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Sensational
Philip
Roth’s latest novel, The Plot
Against America, provides an engaging scenario of what would have
happened had Lindbergh been elected President in 1940 instead of Roosevelt. As we’d expect, the impact on Jews was
dramatic. In The Plot
Against America, Roth creates an account of what happened to his only
family under the Lindbergh administration’s policies. As readers expect from
Roth, the dialogue is pitch perfect, the settings are described in detail,
and the plot moves efficiently.
Here’s an
excerpt from the beginning
of Chapter 2, “November 1940—June 1941 Loudmouth Jew,” pp. 44-57:
In
June 1941, just six months
after Lindbergh’s inauguration, our family drove the three hundred miles to Washington, D.C.,
to visit the historic sites and the famous government buildings. My mother
had been saving in a Christmas Club account at the Howard Savings Bank for
close to two years, a dollar a week out of the household budget to cover the
bulk of our prospective travel expenses. The trip had been planned back when
FDR was a second-term president and the Democrats controlled both Houses,
but now with the Republicans in power and the new man in the White House
considered a treacherous enemy, there was a brief family discussion about our
driving north instead to see Niagara Falls and to take the boat cruise in
rain slickers through the St. Lawrence Seaway’s Thousand Islands and then to
cross over in our car into Canada to visit Ottawa. Some among our friends and
neighbors had already begun talking about leaving the country and migrating
to Canada should the
Lindbergh administration openly turn against the Jews, and so a trip to Canada would
also familiarize us with a potential haven from persecution. Back in
February, my cousin Alvin had already left for Canada to join the Canadian armed
forces, just as he said he would, and fight on the British side against
Hitler.
Till his departure Alvin had been my
family’s ward for close to seven years. His late father was my father’s
oldest brother; he died when Alvin was six, and Alvin’s mother—a second
cousin of my mother’s and the one who’d introduced my parents to each
other—died when Alvin was thirteen, and so he’d come to live with us during
the four years he attended Weequahic High, a
quick-witted boy who gambled and stole and whom my father was dedicated to
saving. Alvin was twenty-one in 1940,
renting a furnished room upstairs from a Wright Street shoeshine
parlor just around the corner from the produce market, and by then working
almost two years for Steinheim & Sons, one of
the city’s two biggest Jewish construction firms—the other was run by the Rachlin brothers. Alvin
got the job through the elder Steinheim, the
founder of the company and an insurance customer of my father’s.
Old man Steinheim, who had a heavy accent and couldn’t read
English but who was, in my father’s words, “made of steel,” still attended
High Holiday services at our local synagogue. On a Yom Kippur several years
back, when the old man saw my father outside the synagogue with Alvin, he mistook my
cousin for my older brother and asked, “What does the boy do? Let him come
over and work for us?” There Abe Steinheim, who’d
turned his immigrant father’s little building company into a
multimillion-dollar operation—though only after a major family war had put
his two brothers out on the street—took a liking to solid, stocky Alvin and
the cocksure way he carried himself, and instead of sticking him in the
mailroom or using him as an office boy, he made Alvin his driver: to run errands,
to deliver messages, to whisk him back and forth to the construction sites to
check on the subcontractors (whom Abe called “the chiselers’ though it was
he, Alvin said, who chiseled them and took advantage of everyone). On
Saturdays during the summer, Alvin
drove him down to Freehold, where Abe owned half a dozen trotters that he
raced at the old harness track, horses he liked to refer to as “hamburgers?’
“We got a hamburger running today at Freehold:’ and down they’d shoot in the
Caddy to watch his horse lose every time. He never made any money at it, but
that wasn’t the idea. He raced horses on Saturdays for the Road Horse
Association at the pretty trotting track in Weequahic
Park, and he talked to the papers about restoring the flat track at Mount Holly,
whose glory days were long past, and this was how Abe Steinheim
managed to become commissioner of racing for the state of New Jersey and got
a shield on his car that enabled him to drive up on the sidewalk and sound a
siren and park anywhere. And it was how he became friendly with the Monmouth
County officials and insinuated himself into the horsy set at the shore—Wall
Township and Spring Lake goyim who would take him to their fancy clubs for
lunch, where, as Abe told Alvin, “Everybody sees me and all they’re doing is
whispering, can’t wait to whisper, ‘Look at what’s here: but they don’t mind
drinking my booze and getting treated to great dinners and so in the end it
pays off?’ He had his deep-sea-fishing boat docked at the Shark River Inlet
and he would take them out on it and liquor them up and hire guys to catch
the fish for them, so that whenever a new hotel went up anywhere from Long
Branch to Point Pleasant, it was on a site the Steinheims
got for next to nothing—Abe, like his father, having the great wisdom of
buying things only at discount.
