On The Bookshelf MEXICAN GRILL Not just big burritos. Big flavors.® `The Plot Against America' Two years of the nation's history are boldly re-imagined in Philip's Roth's latest novel. ADAM BEGLEY Featurewell. corn made FAST made FRESH made RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU Buy 1 Entree Get 1 Entree FREE not xalid NOM any other coupon expires 1 1 /5/04 FIND A QDOBA CLOSE TO YOU FARMINGTON HILLS 33224 W 12 Mile Rd. at Farmington Road next to Blockbuster & Farmer Jack 248-324-2185 SOUTHFIELD 25243 Evergreen Rd. at 10 Mile in Park Place Shopping Complex 248-799-8210 BIRMINGHAM 795 E. Maple Rd. at Woodward next to Kroger 248-988-8941 OTHER LOCATIONS 10/ 8 ROYAL OAK ROCHESTER HILLS FLINT GRAND BLANC EAST LANSING 2004 64 wvvvv.qdoba.com 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.