American Gothic

...Roth’s ability to reproduce the challenge of fascism in an American setting must in some part be owed to his long-cultivated interest in Eastern Europe and his reading of the literature of the Holocaust...

...Often relying on explanatory devices involving “parallel universes,” alternate history exists mostly as one of the more pulpy genres of science fiction...

...Shulevitz suggested an “alternate” allegory for the book as an “indictment of antiwar isolationism, with its faint odor of anti-Semitism...

...He was the first to introduce to American audiences the Yugoslav author Danilo Kis, the Polish writers Bruno Schulz (murdered by a Nazi) and Tadeusz Borowski (who survived Auschwitz but then committed suicide), and the Czech novelist Milan Kundera...

...Sandy comes back a thorough enthusiast of the program and the president, and possessing a newfound contempt for “ghetto Jews” like his parents...

...Something similar to Philip K. Dick’s conceit moves The Plot Against America...

...He believes in voting, not shooting, to defend his rights...

...Lindbergh becomes the Republican candidate for the presidency on a platform branding the Jews as warmongering aliens disconnected from the American majority...

...And yet, in the alternate history of The Plot Against America, the nation has been frightened by war into electing a Jew-baiter as president, but no Holocaust arrives on our soil...

...What will he do with a gun...

...They end up disillusioned with Lindbergh, Roosevelt returns to the White House, and “ordinary history” resumes following a Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, a year after the real one...

...After he is offered resettlement of his whole family in Kentucky under a new “absorption” plan, Herman leaves his job selling insurance and goes to work as a night-shift produce market laborer for another Jewish collaborationist...

...Sandy is twelve and interested in art...

...The more respectable Jewish community leaders cooperate with civil authorities in developing emergency measures to keep their families safe by urging urban Jews to accept Henry Ford’s plan to disperse them into the hinterland...

...However, there is a Gentile figure, and a critical gesture, that stands out in this narrative, which I believe to be the first novel to transfer convincingly the atmosphere of fascist Europe to these United States...

...Roth writes: “the biggest man I had ever seen moved with a pistol through the darkened flat, stealthily advancing from window to window to ascertain with the eagle-eyed thoroughness of the veteran night watchman whether anyone lurked nearby with an ax, a gun, a rope, or a can of kerosene...

...Lindy meets Adolf in Iceland, and the two agree on peace with Germany...

...Cucuzza is the epitome of the Righteous Gentile, and the personification of the authentic America...

...BY STEPHEN SCHWARTZ With The Plot Against America, Philip Roth has become the first—well, the first what...

...The head of the household is a night watchman with a son named Joey and an American-born wife, as well as a crazed mother...

...Philip Roth seems to have a fascination with armed resistance to totalitarianism: In I Married a Communist, a man in suburban New Jersey rids himself of the presence of a corrupt, loudmouthed Stalinist at gunpoint...

...Philip, born in 1933, is seven at the outset of the tale, interested in stamp-collecting...

...The New York Times’s Judith Shulevitz unintentionally hit on the truth about Roth’s subject matter— Lindberghite isolationism—in an exchange with her husband Nicholas Lemann published in the online journal Slate...

...Yet Mr...

...What if he had become president...

...One can no more link Roth’s new book with the politics of the reelected president than with the corruption of President Harding, or, for that matter, the mystery of the Easter Island statues...

...The Roths are middle-class Jewish residents of the Weequahic neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey...

...Cucuzza comes to the Roths with Joey, bearing gifts...

...So what if Lindbergh had broken through politically...

...And with Philip K. Dick’s 1962 The Man in the High Castle, a story of America conquered by the Nazis and Japanese, the genre produced its one genuine classic...

...Europe...

...Cousin Alvin returns from the war missing his left leg below the knee and nursing bitterness along with a suppurating wound...

...Back home, bad news comes incrementally, as it did for many people under the real Nazi occupation of Stephen Schwartz is the author of The Two Faces of Islam...

...More violence follows Winchell’s campaign, culminating in his assassination, but the great mass of Gentiles as presented in this book remain calm and decent...

...Yet it was doubtless foreordained that certain reviewers would try to read into Roth’s latest novel something completely absent from its pages...

...Meanwhile, Philip’s cousin Alvin has left for Canada, to enlist in the British-commanded forces fighting fascism...

...After he is dropped from his radio program and fired from his newspaper column by William Randolph Hearst, Winchell announces that he will run for president against “Adolf Lindbergh...

...Roth’s story is fastpaced and mordant, alternate history as seen through the eyes of Philip Roth himself, remembering his boyhood in the 1940s and imagining how it could have been different...

...Also known as “alternate histories” or “what-if tales,” counterfactual fiction builds on the reader’s knowledge of what actually did happen in history—the South lost the Civil War, Hitler was defeated— to suppose what didn’t happen: What if the South had won...

...Cucuzza comprehends the dangers facing the Jewish family with much greater clarity: “Ifuh they come roun’,” he says, “how you gonna protect...

...Into the empty flat below the Roths move a family of Italian Americans named Cucuzza...

...Jonathan Yardley, for example, wrote in the Washington Post that “the novel’s subtext . . . gives every appearance of being an attack on George W. Bush and his administration...

...The contrasts with verifiable historical facts make it absurd to annex Roth’s new book to the corpus of Bushophobic tracts...

...Czech writers, he noted, tried to appropriate the works of Franz Kafka as metaphors for their oppression under communism...

...An inarticulate Catholic workman shelters the Jews, protects them, places his body between them and any threat, and offers no explanation for his action, except that he is disgusted by Mussolini and Hitler...

...There begins to appear a wave of revulsion as Lindbergh, “accustomed to nearly universal deification,” is suddenly “stymied by the strong disapproval that the opposition [is] so rapidly able to muster against him...

...Chief among them are the unsavory, extremely urban, offensively loud, egregiously irreverent, and above all very Jewish Walter Winchell, gossip columnist extraordinaire, and the popular Italian-American mayor of New York, Fiorello LaGuardia...

...The Jews, Lindbergh charged, presented their “greatest danger to this country in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government...

...Herman Roth steadfastly refuses the offered item, until the night when gunfire is heard in Newark—not a pogrom, it turns out—and Philip’s father takes the gun from the ItalianAmerican night watchman, who herds the Jews into an apartment formerly inhabited by a Jew who has committed suicide...

...Franklin Roosevelt has seemingly withdrawn from politics, but he appears at a protest rally to denounce Lindbergh and Hitler, while others come forward to lead the antifascist resistance...

...The parallels are so richly implicit, they vibrate like harp strings, dissolving the distance between then and now, fact and fiction...

...The most shrilly insistent such argument came from James Wolcott, who proclaimed in the Nation that the sold-out rabbi Bengelsdorf is “Roth’s deadeye portrait of a proto-neoconservative...

...It should be noted that Detroit really was struck by vicious anti-black riots during World War II...

...Philip’s father is baffled...

...Except for Philip’s father Herman, many of the Jews make opportunistic choices...

...But in Roth’s version, Lindbergh and Wheeler win election, while Hitler consolidates his triumphant march across Western Europe...

...Times are bleak, and with Lindbergh in the White House, it seems they can only worsen...

...And yet, in Roth’s fictional fascist-ruled America, the majority of Gentile Americans aren’t buying it...

...But then she lapsed back into absurd comparisons—between Lindbergh in his pilot suit and George W. Bush on the deck of an aircraft carrier, between the imaginary Jewish resettlement operations in Roth’s book and the Patriot Act, etc...

...Perhaps Roth intended—though probably he didn’t, for books do have a life of their own—that his book should shame all those who in the past two years have referred to “the neoconservative cabal in the Pentagon” as a respectable euphemism for Jews allegedly dedicated to warmongering...

...Indeed, “Roth doesn’t make overexplicit the parallels between America’s fall to fascism under Lindbergh and Bush’s fear-based presidency...

...There Mr...

...The parents are in their thirties...

...Smith, and thousands of Jews flee across the nearby Canadian border...

...The couple provides a cover of Jewish support for the Lindbergh administration, to the excruciating point of appearing at a White House dinner with the president and Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop...

...By that treaty, America gains what it already had: control of Hawaii and the other Pacific possessions, and continuing sovereignty over the Philippines...

...In the pilot’s infamous Des Moines speech (really delivered on September 11, 1941, but set back a year by Roth for fictional purposes), Lindbergh labeled “the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration” as the “most important groups that have been pressing this country toward war...

...The isolationists of 1941, Lindbergh on the right and Wheeler on the left, were enablers of Hitler and Stalin...