Every three days Alvin
would drive him the four blocks from the office to 744 Broad Street for a
quick trim in the lobby barber shop behind the cigar stand, where Abe Steinheim bought his Trojans and his dollar-fifty cigars.
Now, 744 Broad was one of the two tallest office buildings in the
state, where the National Newark and Essex Bank occupied the top twenty
floors and the city’s prestigious lawyers and financiers occupied the rest
and where New Jersey’s biggest moneymen regularly frequented the barber
shop— and yet a part of Alvin’s job was to call immediately beforehand to
tell the barber to get ready, Abe was coming, and whoever was in the chair,
to throw him out. At dinner the night that Alvin
got the job, my father told us that Abe Steinheim
was the most colorful, the most exciting, the
greatest builder Newark
had ever seen. “And a genius’ my father said. “He didn’t get there without
being a genius. Brilliant. And a handsome man. Blond. Husky, but not fat.
Always looks nice. Camelhair coats. Black-and-white shoes. Beautiful shirts.
Impeccably dressed. And a beautiful wife—polished, classy, a Freilich by birth, a New York Freilich,
a very wealthy woman in her own right. Abe’s shrewd as they come. And the man
has guts. Ask anybody in Newark:
the riskiest project and Steinheim takes it on. He
does buildings where no one else will take a chance. Alvin will learn from him. He’ll watch him
and see what it is to work round the clock for something that’s yours. He
could be an important inspiration in Alvin’s
life.”
Largely so my father could
keep tabs on him and my mother could know that he wasn’t surviving on hotdogs
alone, Alvin came to our house a couple of times a week to eat a good meal,
and miraculously, instead of his getting stern lectures about honesty and
responsibility and hard work at the dinner table every night— as in the days
after he’d been caught with his hand in the till at the Esso
station where he worked after school and, until my father prevailed on Simkowitz, the owner, to drop the charges and himself
made good with the money, looked to be headed for the Rahway
reformatory—Alvin conversed heatedly with my father about poiitics,
about capitalism particularly, a system that, ever since my father had gotten
him to take an interest in reading the paper and talking about the news,
Alvin deplored but that my father defended, patiently reasoning with his
rehabilitated nephew, and not like a member of the National Association of
Manufacturers but as a devotee of Roosevelt’s New Deal. He’d warn Alvin, “You don’t have
to tell Mr. Steinheim about Karl Marx. Because the
man won’t hesitate—you’ll be out on your keister.
Learn from him. That’s why you’re there. Learn from him and be respectful,
and this could be the opportunity of a lifetime?’
But Alvin couldn’t bear Steinheim and reviled him constantly— he’s a fake, he’s a
bully, he’s a cheapskate, he’s a screamer, he’s a shouter, he’s a swindler,
he’s a man without a friend in the world, people cannot stand to be anywhere
near him, and I, said Alvin, have to chauffeur him around. He’s cruel to his
sons, is uninterested even in looking at a grandchild, and his skinny wife,
who never dares to say or do anything to displease him, he humiliates
whenever the mood takes him. Everybody in the family has to live in
apartments in the same luxury building that Abe built on a street of big oaks
and maples near Upsala College in East Orange— from
dawn to dusk the sons work for him in Newark and he’s screaming and yelling
at them, then at night he’s on the house phone with them in East Orange and
he’s still screaming and yelling. Money is everything, though not to buy
things but so as to be able always to weather the storm: to protect his
position and insure his holdings and buy anything he wants in real estate at
a discount, which is how he made a killing after the crash. Money, money,
money—to be in the middle of the chaos and in the middle of the deals and
make all the money in the world.
“Some guy retires at the age of
forty-five with five million bucks. Five million in the bank, which is as
good as a zillion, and you know what Abe says?” Alvin is asking this of my twelve-year-old
brother and me. Supper is over and he’s with us in the bedroom— all of us
lying shoeless atop the covers, Sandy on his
bed, Alvin on mine, and I beside Alvin, in the crook
between his strong arm and his strong chest. And it’s bliss: stories about
man’s avarice, his zealousness, his unbounded vitality and staggering
arrogance, and to tell these stories, a cousin himself unbounded, even after
all my father’s work, a captivating cousin still emotionally among the rawest
of the raw, who at twenty-one already has to shave his black stubble twice a
day in order not to look like a hardened criminal. Stories of the carnivore
descendants of the giant apes who once inhabited the ancient forests and have
left the trees, where all day long they nibbled on leaves, to come to Newark and work downtown.
“What does Mr. Steinheim
say?” Sandy
asks him.
“He says, ‘The guy has five million.
That’s all he has. Still young and in his prime, with a chance someday to be
worth fifty, sixty, maybe as much as a hundred million, and he tells me, “I’m
taking it all off the table. I’m
not you, Abe. I’m not hanging around for the heart attack. I have enough to
call it a day and spend the rest of my life playing golf?” And what does Abe
say? ‘This is a man who is a total schmuck? Every subcontractor when he comes
into the office on Friday to collect money for the lumber, the glass, the
brick, Abe says, ‘Look, we’re out of money, this is the best I can do: and he
pays them a half, a third—if he can get away with it, a quarter— and these
people need the money to survive, but this is the method that Abe learned
from his father. He’s doing so much building that he gets away with it and
nobody tries to kill him?’
“Would somebody try to kill him?” Sandy asks.
“Yeah:’ Alvin says, “me?’
“Tell us about the wedding
anniversary:’ I say.
“The wedding anniversary:’
he repeats. “Yeah, he sang fifty songs. He hires a piano player:’ Alvin tells
us, exactly the way he tells the tale of Abe at the piano every time I ask to
hear it, “and no one gets a word in, no one knows what is going on, all the
guests spend the whole night eating his food, and he is standing in his tux
by the piano singing one song after another, and when they leave he’s still
at the piano, still singing songs, every popular song you can think of, and
he doesn’t even listen when they say goodbye?’
“Does he scream and yell
at you?” I ask Alvin.
“At me? At everybody. He
screams and yells wherever he goes. I drive him to Tabatchnick’s
on Sunday mornings. The people are lined up to buy their bagels and lox. We
walk in and he’s screaming—and there’s a line of six hundred people, but
he’s yelling, ‘Abe is here!’ and they move him to the front of the line. Tabatchnick comes running out of the back, they push
everyone aside, and Abe must order five thousand dollars’ worth of stuff, and
we drive home and there is Mrs. Steinheim, who
weighs ninety-two pounds and knows when to get the hell out of the way, and
he phones the three sons and they’re there in five seconds flat, and the four
of them eat a meal for four hundred people. The one thing he spends on is
food. Food and cigars. You mention Tabatchnick’s, Kartzman’s, he doesn’t care who is there, how many
people—he gets there and buys out the whole store. They eat up every single
slice of everything every Sunday morning, sturgeon, herring, sable, bagels,
pickles, and then I drive him over to the renting office to see how many
apartments are vacant, how many are rented, how many are being fixed up.
Seven days a week. Never stops. Never takes a vacation. No mañana—that’s his slogan. It drives him crazy if anybody
misses a minute of work. He cannot go to sleep without knowing that the next
day there are more deals that will bring more money—and the whole damn thing
makes me sick. The man to me is one thing only—a walking advertisement for
the overthrow of capitalism?’
My father called Alvin’s
complaints kid stuff, and to be kept to himself on the job, especially after
Abe decided that he was going to send Alvin to
Rutgers. You’re too smart, Abe told Alvin, to be so dumb,
and then something happened beyond anything that my father could realistically
have hoped for. Abe gets on the phone to the president of Rutgers
and starts shouting at him. “You’re going to take this boy, where he
finished in high school is not the issue, the boy is an orphan, potentially a
genius, you’re going to give him a full scholarship, and I’ll build you a
college building, the most beautiful in the world—but not so much as a
shithouse goes up unless this orphan boy goes to Rutgers all expenses paid!”
To Alvin he
explains, “I’ve never liked to have a formal chauffeur who was a chauffeur
who was an idiot. I like kids like you with something going for them. You’re
going to Rutgers, and you’ll come home and drive me in the summers, and when
you graduate Phi Beta Kappa, then the two of us sit down and talk?’
Abe would have had Alvin
beginning as a freshman in New Brunswick in
September 1941 and, after four
years of college, coming back as a somebody into
the business, but instead, in February, Alvin
left for Canada.
