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Reviewed by:
  • The Plot Against America
  • Jay L. Halio
The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. 390 pp. $26.00.

Philip Roth has done it again. Ever unpredictable, he has astonished us with his latest novel, a satirical political fantasy set in the 1940s. Although he has written political satire before, as in Our Gang, he has never combined fantasy and satire so well as in The Plot Against America. And although he has also written about himself and his family before, this is the first time he has given us a good closeup look at his mother, Besse Roth, along with his father, brother, and himself as a seven-year-old boy, all living in Newark, New Jersey. But while the novel is set well in the past, it resonates significantly for us today.

We have learned over the years how to take Roth's disclaimers. When he says, therefore, that his novel is not meant as a moral lesson for the Bush era, we can respond with reasonable skepticism. The book speaks powerfully to us now, with clear warnings of dangers that not only lie ahead but are with us even as we read.

The Plot Against America has a fairly simple plot. It opens in 1940, when the war in Europe has already begun but America is still neutral. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is president and will run for an unprecedented third term. Obviously sympathetic to Britain's fighting alone against Hitler, Roosevelt is branded by his political foes as a warmonger. To oppose him, the Republican party decides to nominate the aviation hero, "Lucky Lindy," Charles A. Lindbergh, [End Page 204] who they believe will keep America out of the war. Lindbergh's sympathies are clearly with the Germans. He has accepted a medal from Hitler and has visited Germany several times, ostensibly to inspect their air force, which he admires greatly. To the great consternation of the Roth family and their close friends in the Weekquahic neighborhood where they live, Lindbergh wins the election, and he immediately begins a series of rapprochements with Hitler and the Nazi regime. The Roths, like many other Jews, fear the worst—that the kind of antisemitism decimating European Jewry will begin here.

They have good reason to fear, and fear—the first word in the novel—is a major theme. Incidents begin to multiply that pit antisemites against recognizable Jews, as when the Roth family visits Washington, D.C. and experiences racial slurs—and worse. They are expelled from their hotel by a management whose prejudice against Jews is transparent. Still worse follows when Herman Roth has to resign his job rather than submit to his company's decision to relocate him and his family to Louisville, Kentucky. The company endorses the Lindbergh administration's program of "American Absorption," an effort to break up concentrations of Jews, like those in Newark, and resettle them in other parts of the country, where they are not so numerous and can more easily be forced to assimilate rather than maintain their vital ethnicity. All this despite Herman's able service to the insurance company where he has worked hard and well for many years.

The civil rights of Jews and other minorities increasingly erode during this period, but not all Jews are as terrified as the Roth family by what is happening, which includes physical attacks on Jews. Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf, for example, becomes head of the Office of American Absorption (OAA) and together with his lover, Besse's sister Evelyn, entices Sandy Roth to join a program euphemistically called "Just Folks," another attempt to promote Jewish assimilation. Sandy spends a summer on a tobacco farm and returns not only with a southern drawl but with ideas and attitudes directly at odds with those of his family.

Roth has written about his father before, particularly in the excellent memoir Patrimony, the story of Herman's last years, when he was dying of a brain tumor and his son looked after him. He emerged there and emerges again in this novel as a strong, opinionated but nonetheless lovable man, fiercely loyal to his family and to his democratic beliefs. Besse...

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