Philip Roth's populist Nightmare.

One did not have to look for who would work in the concentration camps
and the liquidation centers--the garrison would be filled with
applicants from the pages of a hundred American novels.
--Norman Mailer, Armies of the Night

Where would American literature be without him? The fierce intelligence; the unbridled imagination; the merciless eye; the magisterial voice--Philip Roth, archivist of that lost Jewish Arcadia, Weequahic, New Jersey; anthropologist of the modern Jewish identity; scourge of self-satisfaction, pettiness, vulgarity, greed, piety, sentimentality and cant.

To all his acolytes--defiant outsiders and self-styled mandarins adrift in a shallow Panglossian culture--Roth looms like a secular Prophet, smiting the Philistines in Goodbye Columbus; mortifying the ethnocentrists in Portnoy's Complaint; mocking the Voluptuary in the Kepesh novels; skewering his hysterical, self-righteous critics in Zuckerman Bound; dissecting the anti-Semites on the one hand and the Zionist chauvinists on the other in The Counterlife and Operation Shylock; and most recently, in American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain, exposing America's bedrock individualist creed as gossamer that the rootless, self-made man clutches at his peril.

Roth registers our grievances, vindicates our arguments, diminishes our enemies, reflects our sentiments, and affirms our outlook. And by transforming our common experience into a scripture of Art, he sustains us in exile. I shudder to imagine our letters without his audacious vision. Fortunately, I don't have to. Our Bard already has. In The Plot Against America, his twenty-third work of fiction, Roth pre-empts himself or rather, the nurturing world from which his dauntless authorial self sprang. Through the prism of a shadow American history, a nightmarish contortion of the novelist's idyllic childhood unfolds and, writ large, of American Jewry's New World pastoral.

The 1940 Presidential election hatches the plot. Faced with a deadlocked nominating convention and seemingly invincible opponent in FDR, the Republican Party turns to a white-knight--the renowned aviator, pioneer of the solo transatlantic flight, Charles A. Lindbergh. The very same Lindbergh who'd lived in Germany as the Nazi's honored guest until April '39 and who'd spent the year since his return, as the anti-war America First movement's celebrity spokesman, barnstorming the country praising Hitler and accusing the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration" of leading the country to war. Few pundits give the maverick a chance.

But on Election Day, an anxious electorate wearied by the Depression and threatened with yet another bloody European war spurns New Deal architect and patrician internationalist Roosevelt for the plainspoken, rugged, heartland isolationist, "Lindy," The People's Hero. And, true to his word, upon assuming office, President Lindbergh promptly signs an entente cordiale with Hitler and Hirohito "to keep the U.S. out of foreign wars," he declares, "and foreign wars out of America." Virtually everyone in the nation rejoices, exulting in the solitary, self-reliant course Lindy charts for its future.

That is, everyone but the Jews. For the old "persecuting spirit" Hawthorne once portrayed has awakened. Just beneath the surface of Lindbergh's blithe fortress Eden percolate hysteria and suspicion. The people--incited by an Administration comprised of crude, unregenerate Jew-haters like Interior Secretary Henry Ford and Vice-President Burton K. Wheeler--spy a duplicitous enemy in their midst. The insidious, war-mongering Jew.

Suddenly, the happy and undistinguished life of the loyal, working-class Roths of Newark, New Jersey takes an ominous turn. For the Lindbergh Presidency will assail their security--their "unconscious oneness" with the land of their birth--as never before. And along with millions of Jews like them, it will confront them with their peoples' eternal question--the question from which as Americans they imagined themselves forever immune: is it time to flee? Is it time to join the small, but growing daily, Jewish exodus northward into Canada?

Still, in the immediate aftermath of Lindbergh's inauguration, the Roths remain stoic, if not hopeful, determined to appraise their situation objectively and not to succumb to historically conditioned fear. Later that summer, in fact, Herman and Bess decide to take their two young sons, Sandy and Philip, to Washington for the family's annual vacation. The trip designed as much to educate their children in the pluralist, democratic tradition the capital's monuments enshrine as to reaffirm their own faith in it. But what they discover instead is the new regime--a now shamelessly blunt and unapologetic anti-Semitism. Indeed, by vacation's end, the ironical greeting the hotel's Negro bellhop extends as he escorts the family to their barely lit, ground-floor crypt illuminates a figurative darkness. "Welcome Jews," reads the subtext: Welcome to the Other America--the Nightmare the flip side of the Dream. And from June '41 through October 42, as the political infects the personal, the Roths will plumb its depths.

