I was so impressed by the miniseries version of Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” that I immediately bought a copy of the novel, which I had not read. You’ll get a sense of the number of books on my to-read shelf when I say I only recently got around to reading the novel – the miniseries came out almost two years ago.
The novel, like the miniseries, is riveting. One clear advantage of the novel over the six-part miniseries is I didn’t have to wait a week to see what happens next. I found myself staying up late reading, reluctant to break the spell of Roth’s powerful prose and vivid characters.
Some episodes in the 120,000-word book did not fit into the six-hour movie. But the HBO movie preserved much of its source material, and I found only one of the book’s key characters missing. I do wish the producers had included Minna Schapp, because she does a lot to humanize one of the male characters. She is among several woman in the book – Selma Wishnow, Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Bess Roth – who keep the families in the novel from falling apart, and ultimately keep American from collapsing into terror and autocracy. Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Bess Roth are among the many real people given roles in Roth’s novel. Bess Roth is his mother. A nine-year-old version of Philip Roth is the narrator of the novel, offering a child’s perspective that makes it easy to relate to the fictional story, and also rendering it intimately frightening.
In “The Plot Against America,” Roth imagines what the United States would have been like had the fascist-leaning anti-Semite Charles Lindbergh beat Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 election. In the novel, Lindbergh keeps America out of the war, sympathizes with Hitler, allows fascism to sweep across Europe and emboldens racists and Nazis in America.
When I read Roth writing of a synagogue bombing, I thought of Birmingham, Alabama’s 16th Street Baptist Church and the four girls who died there in 1963. Roth describes white mobs torching Jewish American communities and lynching Jewish Americans; my mind turned to whites terrorizing their Black neighbors in Colfax, Louisiana in 1873; Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898; Elaine, Arkansas and two dozen other cities and towns across the country in 1919; Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921; Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 1935; Monroe, Georgia in 1942; Money, Mississippi in 1955; Greensboro, North Carolina in 1979; Jasper, Texas in 1998; Charleston, South Carolina in 2015; Satilla Shores, Georgia in 2020.
Roth invents a fascist U.S. government forcing Jewish characters from their homes. Reality is World War II era Japanese-American concentration camps and the 19th century Trail of Tears.
Roth’s novel was published in 2004, when reality was the fear, repression and hatred of immigrants – Muslims from the Middle East, not Jews from Eastern Europe – that was part of America’s response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Roth died in 2018, before journalists began using the term the Big Lie – coined by Hitler to describe the technique of repeating a lie so often that people would come to believe it – for former President Donald Trump’s false claim that election fraud in his race against Joe Biden robbed him of a second term. Roth might have thought it was a scene from his novel come to life had he seen Trump loyalists and self-proclaimed "Western chauvinist" Proud Boys storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 to try to wrest the presidency from Biden.
Roth’s alternative US history is allegory if our actual history is considered.
Thank goodness for Roth’s women. I take heart that Minnas, Selmas and Besses have lived and live among us. We watch Roth’s Bess in particular weather a series of horrors, some she witnesses in her own living room, some she only hears about in radio news bulletins. Roth writes that “all those blows, insults, and surprises intent on weakening the Jews that still hadn’t managed to shatter my mother’s strength.”
Here’s to the strength of our foremothers, literary and otherwise.