As anti-Semitic pressure mounts, neighbors plan to emigrate to Canada, and Philip’s own parents consider doing the same. Philip’s father, Herman, is a staunch opponent of Lindbergh who’s horrified by the country’s turn Philip’s brother, Sandy, sent to rural Kentucky for the summer as part of a federal program, has become an enthusiast for farm life among Gentiles his older cousin, Alvin, joins the Canadian Army to fight with the British in Europe and Philip’s aunt, marrying a collaborationist rabbi, glories in her presence at Lindbergh’s state dinner in honor of the Nazi Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop. Soon after Lindbergh takes office, federal policies are implemented to disperse Jews from urban communities and into the American “heartland,” and, in turn, to move non-Jews into Jewish neighborhoods. The Philip of the story is born, like the real-life novelist, in 1933.
( Judith Thurman recently interviewed Roth about it in The New Yorker.) It’s not one of Roth’s Zuckerman novels or one of his Kepesh novels it’s a Roth novel, composed as if it were an autobiographical tale, written by the adult Philip Roth about the child Philip Roth and his family-endowed with their real-life names, his parents, Herman and Bess, and his brother, Sandy-and set in Newark’s Weequahic neighborhood, where the novelist was, in fact, raised.
The novel is also a counterfactual masterwork of personal history. Philip Roth’s novel “ The Plot Against America” is a masterwork of counterfactual history, a what-if story in which Charles Lindbergh, the aviation hero and Nazi sympathizer, is elected President in 1940, leading to the widespread persecution of Jews in the United States. Philip Roth’s novel “The Plot Against America” imagines the aviator’s election to the Presidency in 1940 and the widespread persecution of Jews that follows.
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