First, their ward Alvin, Herman's deceased brother's son, a vehement opponent of Lindbergh's Quisling peace, enlists in the Canadian Royal Army and loses a limb fighting in Europe. The entire family suffers the trauma however. Eight-year-old Philip, for the first time, witnesses his grief-stricken father cry. Philip's doting mother is forced to abandon her cherished place as homemaker to get a job--ostensibly to defray the added cost of Alvin's convalescence but also so she secretly can deposit a share of her salary in a Montreal bank account. Meanwhile, the government deems Alvin a subversive, along with the relatives housing, feeding, and employing him. FBI agents harass a young frightened Philip, waylaying him with crude anti-Semitic innuendo, and then coax local mob boss Longy Zwillman into forcing Herman's brother Monty, "The Tomato King," to fire his own nephew. Roth reflects.

"A new life began for me. I'd watched my father fall apart, and I would never return to the same childhood. The mother at home was now away all day working for Hahne's ... [I experienced] a sense that my family was slipping away from me right along with my own country ... I must have already begun to think of myself as a little criminal because I was a Jew."

As if that isn't enough, to add insult to injury, Sandy, in act of adolescent rebellion, enrolls in the Lindbergh administration's "Just Folks" program. Implemented by the President's maiden Office of American Absorption, "Just Folks" professes to induct "urban" youth in "the traditional ways of heartland life" through volunteer work programs. A summer apprenticeship of which sends Sandy, along with scores of other urban Jewish boys, to play yeoman farmer in the rural South, transforming him into a blonde-haired drawling outdoorsman with awe for agrarian living, adulation for the "Nordic Anglo-Saxons who run America" and contempt for his "frightened, paranoid 'ghetto Jew'" parents who he accuses of harboring a "persecution complex". Sandy becomes, in other words, a regular "Lindbergh Youth".

That Sandy can embrace the enemy of course only illustrates what is, until October of '42 anyway, the ambiguity of the Roths' dilemma (and by extension, the novel's brilliant subtlety). Yes, the OAA and Just Folks implied intolerance for the cohesive, hyphenated, identifiably ethnic brand of Jew the Roths were. "Something essential had been destroyed and lost," Roth writes, "we were being coerced to be other than the American we were." Still, the government had not threatened their citizenship, let alone their lives. What's more, ever ready to defend Lindbergh and dismiss their lesser brethren's worries as so much paranoia were Jews like Aunt Evelyn, Bess' arriviste sister, and her husband, OAA's National Director, Rabbi Bengelsdorf. Third-generation Southerner, fervent assimilationist, Court Jew nonpareil--Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf and his small, influential claque of highly assimilated, old-line German Jews believed, to the contrary, that the Roths and their unwashed Eastern European co-religionists' xenophobia and clannish tendency to huddle

together in neighborhoods like Newark threatened them more than any imagined Gentile hostility. "Americanization" should be the Jews' first priority, Bengelsdorf contends, because "[t]here can be no divided allegiance. Any man who says he is an American and something else also, isn't an American at all."

So in November, the Office of American Absorption announces that through the Homestead Act of 1942, the federal government will fund participating corporations' relocation of their Jewish employees to remote regions of the country where no Jews reside. And through Aunt Evelyn's connivance, Metropolitan Life notifies Herman Roth he's been "chosen" to open Metropolitan's new district office in "Danville, the county seat of rural Boyle County ... in the beautiful Kentucky countryside, sixty-miles south of Lexington, the state's second-biggest city after Louisville."

Homestead '42 also initiates the novel's page-turning denouement. Walter Winchell reports that Homestead '42 actually originated from a secret agreement between Lindbergh and Hitler first to disperse and then to imprison American Jewry. The Administration cries libel. The New York Times accuses Winchell of reckless demagoguery. Jergens Lotion removes him from the airwaves, and Winchell declares his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for President. Following which, a violent anti-Semitic backlash ensues. Pogroms erupt on American soil for the first time in history and a one-hundred-eighty-year-old democracy momentarily implodes.

