From the Shadows of the Past
ALLEN, BROOKE
On Fiction From the Shadows of the Past By Brooke Allen DURING THE 1960s and '70s the brilliant young Philip Roth gave us an entirely new picture of what it meant to grow up Jewish in...
...Lindbergh runs as "A virile hero...
...I had a kind of practical invisibility...
...The Mitwissers provide James not so much with a purpose as a diversion: They are, to him, little dolls in a dollhouse, objects he can completely control...
...He's up there talking to the goyim—he's giving the goyim all over the country his personal rabbi's permission to vote for Lindy on Election Day...
...settled the frontier, tilled the farms, built the cities, governed the states, sat in Congress, occupied the White House...
...mainstream, making them "more American...
...FDR is exiled to Hyde Park...
...Koshering Lindbergh," says Philip's furious, rebellious cousin, Alvin...
...Ninel was angry at Jane Austen not only on account of the British Empire—she was angry at all novels...
...Don't you understand...
...His first act as President is to sign nonaggression treaties with Hitler and Hirohito, endorsing the "new orders" in Europe and Asia...
...The Bertram Rosie refers to in the Victorian manner as her "benefactor" proves as fickle as Austen's Bertrams...
...Rooted in its own period, the novel nevertheless is full of resonance for the present...
...And why...
...One of its programs, "Just Folks," sends urban Jewish kids to stay with farm families deep in the South and Midwest...
...From the very beginning, however, the visit is chilling...
...Life simply goes on, apparently as unrewarding as ever...
...If anything, his process is even more subtle...
...When I came up from the subway at 42nd Street, it was into a flowing gully of striders, gray fedoras like a field of dandelions gone to seed, hurrying women stuttering on Chinese heels...
...Their hidden agenda is not lost on Philip: They want to convince their sons that "America wasn't a fascist country and wasn't going to be...
...Angry, blisteringly cruel, with a frenzied intelligence and passion for the grotesque, he was the funniest writer in the country and the most iconoclastic, too...
...We'd already had a homeland for three generations...
...So the nomination of the openly antiSemitic Lindbergh ignited an atavistic fear "that had more to do with Kishinev and the pogroms of 1903 than with New Jersey 37 years later...
...Heir to the Glimmering World is a consummately strange book, fascinating yet at the same time repelling...
...The Roths' knowledge of the worst, the way this knowledge permeates their son's emotional defenses, is described with a great sense of truth and inevitability...
...Koshering Lindbergh for the goyim___They didn't get him up there to talk to Jews...
...He was accustomed to privilege: at home in Berlin, at the University, he had been surrounded by a haze of attentive acolytes...
...His answer is to employ quislings like Newark's Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf, soon to be Philip's uncle by marriage, a smooth public speaker who assures the nation, and specifically the nation's Jews, that Lindbergh is the only man to save them from "Bolshevism, radicalism, and anarchism...
...He was a man who had been much served...
...At one moment he invents a New York Times editorial that is as pompous and as morally timid as many of the real ones we have read in recent years...
...Overt anti-Semitism, dormant under the egalitarian Roosevelt, is flourishing in Lindbergh's capital...
...The result is confusion: Ozick seems to be telling several stories and working several themes simultaneously...
...Roth does not overtly refer to our current situation, but the parallels are unavoidable...
...The three principal tales—Rosie's, the Mitwissers' and the Bear Boy's—converge but stay separate...
...My parents were outgoing, hospitable people, their friends culled from among my father's associates at the office and from the women who along with my mother had helped to organize the ParentTeacher Association...
...A courageous adventurer...
...its premise seems perfectly plausible when one mulls it over...
...My friends, it is happening here...
...He is a fabulously rich man named James Philip A'Bair, once world-famous as the Bear Boy, a sort of American equivalent of Christopher Robin Milne...
...Roth has succeeded in making this fear not only comprehensible, but inescapable...
...they never form a larger whole...
...As Herman Roth comments, "In Germany Hitler has the decency at least to bar the Jews from the Nazi Party...
...Looking back, he marvels at the "huge endowment of personal security that I had taken for granted as an American child of American parents___" His parents, of course, are warier...
...It's disgraceful...
...Herman Roth recognizes that the program's purpose is to weaken Jewish families and the Jewish social structure, and he is compelled to watch the process play out in his own family when Sandy becomes a member, then a spokesman, for the hypocritical administration...
...On Fiction From the Shadows of the Past By Brooke Allen DURING THE 1960s and '70s the brilliant young Philip Roth gave us an entirely new picture of what it meant to grow up Jewish in America...
...was a mystery to me...
...It starts with the White House...
...Israel didn't yet exist, six million European Jews hadn't yet ceased to exist, and the local relevance of distant Palestine...
...With his late novels, notably American Pastoral, The Human Stain and now The Plot Against America (Houghton Mifflin, 400 pp., $26.00), he has provided an extended personal meditation on what America means and what it means to be an American...