My father was furious with him. They argued for weeks before finally,
without telling us, Alvin took the express
train from Newark’s Penn Station straight up
to Montreal.
“I don’t get your morality, Uncle Herman. You don’t want me to be a thief but
it’s okay with you if I work for a thief?’ “Steinheim’s not a thief. Steinheim’s a builder. What he’s doing is what
they do,” my father said, “what they all have to do because the building
trade is a cutthroat business. But his buildings don’t fall down, do they?
Does he break the law, Alvin? Does he?” “No, he just screws the workingman
every chance he gets. I didn’t know your morality was also for that.” “My
morality stinks:’ said my father, “everybody in this city knows about my
morality. But the issue isn’t me. It’s your future. It’s going to college. A
four-year free college education?’ “Free because he browbeats the president
of Rutgers the way he browbeats the whole
goddamn world.” “Let the president of Rutgers
worry about that! What is the matter with you? You really want to sit there
and tell me that the worst human being ever born is a man who wants to make
you an educated person and find you a place in his building company?” “No,
no, the worst human being ever born is Hitler, and frankly I’d rather be
fighting that son of a bitch than waste my time with a Jew like Steinheim, who only brings shame on the rest of us Jews
by his goddamn—” “Oh, don’t talk to me like a child—and the ‘goddamn’s I can
live without too. The man doesn’t bring shame on anyone. You think if you
worked for an Irish builder it would be better? Try it—go work for Shanley, you’ll see what a lovely fellow he is. And the
Italians, would they be better, you think? Steinheim
shoots his mouth off—the Italians shoot guns?’ “And Longy
Zwillman doesn’t shoot guns?” “Please, I know all
about Longy—I grew up on the same street with Longy. What does any of this have to do with Rutgers?” “It has to do with me, Uncle Herman,
and being indebted to Steinheim for the rest of my
life. Isn’t it enough that he has three sons that he’s already destroying? Isn’t
it enough that they have to attend every Jewish holiday with him and every
Thanksgiving with him and every New Year’s Eve with him—I have to be there to
be shouted at too? All of them working in the same office and living in the
same building and waiting around for only one thing—to split it all up on
the day he dies. I can assure you, Uncle Herman, their grief won’t last
long.” “You’re wrong. Dead wrong. There is more to these people than just
money?’ “You’re wrong! He holds them in his hand with the money! The
man is totally berserk, and they stay and take it for fear of losing the
money!” “They stay because they’re a family. All families go through a lot. A
family is both peace and war. We’re going through a little war right now. I
understand it. I accept it. But that’s no reason to give up the college you
missed out on and that now you can have and to run off half-cocked to fight
Hitler instead?’ “So,” said Alvin,
as though at last he had the goods not only on his employer but on his family
protector as well, “you’re an isolationist after all. You and Bengelsdorf. Bengelsdorf, Steinheim— they make a good couple?’ “Of what?” my father
asked sourly, having finally run out of patience. “Of Jewish fakes?’ “Oh’
said my father, “against the Jews now too?” “Those Jews. The Jews who are a
disgrace to the Jews—yes, absolutely!”
The argument went on for four
consecutive nights, and then, on the fifth, a Friday, Alvin didn’t report to
eat, though the idea had been to keep him showing up regularly for dinner
until my father wore him down and the boy came to his senses—the boy whom my
father had single-handedly changed from a callow good-for-nothing into the
family’s conscience.
The next morning we learned from Billy Steinheim, who was closest to Alvin of any of the sons
and concerned enough about him to telephone us first thing Saturday, that
after having received his Friday pay packet Alvin had thrown the keys to the
Caddy in Billy’s father’s face and walked out, and when my father rushed off
in our car to Wright Street to talk to Alvin in his room and get the whole
story and gauge just how much damage he had done to his chances, the
shoeshine parlor proprietor who was Alvin’s landlord told him that the tenant
had paid the rent and packed his things and was off to fight against the very
worst human being ever born. Given the magnitude of Alvin’s seething, no one less nefarious
would do.