II

Like The Counterlife, Operation Shylock, Sabbath's Theater and The Human Stain before it, The Plot Against America marks a highpoint in Roth's oeuvre because the author, again, to quote a metaphor Ralph Ellison favored, "play[s] beyond his game." Roth's game or metier being the story of a post-war, middle-class Jewish-American male's struggle for freedom and self-realization against the strictures of family, tribe, career, society, or even, his own body and self. The Plot Against America, however, encompasses two separate, if intertwined dramas, personal and political: Roth's and the nation's. How will a forlorn Philip survive a childhood of epidemic fear, grievous loss, unassuageable anxiety, and looming threat? How will an isolated Republic, plagued by hysterical paranoia and anti-Semitism, survive amid a sea of war, despotism, and mass murder?

Actually, the plausibility of the novel's alternate history alone merits awe (to say nothing of its feat in fictionalizing a pantheon of historical personages by ventriloquizing oratory in their distinctive voice and cadence.) The Lindbergh Presidency, the threats to American Jewry, the country's brief flirtation with dictatorship all strike the reader as eminently possible and frighteningly real. So much so that The Plot Against America compares to Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here--the title that has become a veritable synecdoche for the threat of American Fascism--as would a documentary to the cartoon farce of a trenchant episode of The Simpsons.

The Plot Against America achieves its illusion of verisimilitude, first, through Roth's autobiographical conceit. The novel poses as a poignant memoir of a traumatic and formative moment both in the author's life and his country's history, much in the way Operation Shylock disguised itself as his antic confession of a Halcyon-induced schizophrenic episode.

Secondly, Roth's American garrison state is grounded firmly in native soil. Unlike the Windrip putsch in It Can't Happen Here, Roth's Lindbergh scenario accounts for the genuine obstacles the nation's Constitutional protections, pluralist heritage, and democratic creed would present to nascent tyranny. It also builds upon our democratic tradition's notorious and shameful exceptions: the lynching of blacks; the internment of Japanese-Americans; the Red Scare, witch-hunts, and blacklists; the Pinkertons; the FBI's COINTELPRO abuses; Jim Crow; the Kennedy assassinations; the Huey Long-style demagogue; the Alien and Sedition Act; Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus; fringe group bombings from Hay Market Square to Oklahoma; and armed uprisings from the Whiskey Rebellion to Ruby Ridge and Waco. But above all, the Lindbergh Presidency haunts because it taps a durable paranoid undercurrent in American politics, visible even today.

III

That Roth has chosen to implicate himself and to exploit his biography in particular is significant for a few reasons. The novel's autobiographical facade, at its most basic, aids the reader's suspension of disbelief. It creates history imagined under the pretense of re-creating history remembered, with the implicit authority of Roth the autobiographer--that of any memoirist over his subject--enshrouding Roth the historian. Second, The Plot's "Philip Roth" character evokes a rich subtext of irony and resonance, drawing on the author's controversial public persona and literary essays, in a way that Zuckerman and Kepesh--the novelist's two other recurring protagonists--cannot. The Plot Against America recalls Operation Shylock in this respect. There, a Philip Roth impostor embodied everything the genuine article wasn't and animated the latter, a cipher in comparison, by bringing him into sharper relief.

So, too, The Plot Against America--read against The Facts, the author's authentic autobiography--projects a mirror image of the author and his childhood. And the inversion it reflects, this time, not just of Roth but of his family and his country, emphasizes that pluralistic landscape's contingency and tenuousness and dramatizes the author's signal leitmotif of late: that Americans cannot escape history; our Romantic illusions--the shibboleth that we alone, individually and collectively, determine our destiny--notwithstanding.

Only The Plot steeps this theme still deeper in tragedy. Here, "the terror of the unforeseen ... [that which] the science of history hides, turning disaster into epic" requires no great act of hubris as improvident as foreswearing one's heritage or jettisoning one's identity to unleash its full fury: as do the Swede in American Pastoral: Ira Ringold in I Married A Communist; and Coleman Silk in The Human Stain. The Roths of The Plot don't invite their misery. To the contrary,

      what they were was what they couldn't get rid of. Their being Jews
      issued from being themselves, as did their being American. It was,
      in the nature of things, as fundamental as having arteries and
      veins, and they never manifested the slightest desire to change or
      to deny it, regardless of the consequences.