...Her descriptive prose is sometimes quite wonderful...
...Thieving germinates, pullulates: A boy is a thief, a man is a thief, a continent is a thief...
...Cynthia Ozick has also produced a new novel about Jewish life in America during the Nazi period, Heir to the Glimmering World (Houghton Mifflin, 310 pp., $24.00...
...It can't happen here...
...All were Jews...
...Rosie lost her mother when she was a baby...
...Other national programs follow: Roth has planned this Nazification of America as brilliantly as Joseph Goebbels himself might have done...
...I pledged allegiance to the flag of our homeland every morning at school, I sang of its marvels with my classmates at assembly programs, I eagerly observed its national holidays...
...he was Herr Doktor Professor...
...Is her emotional masochism purely derived from that of her literary progenitors, or does it have another function in the narrative...
...Things have admittedly changed since 1940, but there is no reason to suppose they have changed forever...
...Although the book is grounded in extensive research and an intuitive grasp of political possibility, Roth is primarily a novelist and he focuses his sights on the novelist's classic material, the family...
...But moderates are put off by his anti-Semitism and his friendliness with Nazi Germany...
...As the decades have passed, he has grown into a very different type of artist...
...She spends her early years as the neglected ward of her father, a seedy and corrupt teacher who finagles a job at aboys' prep school and dies in a car accident while taking his pupils out on a gambling binge...
...The anger is still there, but it is channeled into more measured appraisals of his world...
...They didn't buy him off for that...
...Lindbergh cynically exploits the cravenness of his compatriots for his own purposes...
...Heir to the Glimmering World, disconcertingly, does neither...
...We were a happy [middle-class] family in 1940...
...Decades later, Rosie says, she "would come to agree with Ninel about the useless delusions of literature...
...Maybe Heir to the Glimmering World is intended as an illustration of that uselessness, for at the end its narrator goes out into the world having seemingly learned nothing from her weird sojourn...
...Lindbergh sweeps 46 out of the 48 states, with 57 per cent of the popular vote...
...Kingsley Amis' The Alteration, positing an England that never underwent the Reformation, is an example...
...Mitwisser, who in spite of her madness frequently demonstrates more sense than the rest of the family, sees him less as a benefactor than a thief...
...History has taught them there is no such thing as safety...
...Rosie obsessively reads novels, especially the 19th-century classics...
...Rosie's status in the house is uncertain...
...Less funny but wiser, Roth has become the foremost fictional chronicler of American social history in the last century, gradually outstripping other contenders like Sinclair Lewis and John Dos Passos...
...There was something about the inherent decorum of the delivery that, alien though it was, not only calmed our anxiety but bestowed on our family a historical significance, authoritatively merging our lives with his as well as with that of the entire nation when he addressed us in our living room as his 'fellowcitizens.'" Lindbergh, who sees the Germans as natural allies against the godless Communists, bases his whole campaign on keeping the country out of the War, and plays to the voters' base cowardice to get elected...
...Novels, like movies, were pretend-shadows...
...Roth constructs an alternate history that is all too credible...
...they failed to diagnose the world as it was in reality...
...To give away any more of the story would be unfair...
...Pondering on the passive heroine of 19th-century fiction, she imagines how such a woman might fare in the 1930s, a time of exile, uprooting and economic depression as dangerous to unprotected girls as the Victorian era, but less ready to idealize their helplessness...
...A denatured autumn wind smelled of trolley ozone...
...at another he creates the perfect airy-fairy, Seven Sisters tone in an ass-kissing missive from Anne Morrow Lindbergh to Rabbi Bengelsdorf...
...But where Roth's work is solidly grounded in reality, in a credible if not an actual world, Ozick's is a purposely artificial creation, an exploration of the rules and conventions of literature as much as of her characters or period...
...for a replica of the old life, the old reverence...
...Roth reminds us that unlike, say, the Irish or the Italians, American Jews had no Old Country then...
...The tensions among the Mitwissers, the Bear Boy, Rosie, and the eventually reappearing Bertram and Ninel bring the novel to its climax and serve to illustrate some of Ozick's ideas about heresy and orthodoxy, colonization and invasion, the Old World and the New...
...Still, Ozick can write very well when she is not being too programmatic...
...Heightening the tale's eerie verisimilitude is the fact that the family is his own...
...Sufficient unto themselves, yes, but assimilated, at least in their own minds...
...Perhaps most awful, though, is Rosie—awful through the perverse force of her passivity...
...I was compliant," she says, "I was quick, I was most often silent...
...The Plot Against America is, among other wonderful things, a pageturner...
...There was a new President and a new Congress but each was bound to follow the law as set down in the Constitution...
...Roth's is even more plausible...
...He imagines an America whose isolationists and reactionaries managed in 1940 to come up with a candidate who could beat Franklin D. Roosevelt and keep us out of the War: Charles Lindbergh...
