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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
For "The Plot Against America" is a book about fear. "Fear" is the very first word in it, and for Roth fear is the natural companion of love, the secondary subject of the novel. The book is a tribute to his parents, Herman and Bess, and the tender order and fierce integrity of the life they created for their two sons, Sandy and Philip, in mid-20th century Newark. Roth seems unaware of the vast and lively fictional genre of alternate history, but this novel belongs to the small subset of it that is less interested in the unfolding of global events than in the way those events affect the most intimate experiences of the people who live through them.
From the moment Lindbergh offers himself as a Republican candidate opposed to intervention in the war in Europe, he becomes the villain of the Roth household. This puts Herman at odds with such rich, assimilated Jews as Rabbi Bengelsdorf, a Newark macher renowned for his public speaking, horsemanship and "several books of inspirational poetry routinely given as gifts to bar mitzvah boys and newlyweds." Bengelsdorf is a marvelous creation, part object lesson in the perils of collaboration and part meticulous parody of self-important men everywhere: "'Newark has the best drinking water in the world,' the rabbi said, and said it as he would say everything, with deep consideration."
But while the desperate rabbis of Europe might have cooperated with the Nazis in hope of somehow lessening or managing the devastation awaiting their communities, Bengelsdorf is merely a fool. Like everyone else in the novel, he's in thrall to a notion of America; the novel's most ferocious battles ultimately boil down to a collision of contradictory Americas. For the rabbi and his "wealthy, urbane, self-assured" friends, America is their own success story, in which they, the tiny first generation of Jews to attend Ivy League colleges, "mingled with the non-Jews, whom they subsequently associated with in communal, political and business endeavors and who sometimes appeared to accept them as equals."
To the Roths, America is the set of constitutional and governmental protections that allows them to live unmolested in Jewish neighborhoods. What they share with their neighbors is not a particularly Jewish culture but simply a blessed relief from the prejudice that, anywhere else, made them feel like outsiders. "It was work that identified and distinguished our neighbors for me far more than religion," Roth writes -- and there is a powerful sense that the neighborhood and family depictions here are largely autobiographical. "Nobody in the neighborhood had a beard or dressed in the antiquated Old World style or wore a skullcap either outside or in the houses."
Philip and his family know they are Jews, and that this threatens to set them apart (early in the novel, Herman rejects a promotion that would require moving to a gentile neighborhood), but they identify as Americans. Philip, "steeped in an American English that sounded more like the language spoken in Altoona or Binghamton than like the dialects famously spoken across the Hudson," revels in the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, and finds the bearded stranger who goes door-to-door collecting donations to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine bewildering. "We'd already had a homeland for three generations ... Our homeland was America."
Lindbergh's presidency splits the Roth family. Bess' sister, Evelyn, marries Rabbi Bengelsdorf, who is appointed by Lindbergh to direct the Office of American Absorption. They lure Philip's older brother, Sandy, into an OAA program with the sinisterly wholesome title of Just Folks. Just Folks sends urban children to heartland farms for the summer, with the ostensible aim of "encouraging America's religious and national minorities to become further incorporated into the larger society." Sandy becomes a partisan of Evelyn's view that "the greatest fear of a Jew like her brother-in-law was that his children might escape winding up as narrow-minded and frightened as he was."
