What If…

That a master is at work becomes evident when he chooses to tell the reconstructed history through the eyes of his own family. As native New Jerseyans, the senior Roths, Herman and Bess, and their two sons, Sandy and Phil, never had to come under pressure because they were Jewish. But what if they had? How would they behave? How would a seven-year-old react when Lindbergh’s election assaulted, “as nothing ever had before, that huge endowment of personal security that I had taken for granted as an American child of American parents in an American school in an American city in an America at peace with the world.”

In reality, Europe was in the grip of World War II from 1939-1943, with America too drawn into it. In Roth’s hands, the war-at-large is kept off, albeit for a while, as a little boy and his family and friends fight the battle at home. With only a gossip columnist Walter Winchell leading the political opposition against Lindbergh.

While father Herman struggles with the America he knew falling apart — “it can’t happen here? My friends, it is happening here” is a paranoid cry you hear often; mother Bess’s job is to hold their world together. Brother Sandy creates more turbulence when he goes for an internship with a tobacco farmer in Kentucky under a scheme called “Just Folks”, which is a way of absorbing Jews with other Americans. To Phil, his father is a hero “ruthlessly obedient to their idea of fair play”; while many others, including his uncle and aunt, are “remorseless about making money” or too busy aligning themselves with Lindbergh whose only apparent goal is to keep America out of all foreign wars and to keep all foreign wars out of America.

Phil is taken up with protecting his world around him: “I had my only one concern… preserving my stamp collection from harm.” He has a dream — that on his prized treasure of 1934 National Parks set of ten is printed a black swastika. As it turns out he will lose his most revered possession while running away to escape history.

The Roths will escape the tragic turn of events but Phil’s lonely friend next door, Seldon Wishnow, isn’t so lucky, facing the brunt of anti-Semitism, the closest to the German Jewish experience. And it’s because Phil wants to get rid of him that Seldon, displaced from New Jersey, loses everything, becoming a stump: “the blunt remnant of something whole that belonged there and once had been there.”

And in case you mix up fact and fiction, Roth provides an elaborate postscript with the true chronology of the ears 1940-42. But he needn’t have because “the terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic”. Roth has just turned it around like only he can, holding up the making of the disaster… soon to pass into history as inevitable.

While The Plot… may pale in comparison to his masterpieces American Pastoral, I Married a Communist or The Human Stain — there is no ruthless reinvention of the self or a rediscovery of America as it were — many of the dialogues, particularly the emotional outbursts, are vintage Roth. We can also trace some of the paranoia to one of his famous Zuckerman books, The Ghost Writer, where Z runs into Anne Frank… the narrator realising that growing up Jewish in New Jersey in the 1940s was very different from growing up Jewish in fascist Europe. But what if it were not so? As always, Roth marvels in the re-telling. Sheer pleasure.