...Babysitter, nurse, amanuensis to the Professor, she is basically an "animate tool"—Aristotle's definition of a slave—and accordingly scorned by the Mitwissers, despite their being so poor now themselves that they cannot even afford to pay her...
...The humor is still there, but it is no longer the driving force behind his style...
...they were of necessity "committed irrevocably to America...
...More or less cast out by Bertram and the rapacious Ninel, Rosie takes a job as assistant to a recent fugitive from Hitler's Germany, Professor Rudolf Mitwisser...
...As a Protestant married into a Jewish family, I never quite understood my in-laws' profound fear and hatred of the great American hinterland: the South, the Midwest, the West...
...Its cast of characters—the arrogant, selfish Mitwissers, the cretinous Bear Boy, the self-satisfied Bertram—is as unpleasant as any I have ever come across...
...Ninel berates her for this degenerate and pointless taste...
...As the Roths notice, though, the only minority the Office seems too concerned with are the Jews...
...Before long, Lindbergh has created an Office of American Absorption for the supposed purpose of absorbing minorities into the U.S...
...The Jews, chased from every corner of Europe, know they have been given a safe haven only on the sufferance of the Christians, "the great overpowering majority that fought the Revolution and founded the nation and conquered the wilderness and subjugated the Indian and enslaved the Negro and emancipated the Negro and segregated the Negro...
...A natural person of gigantic strength and rectitude combined with a powerful blandness"—an image that is always attractive to American voters...
...The solipsism, for better and for worse, appears to be gone...
...What function might that be...
...The Roths decide to take the boys on a tour of Washington...
...but now they think they can get away with anything...
...he has never been able to see himself as anything but an object, eventually a despised object, and as he has aged he has become a vacant drifter, dependent on drugs and alcohol...
...There seems to be nothing Roth can't do, no idiom he can't adopt...
...She can capture the feeling not only of a place but an era...
...This seems indeed to be the case...
...To young Philip, it was a safe cocoon...
...Rose Meadows, Ozick's narrator, is a combination of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, George Eliot's Dorothea Brooke, and Jane Austen's Fanny Price...
...He does this by disbursing and withholding money at will...
...To lull them to sleep...
...Herman Roth is 39 years old at the time of the Lindbergh nomination, Bess is 36, Philip is seven, and his brother Sandy 12...
...Bertram's name is as significant as Rosie's: It was, after all, the unreliable and even sinisterBertram family upon whose mercies Fanny Price was thrown in Mansfield Park...
...But here the Nazis pretend to invite the Jews in...
...They live in Newark, Roth Country ever since Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy's Complaint...
...The new work belongs to a special might-have-been genre, in which some key historical moment is altered and the novel plays out what might have happened...
...Roosevelt had sought to conquer fear through his rhetoric, delivered, as Roth the narrator puts it, "in the confidently intoned upper-class enunciation that, for close to eight years now, had inspired millions of American families like ours to remain hopeful in the midst of hardship...
...That and the armbands, that and the concentration camps, and at least it's clear that dirty Jews aren't welcome...
...Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia asks, in a rabble-rousing anti-Lindbergh speech...
...The demolition of the Constitution and the stripping away of civil liberties, with the willing and even enthusiastic consent of the people, are clearly far from impossible...
...the eldest, 16-year-old Anneliese, has been running the household...
...My silence concealed watchfulness...
...Unfortunately, these ideas are never fully developed, nor do they assume an order of precedence...
...The Bear Boy books made James' fortune but stole his soul...
...Literature does not exist to impose meaning but to help us discern it...
...Is that really the message that Ozick, one of our most literarily conscious novelists—a woman in love with literature—wants to convey...
...Mitwisser is hampered with a mad wife, a former scientist who has lost her wits along with her homeland, and five children...
...But it turns out that they have a benefactor of their own— an unreliable one, who doles out or withholds his largess at whim...
...though it fascinates, it utterly mystifies...
...Under the dusty towers of Manhattan dust was quickening...
...Herman Roth recognizes that the leader, as always, sets the climate and determines the national etiquette: "People wouldn't dare, they wouldn't dream, in Roosevelt's day...
...An expert on the Karaites, a heretical Jewish sect of the Middle Ages, Mitwisser was a rather obscure participant in the great mass exodus of artists and intellectuals from Europe that produced "an influx of refugee scholars, injured, diminished, confused, streaming into the chaos of an alien haven and hoping for an academic berth of some kind...
...James lives off the enormous royalties brought in by his dead father's children's books, all of which featured the young James...
...Full of masculine egotism, he does not discourage Rosie from falling in love with him, although he himself is besotted with a Communist agitator who has changed her name from the traditional Jewish Miriam to the ideologically correct Ninel (Lenin, spelled backward...
...The teenaged Rosie then moves in with her older cousin Bertram, a pharmacist...
...Hopelessly out of place in his new country, he is too spoiled and proud to lower his professional standards and toil away at some insignificant American college where no one has even heard of the Karaites...
Vol. 87 • September 2004 • No. 5
