Philip Roth - The Plot Against America

In his low-key, taciturn, winning way, Lindbergh told the airfield crowds and the radio listeners who he was and what he'd done, and by the time he climbed back aboard his plane to take off for his next stop, he could have announced that, following the von Ribbentrop White House dinner, the First Lady would be inviting Adolf Hitler and his girlfriend to spend the Fourth of July weekend as vacation guests in the Lincoln bedroom of the White House and still have been cheered by his countrymen as democracy's savior.

My father's boyhood friend Shepsie Tirschwell had been one of several projectionist-editors at the Newsreel Theater on Broad Street since its opening in 1935 as the city's only all-news movie house. The Newsreel's one-hour show comprised news clips, shorts, and "The March of Time," and it ran daily from early morning until midnight. Every Thursday, out of thousands of feet of news film supplied by companies like Pathe and Paramount, Mr. Tirschwell and the three other editors selected stories and spliced together an up-to-the-minute show so that regular customers like my father-whose office on Clinton Street was only a few blocks away-could keep pace with national news, important happenings worldwide, and exciting moments from championship sports matches that, back in the radio era, could be seen on film nowhere but at a movie theater. My father would try to find an hour each week to catch a complete show, and when he did, he'd recount over dinner what he'd seen and whom. Tojo. Petain. Batista. De Valera. Arias. Quezon. Camacho. Litvinov. Zhukov. Hull. Welles. Harriman. Dies. Heydrich. Blum. Quisling. Gandhi. Rommel. Mountbatten. King George. La Guardia. Franco. Pope Pius. And that was but an abbreviated list of the tremendous cast of newsreel characters prominent in events that my father told us we would one day remember as history worthy of passing on to our own children.

"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."

On the weekends when Mr. Tirschwell was working, my father would take Sandy and me to be further educated at the Newsreel Theater. Mr. Tirschwell would leave free passes at the box office for us, and each time my father brought us up to the projection booth after the show would give the same civics lecture. He'd tell us that in a democracy, keeping abreast of current events was a citizen's most important duty and that you could never start too early to be informed about the news of the day. We'd gather close to the film projector, each of whose parts he'd name for us, and then we'd look at the framed photographs on the walls that had been taken at the theater's black-tie opening night, when Newark's first and only Jewish mayor, Meyer Ellenstein, had cut the ribbon strung across the lobby and welcomed the famous guests, among whom, as Mr. Tirschwell told us, pointing to their pictures, was the former U.S. ambassador to Spain and the founder of Bamberger's department store.

What I liked best about the Newsreel Theater was that the seats were constructed so that even an adult didn't have to get up to let others by, that the projection booth was said to be soundproof, and that on the carpet in the lobby was a design of motion picture reels that you could step on when you went in and out. Not until I think back to those consecutive Saturdays in 1942, when Sandy was fourteen and I was nine and we were taken by my father specifically to see the Bund rally one week and FDR addressing the anti-Ribbentrop Garden rally the next, am I able to remember anything much other than the narrating voice of Lowell Thomas, who introduced most of the political news, and of Bill Stern, who enthusiastically reported on sports. But the Bund rally I've not forgotten because of the hatred instilled in me by the Bundists up on their feet chanting von Ribbentrop's name as though it were he who was now president of the United States, and FDR's speech I've not forgotten because when he proclaimed to the anti-Ribbentrop rally, "The only thing we have to fear is the obsequious yielding to his Nazi friends by Charles A. Lindbergh," a good half of the movie audience booed and hissed while the rest, including my father, clapped as loudly as they could, and I wondered if a war might not break out right there on Broad Street in the middle of the day and if, when we left the darkened theater, we'd find downtown Newark a rubble heap of smoking ruins and fires burning everywhere.

It wasn't easy for Sandy to sit through those two Saturday-afternoon shows at the Newsreel Theater, and since he'd already understood beforehand that it wasn't going to be, he at first refused my father's invitation and agreed to come along with us only when he was ordered to do so. By the spring of 1942, Sandy was a few months from beginning high school, a lean, tall, good-looking boy whose attire was neat, whose hair was combed, and whose posture, standing or sitting, was as perfect as a West Point cadet's. His experience as a leading young spokesman for Just Folks had endowed him, in addition, with an air of authority seldom seen in one so young. That Sandy should prove himself so adept at influencing adults and that he should have developed a reverential following among the younger neighborhood kids who were eager to emulate him and qualify for the Office of American Absorption's summer farm program had surprised my parents and made their older child more intimidating to have around the house than he was back when everyone thought of him as an affable, fairly ordinary boy with a gift for drawing people's likenesses. To me he'd always been the mighty one because of his seniority; now he seemed mightier than ever and easily aroused my admiration despite my having turned away from him because of what Alvin had described as his opportunism-though even the opportunism (if Alvin was correct and that was the word for it) seemed another remarkable attainment, the emblem of a calm, self-aware maturity knowingly wedded to the ways of the world.

Of course, the concept of opportunism was barely familiar to me at the age of nine, yet its ethical status Alvin communicated clearly enough by the disgust with which he'd pronounced his indictment and what he added by way of amplification. He was still fresh from the hospital then and far too miserable to show much restraint.

"Your brother's nothing," he informed me from his bed one night. "He's less than nothing." And that was when he labeled Sandy opportunistic.

"Is he? Why?"

"Because people are, because they look for the advantage for themselves and the hell with everything else. Sandy's a fucking opportunist. So's your bitch aunt with the big pointy tits. So's the great rabbi. Aunt Bess and Uncle Herman are honest people. But Sandy-selling out to these bastards right off the bat? At his age? With his talent? A real fucking doozy, this brother of yours."

Selling out. Language also new to me, but now no more difficult to understand than "opportunist."

"He just drew some pictures," I explained.

But Alvin was in no mood to have me try to downplay the existence of those pictures, especially as he'd somehow come to know about Sandy's affiliation with Lindbergh's Just Folks. I didn't have the courage to ask how he'd found out what I'd determined never to tell him, though what I figured was that, after accidentally uncovering the artwork beneath the bed, he must have gone ahead to scavenge the drawers of the dining room breakfront, where Sandy stored his school notebooks and his writing paper, and found there all the evidence necessary to hate Sandy forever.

"It doesn't mean what you think," I said, but immediately I had to think what else it could mean. "He's doing it to protect us," I announced. "So we don't get in trouble."