...a cake and, for Herman Roth, a pistol...

...What if Hitler had triumphed...

...One could draw much more apt comparisons between the stagey heroics of Lindbergh and John F. Kerry’s ludicrous posturing at the Democratic convention, or between the corporationbashing legal careers of Burton K. Wheeler and John Edwards...

...But he left unstated an obvious fact: Kafka’s Trial and Castle may very well have been satires of the impregnable and arbitrary Hapsburg bureaucracy under which Kafka had lived, but neither book ends in a fate comparable to those encountered in Auschwitz or the Gulag...

...He doesn’t need to...

...But in the world as it wasn’t, Roth inverts his memories to have it all turn frightening...

...He also cites a curious example of how readers use literature politically...

...And neither can the Patriot Act be compared with Auschwitz or the Gulag, except by those who seek to defile the memory of the victims of totalitarianism...

...If not the first serious writer of fiction, or the first highbrow author, then at least the first of those regarded as America’s magisterial novelists to write a deliberately “counterfactual” story...

...Cucuzza is transformed from a simple night watchman into the authentic “watchman of the night...

...A pogrom briefly breaks out in Detroit, home to Ford, as well as to the Jewbaiting radio priest Charles Coughlin and the demented agitator Gerald L.K...

...The Plot Against America includes Roth’s father Herman and his brother Sandy as major protagonists...

...The first in arms are men who already have weapons—gangsters such as the Newark mobster Longy Zwillman, of whom Roth has previously written in the novel Patrimony...

...After the Detroit outbreak, the Jews begin to plan for their defense...

...In this context, Lindbergh’s appointment of Henry Ford, an even more extreme Judeophobe, as secretary of the interior comes to appear anything but innocuous...

...In Roth’s account, something called the “Office of American Absorption” is established, with a scheme called “Just Folks,” that sends Jewish youth from urban environments to live in rural communities, and Philip’s brother Sandy joins up, going to Kentucky to work on a tobacco farm...

...Roth’s Lindbergh takes as his running mate Democratic senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, another strident isolationist and Jew-baiter, once famous as a corporation-bashing progressive but increasingly hypnotized, as the 1930s wore on, by a belief that he could resuscitate the widespread leftist opposition to American involvement in the World War of 1914-18...

...But alternate history has nonetheless remained a fairly low-rent kind of fiction, the kind that sells best at airport bookstores and science-fiction conventions...

...Sandy remains obdurately loyal to the new regime, and Alvin turns to crime...

...Roth offers a dark picture of the United States after 1940, with the interventionist and globalist democratizer Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated for a third presidential term by the Jewbaiting Hitler sympathizer, Charles A. Lindbergh...

...When they move in, Mr...

...An invented relative of Philip, Aunt Evelyn, is the paramour of a thoroughly repellent collaborationist rabbi, Lionel Bengelsdorf...

...Lucky Lindy” was known worldwide as the first man to fly a plane alone across the Atlantic in 1927, then as the tragic hero whose infant son was kidnapped and murdered in 1932, and after that as the leader of the isolationist “America First” movement...

...In one of the book’s many sharp notes, the New York Times, although Jewish-owned, sides with Lindbergh against Winchell, who retorts that “the snooty Park Avenue proprietors of the gutless New York Times aren’t the first ultracivilized Jewish Quislings to grovel before an anti-Semitic master because they’re just too, too refined to fight...

...Of course, Wheeler and other liberal and pacifist isolationists in the late 1930s did not understand that the nature of German ambitions had changed with the rise of Hitler...

...Someone had to do it...

...So will Philip Roth elevate the genre to a higher status...

...Roth’s ear is impeccable, and his Winchell, as well as his LaGuardia and other historical personages, are thoroughly believable as they are thrust into roles they were never called upon to fill...

...It can be pleasurable and clever, as its writers compete to see how small a change they can make in the actual facts to produce a massive change in the flow of history...

...Roth is no admirer of the president, but in a recent essay he disclaimed any similarity between past history and present...

...The aviator then travels to Honolulu to sign a “Hawaii Understanding,” which recognizes the Japanese conquest of French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies...

...With the country again saved from isolationism by the president’s reelection, Roth, whatever his own views of the second administration of George W. Bush, deserves thanks for reminding us, through “alternate history,” of our real history...