The November election hadn’t even been
close. Lindbergh got fifty-seven percent of the popular vote and, in an
electoral sweep, carried forty-six states, losing only FDR’s home state of
New York and, by a mere two thousand votes, Maryland, where the large
population of federal office workers had voted overwhelmingly for Roosevelt
while the president was able to retain—as he could nowhere else below the
Mason-Dixon Line—the loyalty of nearly half the Democrats’ old southern
constituency. Though on the morning after the election disbelief prevailed,
especially among the pollsters, by the day after that everybody seemed to
understand everything, and the radio commentators and the news columnists
made it sound as if Roosevelt’s defeat had been preordained. What had
happened, they explained, was that Americans had shown themselves unwilling
to break the tradition of the two-term presidency that George Washington had
instituted and that no president before Roosevelt
had dared to challenge. Moreover, in the aftermath of the Depression, the
resurgent confidence of young and old alike had been quickened by Lindbergh’s
relative youth and by the graceful athleticism that contrasted so starkly
with the serious physical impediments under which FDR labored as a polio
victim. And there was the wonder of aviation and the new way of life it
promised: Lindbergh, already the record-breaking master of long-distance
flight, could knowledgeably lead his countrymen into the unknown of the
aeronautical future while assuring them, by his strait-laced, old-fashioned
demeanor, that modern engineering achievements need not erode the values of
the past. It turned out, the experts concluded, that twentieth-century
Americans, weary of confronting a new crisis in every decade, were starving
for normalcy, and what Charles A. Lindbergh represented was normalcy raised
to heroic proportions, a decent man with an honest face and an
undistinguished voice who had resoundingly demonstrated to the entire planet
the courage to take charge and the fortitude to shape history and, of course,
the power to transcend personal tragedy. If Lindbergh promised no war, then
there would be no war—for the great majority it was as simple as that.
Even worse for
us than the election were the weeks following the inauguration, when the new
American president traveled to Iceland
to meet personally with Adolf Hitler and after two
days of “cordial” talks to sign “an understanding” guaranteeing peaceful
relations between Germany
and the United States. There were demonstrations against the Iceland
Understanding in a dozen American cities, and impassioned speeches on the
floor of the House and the Senate by Democratic congressmen who’d survived
the Republican landslide and who condemned Lindbergh for dealing with a
murderous fascist tyrant as his equal and for accepting as their meeting
place an island kingdom whose historic allegiance was to a democratic
monarchy whose conquest the Nazis had already achieved—a national tragedy for
Denmark, plainly deplorable to the people and their king, but one that
Lindbergh’s Reykjavik visit appeared tacitly to condone.
When the president returned from Iceland
to Washington—a flight formation of ten large Navy patrol planes escorting
the new two-engine Lockheed Interceptor that he himself piloted home— his
address to the nation was a mere five sentences long. “It is now guaranteed
that this great country will take no part in the war in Europe?’
That was how the historic message began, and this is how it was elaborated
and concluded: “We will join no warring party anywhere on this globe. At the
same time we will continue to arm America and to train our young men
in the armed forces in the use of the most advanced military technology. The
key to our invulnerability is the development of American aviation,
including rocket technology. This will make our continental borders unassailable
to attack from without while maintaining our strict neutrality?”
Ten days later the president signed the
Hawaii Understanding in Honolulu
with Prince Fumimaro Konoye,
premier of the Japanese imperial government, and Foreign Minister Matsuoka.
As emissaries of Emperor Hirohito, the two had
already signed a triple alliance with the Germans and the Italians in Berlin in September of 1940, the Japanese endorsing the “new order in Europe”
established under the leadership of Italy
and Germany, who in turn
endorsed the “New Order in Greater East Asia” established by Japan. The
three countries further pledged to support one another militarily should any
of them be attacked by a nation not engaged in the European or Sino-Japanese
war. Like the Iceland Understanding, the Hawaii Understanding made the United States a party in all but name to the
Axis triple alliance by extending American recognition to Japan’s sovereignty
in East Asia and guaranteeing that the United States would not oppose
Japanese expansion on the Asian continent, including annexation of the
Netherlands Indies and French Indochina. Japan pledged to recognize U.S.
sovereignty on its own continent, to respect the political independence of
the American commonwealth of the Philippines—scheduled to be enacted in
1946—and to accept the American territories of Hawaii, Guam, and Midway as
permanent U.S. possessions in the Pacific.
In the aftermath of the
Understandings, Americans everywhere went about declaiming, No war, no young men fighting and dying ever again! Lindbergh can
deal with Hitler, they said, Hitler respects him because he’s Lindbergh.
Mussolini and Hirohito respect him because he’s
Lindbergh. The only ones against him, the people said, are the Jews. And
certainly that was true in America.
