The Plot Against America

by Philip Roth

“Because what’s history?” he asked rhetorically when he was in his expansive dinnertime instructional mode. “History is everything that happens everywhere. Even here in Newark. Even here on Summit Avenue. Even what happens in his house to an ordinary man—that’ll be history too someday.”

Either my mother was keeping a very strict vigil over herself or she’d managed temporarily to make peace with all her chagrin, because though my father had taken a steep pay cut and the household budget required some difficult trimming, she showed no disabling signs of the improbabilities she’d confronted over the past year. Her resilience had a lot to do with her being back at a job whose compensations mattered more to her than those derived from selling dresses, work she hadn’t shrunk from doing but that seemed to her meaningless measured against her normal pursuits. Just how troubling her worries continued

I was remembering the generic maternalism that she shared with my mother—the succoring warmth I wallowed in as a matter of course—and

back when she was just another watchful member of the local matriarchy whose overriding task was to establish a domestic way of life for the next generation.