This is the fictionalised account of the
young Philip Roth and his family living in Newark during the first years of the
Second World War when the United States President is not Franklin D. Roosevelt but the pro-Nazi sympathiser Charles A. Lindbergh, the pioneering aviator who became famous for the first non-stop transatlantic solo flight from New York to Paris.
Lindbergh is the epitome of the all-American hero. So perhaps it is not surprising that as the Republican candidate for Presidency in 1940 he is able to beat the still popular Roosevelt. It also helps Lindbergh – in fact it is the central plank of his campaign – that he wants to keep the United States out of the war in Europe. Many Americans did not want any part of another life wasting world war, a war seen as that between old European, mainly imperialist, powers. Understandably, isolationism was a popular position.
But it is not simply the fact that Lindbergh keeps America out of the war that is important. He also blames the Jews in America for pushing the
country towards an unnecessary war. Moreover, he negotiates an understanding with Hitler to keep the country out of war. And he is clearly sympathetic towards the Nazis, even having accepted – as he had in real life – an honour from the Nazis before the war.
So this is the menacing situation in which America’s Jews find themselves living. But what is most interesting about Roth’s account is the subtleness of the story. Although towards the end of the novel, there are serious anti-Jewish riots and casualties, for the most part it is the quiet menace that is most disturbing. There are no concentration camps or mass exterminations or Stars of David. There is nothing like that. Instead, it is much more restrained.
There is the Office of American Absorption (OAA) which is itself headed by a prominent Jewish Rabbi, who also marries
young Roth’s attractive and bubbly aunt. The Rabbi and vivacious wife are even guests at the White House and confidants of the First Lady. Roth’s young aunt even has the pleasure of dancing with German Foreign Minister Von Ribbentrop at a White House reception. However, the Roth family, to which young Philip belongs, is not interested in the OAA and its assimilation programmes. Instead, they are ‘ghetto Jews’ – disparagingly so.
Of course, the Roth family itself is not totally united. One of the two boys, Sandy, is enticed into joining an OAA programme – by his aunt, of course, very much to the annoyance of Roth Senior – and spends a happy summer with a true all American family in rural Kentucky. Only reluctantly is young Sandy reconciled with his family after his father puts an end to such activity and bars the aunt from his house.
Roth Senior is outspoken, even speaking out in the middle of a restaurant during a family trip to a seemingly very pro-Lindbergh Washington. He resigns his job in an insurance company rather than accept a transfer – inspired by the OAA – to move out west.
The defence of the ‘ghetto’ mentality is interesting in the light of modern concerns about the need to assimilate ethnic groups into mainstream society, namely, Asian Muslims. Of course, the Roth family, while Jewish, is in no doubt that it is American. Mr Roth is very loud on this and so particularly appalled with the Lindbergh Presidency. He awaits the return of FDR and is, finally, rewarded.
What keeps this story from descending into a bleak tale of irrational prejudice is the voice of the nine or ten-year-old narrator, the child trying to make sense of the world around him, one in which he is aware of the palpable menace as he listens to his outspoken father and the quieter worry of his mother. The young Roth even runs away in clothes stolen from the boy who lives in the flat below him, only to be knocked unconscious by a kick from an old horse as he makes his way in the dark through the grounds of a Catholic orphanage, a world which in itself is alien to him.
The boy who lives downstairs is Seldon, a rather timid child who latches onto Philip, more so after the death of his terminally ill father who, it is supposed rightly or wrongly, kills himself to put everyone out of their misery. Seldon’s mother herself is killed in the anti-Jewish riots of the later part of the book, caught out on a rural road in the part of the country she and her son moved as part of the OAA programme. Young Roth feels responsible for that as it was through his rather muddled intervention with his aunt to prevent his own family’s re-location that Seldon and his mother ended up moving.
We don’t think of the United States as a country that would turn fascist. But then we might have thought a developed and cultured country like Germany would not have turned civilisation on its head either. The alternative history that Roth presents is all the more disturbing because of those possibilities. It might have happened. And we know that it might have happened because countries still do succumb to irrationality and prejudice and can do so in subtle ways. Roth’s book is not just about an alternative past but an alternative present.