The Plot Against America

'But I don't want him walking around in my clothes,' I said. 'I don't want him telling everyone in Kentucky, 'Look at me, I'm wearing Roth's clothes.''

'Why don't you worry about Kentucky when and if we go to Kentucky.'

'He'll wear them to school here, Ma.'

'What is the matter with you?' she replied. 'What is going on with you? You're turning into-'

'So are you!' and I ran off with my books to school, and when I got home for lunch at noon I pulled from the bedroom closet the green shirt I hated and the brown corduroy pants that never fit and brought them downstairs to Seldon, who was in his kitchen eating the sandwich his mother had left for him and playing chess with himself.

'Here,' I said, throwing the clothes on the table. 'I'm giving you these,' and then I told him, for all the good it did in rerouting the direction of either of our lives, 'Only stop following me around!'

There were leftover delicatessen sandwiches for our supper when Sandy, Seldon, and I got back from the movies. The adults, who'd eaten in the living room when their meeting was through, had by now all left for home, except for Mrs. Wishnow, who sat at the kitchen table with her fists clenched, still embattled, still grappling day in and day out with everything determined to crush her and her fatherless son. She listened, along with the three of us, to the Sunday-night comedy shows and, while we ate, watched Seldon the way an animal watches over her newborn when she's caught a whiff of something stealthily creeping their way. Mrs. Wishnow had washed and dried the dishes and put them away in the pantry cupboard, my mother was in the living room pushing the carpet sweeper over the rug, and my father had collected and put out the garbage and carried the Wishnows' set of bridge chairs downstairs to return them to the back of the closet where Mr. Wishnow had killed himself. The reek of tobacco smoke pervaded the house despite every window having been thrown open and the ashes and butts flushed down the toilet and the glass ashtrays rinsed clean and stacked away in the breakfront's liquor cabinet (from which not a bottle had been removed that afternoon nor-in keeping with the matter-of-fact temperance practiced in the bulk of the homes of that first industrious American-born generation-a drop requested by a single guest).

For the moment, our lives were intact, our households were in place, and the comfort of habitual rituals was almost powerful enough to preserve a child's peacetime illusion of an eternal, unhounded now. We had the radio going with our favorite programs, we had dripping corned beef sandwiches for supper and rich coffee cake for dessert, we had the resumption of the routines of the school week before us and a double feature under our belts. But because we had no idea what our parents had decided about the future-had as yet no way of telling whether Shepsie Tirschwell had persuaded them to immigrate to Canada, whether cousin Monroe had come through with an affordable legal maneuver to challenge the relocation plan without getting everyone fired, or whether, after poring over the ins and outs of their government-ordained displacement as unemotionally as it was in them to do, they'd found no alternative but to accept that the guarantees of citizenship no longer fully extended to them-the embrace of the totally familiar wasn't the Sunday-night debauch it would ordinarily have been.

Seldon had got mustard all over his face when he hungrily attacked his sandwich, and it surprised me to see his mother reach over to wipe it off with a paper napkin. His letting her do it surprised me even more. I thought, 'It is because he has no father,' and though by now I believed that about everything that concerned him, probably this time I was right. I thought, 'This is the way it's going to be in Kentucky.' The Roth family against the world, and Seldon and his mother for dinner forever.

Our voice of belligerent protest, Walter Winchell, came on at nine. Everyone had been waiting on successive Sunday evenings for Winchell to lay into Homestead 42, and when he failed to, my father attempted to rid himself of his agitation by sitting down to compose a letter to the one man aside from Roosevelt whom he considered America's last best hope. 'This is an experiment, Mr. Winchell. This is the way Hitler did it. The Nazi criminals start with something small, and if they get away with it,' he wrote, 'if no one like you raises a cry of alarm…' but he never proceeded to list the horrors that could ensue, because my mother was sure that the letter would wind up in the office of the FBI. It is mailed to Walter Winchell, she reasoned, but it never reaches Walter Winchell-at the post office it's diverted to the FBI and placed in a folder labeled 'Roth, Herman,' to be filed beside the existing folder labeled 'Roth, Alvin.'

