The Plot Against America

by Philip Roth

Our homeland was America. Then the Republicans nominated Lindbergh and everything changed.

“The pompous son of a bitch knows everything—it’s too bad he doesn’t know anything else.”

“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.”

A childhood milestone, when another’s tears are more unbearable than one’s own.

Turned wrong way round, the relentless unforeseen was what we schoolchildren studied as “History,” harmless history, where everything unexpected in its own time is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic.

Bullies love to summarize. The redundant upbraiding summary—nothing to equal it outside the old-fashioned flogging.

nor had I understood till then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others.

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.

There were two types of strong men: those like Uncle Monty and Abe Steinheim, remorseless about their making money, and those like my father, ruthlessly obedient to their idea of fair play.

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.

My father chooses resistance, Rabbi Bengelsdorf chooses collaboration, and Uncle Monty chooses himself.