Abzug Hoffman
10-11-2004, 10:49 PM
This is frickin' weird. And some jews are claiming this is a fable about George Wailingwall Bush, which is even weirder. Can you imagine an America where ordinary Americans were allowed to write real memoirs about how their families suffered under the Zionist Plot Against America?
'Plot' imagines a Lindbergh presidency
Jerry Schwartz
Associated Press
Oct. 10, 2004 12:00 AM
This is a work of fiction, Philip Roth tells us, as if we need assurance that none of this is true, that Charles Lindbergh never was elected president and that he never led the United States down the genocidal path blazed by Adolf Hitler in Germany.
Yet the narrator of The Plot Against America is 7-year-old Philip Roth. The other main characters are Philip's mother and father, Bess and Herman, and his older brother, Sandy, the family of the real Philip Roth. The setting is of Roth's childhood: the Jewish enclave of Weequahic in Newark, N.J., in the early 1940s.
Once Roth has conjured a world where bread is not presliced and newsreels illustrate the day's events, he invents another world: the slow descent of that America into anti-Semitic fascism, as reflected in the lives of one middle-class Jewish family.
The result is a moving and deeply disquieting fable.
There have been other "what if" books that imagined a world in which Nazism triumphed. It can be an amusing exercise or a way of asserting the fascist impulse in all of us.
Roth tries a different tack. The Plot Against America is, at its center, a story about how a family reacts when snared in an ever-tightening vise.
"Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear," the book begins. "Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews."
Roth makes a Lindbergh presidency plausible. The Lone Eagle, an outspoken isolationist, appeals to Americans who fear that they will be drawn into the war in Europe. Voters also bridle against voting for Franklin D. Roosevelt for an unprecedented third term.
Lindbergh is a taciturn hero of the age, a non-politician capitalizing on his celebrity.
The Roths are American true believers. But when they visit Washington, D.C., six months after the election, they are evicted from their hotel. An old woman calls Herman "a loudmouth Jew."
The Lindbergh administration establishes Just Folks, a program that sends "city youth" - young Jews - to live in the heartland with Christians.
Then the Roths are told they are being transferred to Kentucky under a new federal homesteading program aimed at assisting in the assimilation of immigrant communities. Foreboding suffuses everything. We know what happened to the Jews of Germany, and it seems the same will happen to the Roths.
Eventually, Roth stumbles in telling the grand story of Lindbergh's reign, but he never falters in telling the story of the Roth family. Young Philip is a real child, prone to gripping fears, often acting out in unexpected ways. His brother is a real adolescent, changeable, given to fleeting enthusiasms. Herman and Bess are common nobility. Their heroism is pure; they risk all for their family, their friends and their country.
'Plot' imagines a Lindbergh presidency
Jerry Schwartz
Associated Press
Oct. 10, 2004 12:00 AM
This is a work of fiction, Philip Roth tells us, as if we need assurance that none of this is true, that Charles Lindbergh never was elected president and that he never led the United States down the genocidal path blazed by Adolf Hitler in Germany.
Yet the narrator of The Plot Against America is 7-year-old Philip Roth. The other main characters are Philip's mother and father, Bess and Herman, and his older brother, Sandy, the family of the real Philip Roth. The setting is of Roth's childhood: the Jewish enclave of Weequahic in Newark, N.J., in the early 1940s.
Once Roth has conjured a world where bread is not presliced and newsreels illustrate the day's events, he invents another world: the slow descent of that America into anti-Semitic fascism, as reflected in the lives of one middle-class Jewish family.
The result is a moving and deeply disquieting fable.
There have been other "what if" books that imagined a world in which Nazism triumphed. It can be an amusing exercise or a way of asserting the fascist impulse in all of us.
Roth tries a different tack. The Plot Against America is, at its center, a story about how a family reacts when snared in an ever-tightening vise.
"Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear," the book begins. "Of course no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews."
Roth makes a Lindbergh presidency plausible. The Lone Eagle, an outspoken isolationist, appeals to Americans who fear that they will be drawn into the war in Europe. Voters also bridle against voting for Franklin D. Roosevelt for an unprecedented third term.
Lindbergh is a taciturn hero of the age, a non-politician capitalizing on his celebrity.
The Roths are American true believers. But when they visit Washington, D.C., six months after the election, they are evicted from their hotel. An old woman calls Herman "a loudmouth Jew."
The Lindbergh administration establishes Just Folks, a program that sends "city youth" - young Jews - to live in the heartland with Christians.
Then the Roths are told they are being transferred to Kentucky under a new federal homesteading program aimed at assisting in the assimilation of immigrant communities. Foreboding suffuses everything. We know what happened to the Jews of Germany, and it seems the same will happen to the Roths.
Eventually, Roth stumbles in telling the grand story of Lindbergh's reign, but he never falters in telling the story of the Roth family. Young Philip is a real child, prone to gripping fears, often acting out in unexpected ways. His brother is a real adolescent, changeable, given to fleeting enthusiasms. Herman and Bess are common nobility. Their heroism is pure; they risk all for their family, their friends and their country.