattered ordeal complete with blighted
lives, simmering fury, murder and looming madness.
(Well, that would explain Sabbath's Theater and The
Dying Animal.)
Two years of the nation's history are boldly re-imag-
ined in The Plot Against America, and so is the daily
life of the Roth family on Summit Avenue in
Weequahic.
The "facts," rendered with loving precision, remain
the same: 7-year-old Philip lives in a rented second-
floor flat in a small house on a tree-lined street; his
father sells insurance for Metropolitan Life; his mother
is involved in the P.T.A.; his 12-year-old brother,
Sandy, nurtures a precocious artistic talent — "We
were a happy family in 1940."
But the change in national government (especially the cozy
entente between Hider and Lindbergh, who campaigned on
the promise to keep America out of the European war) has
ugly local consequences. The political poisons the personal.
And what is the poison that turns the neighborhood septic?
American anti-Semitism — imported from Germany by
President Lindbergh. Or, more specifically, the fear of
American anti-Semitism.
Young Philip's own encounters with prejudice are very few
and relatively anodyne (two incidents in which the epithet
"loudmouth Jew" is uttered in his presence, and an odd
exchange with an otherwise friendly Italian-American boy
who insists, without a trace of rancor, that "Jews
drink blood").
Until the spring of 1942, however, the Weequahic
Jews don't experience anything even remotely like persecu-
tion. They can't "justify either their alarm or their composure
with hard fact."
Instead of persecution, they get "Just Folks," a pushy pro-
gram of cultural indoctrination administered by the newly cre-
ated "Office of American Absorption" — the purpose of
which is to encourage minorities "to become further incorpo-
rated into the larger society."
Just Folks is aimed squarely at neighborhoods like
Weequahic: The intent is to send Jewish boys between 12 and
18 to work on farms in the American heartland for eight
weeks.
Depending on how you look at it,
Just Folks is either a benign voluntary
summer program for kids or the first
step toward eradicating the kind of
It's on the
ethnic difference that gives Jews their
domestic front —
identity. Sandy, the admired big
back home in
brother, ignoring his parents' worried
meticulously
protest, ships happily off to Kentucky
mapped
to work on a tobacco farm.
Weequahic —
"This doesn't have anything to do
that Philip Roth's
with anti-Semitism," Sandy tells his
book succeeds best.
father, who strenuously objects to
what the mere existence of the Office
of American Absorption implies
about the status of Jewish citizens,
and who fears that the hidden agenda
of Just Folks is to "erode the solidari-
ty of the Jewish family." (That's pre-
cisely what happens: A year later,
Sandy is calling the rest of his family
"ghetto Jews.")
The next phase — the Office of
American Absorption's "Homestead
42" program — is unequivocally sin-
ister. At the prompting of the govern-
ment, Met Life orders the transfer of
Philip's father (and his family) to a
• new district office in Danville, Ken.
A sugarcoated letter from corporate
•
• headquarters congratulates him on
being "among the company's first
pioneering 'homesteaders' of 1942."
Altogether, 225 Jewish families are accorded this honor,
including several of the Roths' Weequahic friends.
Here's Walter Winchell's take: "Item: Whether the
Homestead 42 Jews end up in concentration camps a la
Hider's Buchenwald has yet to be decided by Lindbergh's two
top swastinkers, Vice President Wheeler and Secretary of the
Interior Henry Ford. Did I say 'whether'? Pardon my German.