All the Jews could do was worry. Our elders on the street speculated incessantly
about what they would do to us and whom we could rely on to protect us and
how we might protect ourselves. The younger kids like me came home from
school frightened and bewildered and even in tears because of what the older
boys had been telling one another about what Lindbergh had said about us to
Hitler and what Hitler had said about us to Lindbergh during their meals together
in Iceland. One reason my parents decided to keep to our long-laid plans to
visit Washington was to convince Sandy and me—whether or not they themselves
believed it—that nothing had changed other than that FDR was no longer in
office. America wasn’t a
fascist country and wasn’t going to be, regardless of what Alvin had predicted. There was a new
president and a new Congress but each was bound to follow the law as set
down in the Constitution. They were Republican, they were isolationist, and
among them, yes, there were anti-Semites—as indeed there were among the
southerners in FDR’s own party—but that was a long way from their being
Nazis. Besides, one had only to listen on Sunday nights to Winchell lashing out at the new president and “his friend
Joe Goebbels” or hear him listing the sites under
consideration by the Department of the Interior for building concentration
camps—sites mainly located in Montana, the home state of Lindbergh’s
“national unity” vice president, the isolationist Democrat Burton K.
Wheeler—to be assured of the fervor with which the new administration was being
scrutinized by favorite reporters of my father’s, like Winchell
and Dorothy Thompson and Quentin Reynolds and William L. Shirer,
and, of course, by the staff of PM. Even I now took my turn with PM
when my father brought it home at night, and not just to read the comic
strip Barnaby or to flip through the pages of photographs but to have
in my hands documentary proof that, despite the incredible speed with which
our status as Americans appeared to be altering, we were still living in a
free country.
After Lindbergh was sworn
into office on January 20, 1941, FDR
returned with his family to their estate at Hyde Park, New York,
and hadn’t been seen or heard from since. Because it was as a boy in the Hyde
Park house that he had first become interested in collecting stamps—when his
mother, as the story went, had passed on to him her own childhood albums—I
imagined him there spending all of his time arranging the hundreds of
specimens that he had accumulated during his eight years in the White House.
As every collector knew, no president before him had ever commissioned his
postmaster general to issue so many new stamps, nor had there been another
American president so intimately involved with the Post Office Department.
Practically my first goal when I got my album was to accumulate all the
stamps that I knew FDR had a hand in designing or had personally suggested,
beginning with the 1936 three-cent
Susan B. Anthony stamp commemorating the sixteenth anniversary of the
women’s suffrage amendment and the 1937
five-cent Virginia Dare stamp marking the birth at Roanoke three
hundred and fifty years earlier of the first English child born in America.
The 1934 three-cent Mother’s
Day stamp designed originally by FDR—and displaying in the left-hand corner
the legend “In Memory and in Honor of the Mothers of America” and to the
right of center the artist Whistler’s celebrated portrait of his mother—was
given to me in a block of four by my own mother to help get my collection
going. She’d also contributed to my purchasing the seven commemorative stamps
Roosevelt had approved in his first year as president, which I wanted because
prominently displayed on five of them was “1933,” the year I was born.
Before we went to Washington, I asked
permission to take my stamp album on the trip. Out of fear that I would lose
it and be heartbroken afterward, my mother at first said no but then allowed
herself to be won over when I insisted on the necessity of at least having
with me my president stamps—the sixteen, that is, that I owned of the 1938 set that progressed
sequentially and by denomination from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge.
The 1922 Arlington National
Cemetery stamp and the 1923 Lincoln
Memorial and Capitol Buildings stamps were far too expensive for my budget,
but I nonetheless offered as another reason for taking my collection along
that the three famous sites were clearly pictured in black and white on the
album page reserved for them. In fact, I was afraid to leave the album at
home in our empty flat because of the nightmare I’d had, afraid that either
because I’d done nothing about removing the ten-cent Lindbergh airmail stamp
from my collection or because Sandy had lied to our parents and his Lindbergh
drawings remained intact under his bed—or because of the one filial betrayal
conspiring with the other—a malignant transformation would occur in my
absence, causing my unguarded Washingtons to turn
into Hitlers, and swastikas to be imprinted on my
National Parks.
Both
historical fiction and what-ifs have been increasing in popularity. In Roth’s
talented hands, The Plot
Against America presents a fascinating view of what life could have been
like 50 years ago, while drawing enough parallels to today’s anxiety over
homeland security to provide much for readers to think about.
Steve
Hopkins, November 26, 2004
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