The Plot Against America

by Philip Roth

But my father could see nothing. “You think you’d hear that here if Roosevelt was president? People wouldn’t dare, they wouldn’t dream, in Roosevelt’s day . . . ,” my father said. “But now that our great ally is Adolf Hitler, now that the best friend of the president of the United States is Adolf Hitler—why, now they think they can get away with anything. It’s disgraceful. It starts with the White House . . .”

“We knew things were bad,” my father told the friends he immediately sat down to phone when we got home, “but not like this. You had to be there to see what it looked like. They live in a dream, and we live in a nightmare.”

“But why did you go,” my mother asked him, “when it was bound to upset you like this?” “I went,” he told her, “because every day I ask myself the same question: How can this be happening in America? How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I’d think I was having a hallucination.”

These were Jews who needed no large terms of reference, no profession of faith or doctrinal creed, in order to be Jews, and they certainly needed no other language—they had one, their native tongue, whose vernacular expressiveness they wielded effortlessly and, whether at the card table or while making a sales pitch, with the easygoing command of the indigenous population. Neither was their being Jews a mishap or a misfortune or an achievement to be “proud” of. 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.