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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
This sort of simplemindedness is unacceptable from a man of Roth's gifts. Had any such thing happened, Jews would have first seen the proverbial handwriting on the wall: They would have begun to notice how much worse things were becoming for Negroes, whose communities would almost surely have been turned into actual ghettos that walled off the black population from the white. Negroes would have needed passes to get out and would have been required to return by a certain hour. One Jewish writer friend of mine says that Roth did not want to complicate what he apparently intended as a reiteration of the old song of Jewish suffering thrust in an American key. Not a good enough reason, if true. No serious writer, in the interest of simplicity, can avoid the heat and weight of a time in the past where he chooses to put his story. Another Jewish writer of Roth's generation recalls that there was always talk during those years of the Negro being "a buffer" between Jews and Christians, and that one could gauge the mood of the country by what was happening to them.
Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of Roth's novel is its absurdly reductive vision. By implication, we are given to believe that even if the hysterical racism and violence toward black people had somehow magically disappeared from American life, Negro activists, writers and firebrands such as W.E.B. DuBois, Walter White, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Roy Wilkins, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston -- all of whom had repeatedly proved their moral courage by standing up to racism through their words or their actions, or both -- would have shuffled off into silence when anti-Semitism was put into policy. This adds an even grimmer substance of insult to this ethnically self-absorbed book.
The fulsome praising of this Roth novel is also a commentary on the lack of knowledge of American history by those who consider themselves literary people in our time. How could this book pass everyone at Roth's publisher without the unmentioned smell of burning flesh filling room after room until someone raised a question about the stench for which the novel had cut off its nose in order to avoid acknowledging? Let us be even more blunt: Would there be no protest if a great writer or dramatist or filmmaker were to find a marvelous story about Gypsies in German cities during the mid-1930s and create a work in which the Nazis became so hot at the Gypsies that their plight overshadowed an unmentioned anti-Semitism?
There may be an understandable -- however unacceptable! -- reason for this that goes far beyond the limitations of "The Plot Against America." Could it be that because Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, the Rev. Al Sharpton, the bad sportsmanship of too many millionaire black athletes, black street-gang violence, the bullshit scholarship of the worst of black studies, and the decadent, dehumanizing minstrelsy of gangster rap have created such quiet animus in our intellectual community that it is preferable to forget the savage racial history of our nation? I raise that question because in the summer of 2001, The New-York Historical Society presented "Without Sanctuary," a showing of lynching photographs that was the talk of the town, much as a similar show was when it was put on in Manhattan by the NAACP during the 1930s (some were so overwhelmed at the time that they fainted when faced with the unfathomable brutality of public murder). In November of 2002, David Levering Lewis assessed recent studies of lynching for the New York Review of Books. So there was plenty of fresh information about that time period, information that it is hard to believe everyone so easily forgot when reading "The Plot Against America."
The most important movement in American fiction, regardless of style, is about moving beyond ethnic provincialism in order to summon a more real and more complex world. In "The Human Stain," Philip Roth hit one out of the park. In this new one, he took to an old American tradition, the segregated baseball team, and became Casey at the Bat.