In fact, the Roths' best laid plans--along with their industry, providence, respectability, and patriotism--are entirely beside the point. All it takes is the mere inauspicious outcome of a watershed Presidential election to upend their idyll and alter their lives irrevocably. Suddenly, Philip's father is no longer the "indestructible bulwark"; nor his mother, the pampering housewife and "Jewish Florence Nightingale"; nor the Jewish family "an inviolate haven against every form of menace from personal isolation to gentile hostility." No longer is Weequahic "as safe and peaceable as his rural community would have been for an Indiana farm boy". Nor is "growing up Jewish and growing up American ... indistinguishable" or this country [undoubtedly Roth's] homeland" or the author's "beginnings ... a pastoral, allowing little room for inner turmoil." No, if the child is father to the man, the Roth who muses in The Plot Against America "I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn't been president or if I hadn't been the offspring of Jews" is hard to envision years hence as the acclaimed Jewish provocateur Cynthia Ozick once anointed the country's bravest writer.

And herein lies much of the novel's piquant meta-irony. After all, this "frightened boy," harassed because he's Jewish, bears the namesake of the literary enfant terrible whose early stories certain hysterical rabbis, paranoid critics, and pious activists once fantasized as posing the very danger to Jews the Lindbergh Presidency in The Plot actually constitutes. For example, following the author's publication of Portnoy's Complaint, no less respected an authority than the eminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem warned,

        The fact is that the hero of a best-seller, avidly acquired by
      the public, proclaimed (and lives his proclamation) that his
      behavior is shaped by a single lust which becomes the slogan of
      his life: to get 'shiksa cunt' ... I daresay that with the turn
      of the century, this book will make all of us [Jews] defendants
      at court. This book will be quoted to us--and how it will be
      quoted! They will say to us: Here you have testimony from one of
      your own artists ... an authentic Jewish witness ...
        I wonder what price k'lal yisrael [the world Jewish community]--
      and there is such an entity in the eyes of the Gentiles--is going
      to pay for this book. Woe unto us in the day of reckoning.

In retrospect, this kind of shrill hysteria would be comical were it no so pathetic. The response these broadsides necessitated, however, inspired Roth's subsequent work--as he himself concedes--and indeed sheds light on The Plot. To a rabbi's related charge that his stories endanger Jews as would shouting "Fire" in a crowded theatre, Roth answers,

      The crowded theatre has absolutely no relevance to the situation
      of the Jew in America today. It is a grandiose delusion ... If
      the barrier between prejudice and persecution collapsed in
      Germany, this is hardly reason to contend that no such barrier
      exists in our country. For those Jews who choose to continue to
      call themselves Jews, and find reason to do so, there are courses
      to follow to prevent it from ever being 1933 again that are more
      direct, reasonable, and dignified than beginning to act as though
      it already is 1933--or as though it always is. The death of all
      those Jews has taught ... the rabbi ... nothing other than how to
      remain a victim in a country where he does not have to live like
      one if he chooses. ('Writing About Jews'")

Among the ways to interpret The Plot Against America, then, is as an imaginative realization of how the metaphorical 1933 of the rabbi's delusions might appear; or alternatively, as an instructive fable about the political conditions which would have had to prevail in America for Roth's early stories to have been recklessly provocative, let alone dangerous.

Then, there's the added irony that in The Plot Against America, the Roths' great nemesis turns out to be an obtuse rabbi who also fancies himself a defender of the faith--Bengelsdorf, the Jewish apologist, who "koshers Lindbergh for the goyim." If Bengelsdorf's prescriptions for American Jewry sound a note diametrically opposite to Roth's real-life critics, they suffer from an equivalent myopia. Rabbi Bengelsdorf condemns Jews like the Roths of Weequahic for their insular clannishness; "their dwelling apart, a pariah community separated from all the rest;" their decision--as Roth in "Writing About Jews" puts it--to "remain victims in a country where they do have to live as such if they choose." Yet in Lindbergh's America when the pogroms erupt, the only Jews spared violence are precisely those who live in so-called "ghettoes" like Weequahic because there they wield sufficient political clout and prestige to compel local political officials to secure them heightened police protection.