My father argued, 'Never. Not the U.S. Mail,' but my mother's commonsensical reply stripped him on the spot of what little remained of his certainty. 'You're sitting there writing Winchell,' she said, 'you're predicting to him how these people will stop at nothing once they know what they can get away with. And now you're trying to tell me that they can't do what they want to the postal system? Let someone else write to Walter Winchell. Our children have been questioned by the FBI already. The FBI is already watching like a hawk because of what Alvin did.' 'But that,' he told her, 'is why I'm writing him. What else should I do? What more can I do? If you know, advise me. Should I just sit here waiting for the worst to happen?'

In his helpless bewilderment she saw her opportunity, and, not because she was callous but because she was desperate, she seized it and thereby humbled him further. 'You don't see Shepsie sitting around writing letters and waiting for the worst to happen,' she said. 'No,' he replied, 'not Canada again!' as though Canada were the name of the disease insidiously debilitating us all. 'I don't want to hear it. Canada,' he told her firmly, 'is not a solution.' 'It's the only solution,' she pleaded. 'I am not running away!' he shouted, startling everyone. 'This is our country!' 'No,' my mother said sadly, 'not anymore. It's Lindbergh's. It's the goyim's. It's their country,' she said, and her breaking voice and the shocking words and the nightmare immediacy of what was mercilessly real forced my father, in the prime of his manhood, fit, focused, and undiscourageable as any forty-one-year-old could possibly be, to see himself with mortifying clarity: a devoted father of titanic energy no more capable of protecting his family from harm than was Mr. Wishnow hanging dead in the closet.

To Sandy-still silently enraged by the injustice of having been stripped of his precocious importance-neither of them sounded anything but stupid, and alone with me he didn't hesitate to speak of them in the language he'd picked up from Aunt Evelyn. 'Ghetto Jews,' Sandy told me, 'frightened, paranoid ghetto Jews.' At home he sneered at just about everything they said, on any subject, and then sneered at me when I appeared to be skeptical of his bitterness. He might anyway have begun by now to seriously enjoy sneering, and perhaps even in ordinary times our mother and father might have found themselves having to tolerate as best they could a restless adolescent's contemptuous derision, but back in 1942 what made it more than merely exasperating was the ambiguously menacing predicament throughout whose duration he would continue disparaging them right to their faces.

'What's 'paranoid'?' I asked him.

'Somebody afraid of his shadow. Somebody who thinks the whole world's against him. Somebody who thinks Kentucky is in Germany and that the president of the United States is a storm trooper. These people,' he said, mimicking our captious aunt whenever she would superciliously distinguish herself from the Jewish rabble. 'You offer to pay their moving expenses, you offer to throw open the gates for their children…Know what paranoid is?' Sandy said. 'Paranoid is nuts. The two of them are bats-they're crazy. And you know what's made them crazy?'

The answer was Lindbergh, but I didn't dare say it to him. 'What?' I asked.

'Living like a bunch of greenhorns in a goddamn ghetto. You know what Aunt Evelyn says Rabbi Bengelsdorf calls it?'

'Calls what?'

'The way these people live. He calls it 'Keeping faith with the certainty of Jewish travail.''

'And what's that supposed to mean? I don't understand. Translate, please. What's 'travail'?'

'Travail? Travail is what you Jews call tsuris.'

The Wishnows had gone back downstairs and Sandy had settled into the kitchen to finish his homework when my parents, at the front of the house, tuned the living room radio to Walter Winchell. I was in bed with the lights out: I didn't want to hear another panic-stricken word from anyone about Lindbergh, von Ribbentrop, or Danville, Kentucky, and I didn't want to think about my future with Seldon. I wanted only to disappear into forgetful sleep and to wake up in the morning somewhere else. But because it was a warm night and the windows were wide open, I couldn't help, at the stroke of nine, but be beset from virtually every quarter by the renowned Winchell radio trademark-the clatter of dots and dashes sounding over the telegraph ticker and signaling in Morse code (which Sandy had taught me) absolutely nothing. And then, above the ticker's dimming clatter, the red-hot blast of Winchell himself issuing from all the houses on the block. 'Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America…' followed by the