Newark, New Jersey, is now on my must-visit list, with American writer Philip Roth deciding to donate his collection of books to the local public library there, which is in the neighbourhood where he grew up. The 4,000-odd titles will give readers a peek into his reading preferences — Franz Kafka or Saul Bellow or J.D. Salinger, or all three? Future visitors to the library will be able to see what Roth read while researching and writing his own illustrious novels — from Portnoy’s Complaint, to American Pastoral, to I Married a Communist.
But in a year when the Nobel Prize in Literature was denied to Roth, yet again, he has come to haunt American and world imagination with his eerie, sinister reimagining of history in his 2004 novel The Plot Against America , in which Franklin D. Roosevelt doesn’t win the 1940 election; victory is claimed instead by Republican candidate and White supremacist Charles Lindbergh.
George Orwell wrote his 1984 in 1949 and saw a catastrophic future under the gaze of the Big Brother. Written in the backdrop of two devastating world wars, it foresaw a world where no one is free.
Power of imaginationIn Roth’s book, as a White supremacist enters the White House, repercussions are felt everywhere, especially in Jewish neighbourhoods. Roth and his Jewish family never had to suffer what other Jews faced in Europe, but the ‘what if’ situation the writer conjures up is as devastating as it is prescient. “You think Swastikas are only for other countries?”
In one of the most chilling moments of the book, a dream sequence, we are horrified as a seven-year-old’s collection of stamps is desecrated. Across the face of each National Parks stamp, “across the cliffs, the woods, the rivers, the peaks, the geyser, the gorges, the granite coastline, across the deep blue water and the high waterfalls, across everything in America that was the bluest and the greenest and the whitest and to be preserved forever in these pristine reservations, was printed a black swastika”.
History tells us that in 1940, America was deeply divided between the Republicans who were against another European war and the Democrats who wanted to halt Adolf Hitler in his tracks as he marched ahead with plans to take over most of Europe. The divisions over race, class and war now seem more entrenched than ever, but unlike in 1940, a Republican is in the White House and threatening to fill up his Cabinet with White supremacists. The Ku Klux Klan is celebrating, even as minorities must be feeling frightened about their future.
In Roth’s book, the Jews are afraid of what Lindbergh might do and it’s palpable from the very first line: “Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear.” The story is told by a narrator, Philip Roth — Roth places his fictional and real self in his books quite often — who looks back to 1940 when he is about seven, and hears a radio broadcast of the Republicans’ convention where Lindbergh is nominated. This didn’t happen in reality, but the dashing aviator’s name did come up among party men as a possible candidate for president. Roth’s narrator recalls the seven-year-old hearing, “‘No!’ was the word that awakened us, ‘No!’ being shouted in a man’s loud voice from every house on the block. ...No. Not for president of the United States.”
Father Herman, mother Bess and brother Sandy cope in different ways with this challenge, while Philip tries to make sense of an increasingly alien world. And sure enough Democratic America takes a beating in the hands of Lindbergh, whose pet project, the “Just Folks” programme, breaks up Jewish families and spreads them far and wide apart in Christian neighbourhoods. Philip’s brother is chosen to be part of the programme and spends some time in Kentucky. When he returns home, he has already been brain-washed into believing that Lindbergh is not all bad.
History appears to be repeating itself in Europe, with right-wing movements gaining popularity by the day, and in America where Donald Trump has already tweeted that the protests against him as the new President are “very unfair”.
Franz Kafka forewarned the world about Nazi gas chambers, Orwell imagined 1984 as a time when an authoritarian omnipresent government would stifle individualism and freedom, Sinclair Lewis’ It Can't Happen Here (1935) placed democratic America in the hands of a fascist.
It can happen anywhereReality is sometimes stranger than fiction, it is said. The scenes playing out on the American streets after an acrimonious presidential election may be a testimony to a fractured right-down-to-the-middle nation, but writers did foretell just such an unbelievable scenario. As Herman says in The Plot against America — Roth’s nod to Sinclair Lewis too — “It can’t happen here? My friends, it’s happening here.”
In 2004 when The Plot Against America came out, in the backdrop of 9/11 and with George Bush at the helm, readers saw parallels in the imagined history with their reality. But Roth insisted the book should be read as an imagined history of the 1940 election; he said what he had imagined hadn’t actually happened. But today it’s impossible to read the book and not think of what is unfolding in America.
Sudipta Datta is a Kolkata-based journalist.
