THE “LONGEST, SADDEST DAY of my young American life,” said Roth, was April 12, 1945, when FDR died of a cerebral hemorrhage just as the war in Europe was coming to an end. Roth was among the crowd in downtown Newark who stood, bereft, as the funeral train “passed with lumbering solemnity” during its trip from Washington to Hyde Park. When V-E Day came less than a month later, the Roth family sat around the radio listening to Norman Corwin’s long demotic masterwork, On a Note of Triumph, whose opening lines were fixed in Roth’s mind for all time:
