The Plot Against America

by Philip Roth

We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction.

“It means turning our back on our friends. It means making friends with their enemies. You know what it means, son? It means destroying everything that America stands for.”

“In Germany Hitler has the decency at least to bar the Jews from the Nazi Party. That and the armbands, that and the concentration camps, and at least it’s clear that dirty Jews aren’t welcome. But here the Nazis pretend to invite the Jews in. And why? To lull them to sleep. To lull them to sleep with the ridiculous dream that everything in America is hunky-dory.

What they were was what they couldn’t get rid of—what they couldn’t even begin to want to get rid of. Their being Jews issued from their being themselves, as did their being American. It was as it was, in the nature of things, as fundamental as having arteries and veins, and they never manifested the slightest desire to change it or deny it, regardless of the consequences.

It’s so heartbreaking, violence, when it’s in a house—like seeing the clothes in a tree after an explosion. You may be prepared to see death but not the clothes in the tree.

That’s the tyranny of the problem. Trying to be faithful to what he’s trying to be rid of. Trying to be faithful and to get rid of what he’s faithful to at the same time.

all those blows, insults, and surprises intent on weakening and frightening the Jews that still hadn’t managed to shatter my mother’s strength.

And there was my mother blocking our doorway and looking angrier than I could ever have imagined her. Never had I seen her in such a fury, nor had I heard her utter a curse word. I didn’t even know she knew how to.

There was no stump for me to care for this time. The boy himself was the stump, and until he was taken to live with his mother’s married sister in Brooklyn ten months later, I was the prosthesis.