Growing Up Jewish in Nazi America

By REBECCA PHILLIPS

THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA
By Philip Roth
416 pages. Vintage. $14.95.

This has been Philip Roth’s decade. While the literary world saw the debut of many fresh Jewish voices between the beginning of 1995 and the end of 2004, it was this Jewish author who first appeared in print nearly 40 years ago, in 1959, with Goodbye, Columbus, who kept us consistently moved, angered, entertained, and even frightened. Not including his latest work, Everyman, which critics have hailed since its April 2006 release, the years between 1995 and 2004 brought us Roth’s American Pastoral ,The Human Stain, Sabbath’s Theater, I Married a Communist, The Dying Animal, and the JBooks.com People’s Choice Award finalist The Plot Against America.

In an incredible stretch for Roth—10 years that have been described by the Guardian newspaper as his “literary second coming”—The Plot Against America stands out for both its humanity and its Jewish content. And it’s a masterwork in literary terms: Roth makes what many would view as an implausible plot seem plausible; his clear, concise writing style takes readers easily through the dense novel; and his characters are, as always, touching, non-formulaic, maddening, and entirely real. Of course the list of Roth’s recent literary contributions doesn’t include the character he is perhaps still most famous for: the shiksa-loving, mother-hating, masturbating Alexander Portnoy of 1969’s Portnoy’s Complaint. But The Plot Against America could change that—over time, the novel’s seven-year-old main character, who happens to be named Philip Roth, may be the one that sticks even more solidly in American Jewish consciousness. The young Philip is as insightful as he is endearing, allowing the reader to easily step into his shoes from 60 years ago and understand what life might have been like in America during a very different World War II.

The Plot Against America re-imagines the wartime 1940 presidential election and what would have been the consequences for Jews had Charles Lindbergh, the renowned aviator who was also a notorious anti-Semite, isolationist, and white supremacist, become president instead of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The election of Lindbergh as America’s 33^rd commander-in-chief stokes anti-Semitism throughout the United States, and the Jews of Philip’s Newark and elsewhere suddenly must deal with discrimination, violent mobs, growing disease about relatives stuck in Hitler’s Europe, and constant fear. Told through the seven-year-old Philip’s eyes, the book chronicles the journey from a seemingly idyllic life and sense of complacency for a young boy—and by extension, the Jewish community as a whole—to overwhelming insecurity. Philip confronts a new reality when his close-knit world becomes besieged by a fascist force, shattering both his family and his country.

When The Plot was published in 2004, Roth wrote an essay for the New York Times Book Review explaining some of his literary and plot choices. “I wanted America’s Jews to feel the pressure of a genuine anti-Semitic threat,” he wrote about his coronation of Lindbergh as president. But he cautioned readers against extracting too much about present-day America or the current situation for Jews throughout the world from his book. “Some readers are going to want to take this book as a roman à clef to the present moment in America. That would be a mistake.” Roth claimed he was only interested in the years between 1940 and 1942. Still, his confabulation didn’t seem so far off base in 2004, and it certainly doesn’t seem so in 2006, after a summer that saw Israel under more threat from its hostile neighbors than it had been in years. It is a novel that constantly reminds us of what might have been—and therefore what might be.

It is this insight into how history affects the Jews that makes The Plot Against America not only Roth’s most successful book of the past decade, but also his most Jewish. Jewishness in The Plot is a source of pride, a source of fear, a source of guilt, and ultimately a source of strength. Roth’s fans are used to reading about Jewish subjects in his books. But more than the tight-knit Newark Jewish enclave, his overbearing Jewish mothers, and his characters’ neuroses, sexual hang-ups, and feelings of shame of his other novels, The Plot Against America offers a vivid, memorable, and affecting look at what it might really mean to Philip Roth to be Jewish.