All of which underscores two verities to which Roth's work time and again returns--verities which transcend the vagaries of politics. As The Plot's narrator encapsulates them, "[I had not] understood till then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others [and] the petty corruptions that proliferate wherever people compete for even the tiniest advantages of rank."

IV

The second pillar of The Plot's terrifying realism is its firm foundation in the darker atavistic regions of the American imagination. President Lindbergh and his administration's ethos--the heartland isolationism; rugged frontier individualism; plain-spoken, agrarian folk idolatry; anti-intellectualism; New Deal animus; the conspiracy-mongering and related anti-Semitism--comes straight out of our Romantic populist heritage. Historian Richard Hofstadter has denoted its peculiar constellation of motifs, illusions, attitudes, and ideas "the agrarian myth"; its obscurantist offshoot, "the paranoid style." (Sociologist Daniel Bell's rubric "the populist style" covers similar terrain.) In fact, Hoftstadter's work numbers among the sources Roth cites in the novel's postscript.

The mythology goes back to the nation's original self-image as a New World Arcadia, free from Europe's decadence, hierarchy, oppression, and interminable war; a pristine tabula rasa upon which the democratic everyman could write his destiny. Whatever truth this idealized self-conception may have captured during Jefferson and Jackson's time, no longer obtained however by the 19th century's end. Industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and the dislocations of civil war spawned a diverse, multifarious, organization-based commonweal. Meanwhile, the prosperity and accompanying worldliness modernity brought eroded the nation's insularity and self-sufficiency and initiated it into the complex, interdependent, incorrigibly anarchic international system. If the U.S. stood a City on a Hill, removed from the Old World's iniquity, it did so in ideal alone.

Still, this disorienting change and loss whetted a compensatory nostalgia for the old, simple, self-directed agrarian order--a longing upon which Populism seized and later, even as the movement dissolved, implanted as permanent symbols in the national consciousness. Its romantic pastoral influences both our politics and letters to this day. Literary critic Alfred Kazin writes in On Native Grounds, "Populism represented the slow groping into a new world, the [nation's] persistent groping for a world no one ever really possessed ... that was to become so characteristic of American literature for years to come." And indeed one can trace the moral force that utopian lineage carries from Thoreau, Melville, and Twain through Faulkner, and even to ironic effect, in Roth's own American Pastoral. But if nostalgia for the old, agrarian golden age has fertilized the literary mind, its sentimentality has left our politics with a paranoid, obscurantist, and latently anti-Semitic undercurrent and an entrenched conspiratorial worldview. Richard Hofstadter explains,

      Populist thought often carried one into a world in which simple
      virtues and unmitigated villainies of a rural melodrama have been
      projected on a national and even international stage ... That
      there is some great but essentially very simple struggle at the
      heart of which lies some single conspiratorial force whether it
      be the Catholic Church, big business, corrupt politicians, or the
      Communist party.

A construct which has informed the ranting of figures and groups spanning the political and ideological spectrum since the Populists first inveighed against a conspiracy of Wall Street, the Bank of England, and Jewish financiers to manipulate the U.S.'s money supply. The delusion's basic features, mutatis mutandis, recur in Henry Ford's canards about Jewish

profiteers orchestrating World War I; Catholic radio crusader Father Coughlin's Depression-era diatribes against international Jewish cabals; and of course, Charles Lindbergh and his America First movement's related fantasy that the British, Jewish, and Roosevelt intellectuals were pushing the U.S. into World War II. The last serves as the imaginative seed from which The Plot Against America germinates and which President Lindbergh's paranoid Weltanschauung enacts. Paradoxically, it's also the democratic, Jeffersonian core to that romantic tradition which, unlike its German and Italian counterparts, ultimately, keeps Lindbergh's America out of the Fascist abyss.

V

Roth has cautioned against interpreting The Plot Against America as some thinly veiled fable about our current Zeitgeist. In a rare article about his novel's intents and inspiration--a subject about which years of pious censure, understandably, has made Roth even more coy and evasive than the typical novelist--he writes,

      Some readers are going to want to take this book as a roman a
      clef to the present moment in America. That would be a mistake. I
      set out to do exactly what I've done: reconstruct the years
      1940-2 as they might have been if Lindbergh, instead of
      Roosevelt, had been elected president in the 1940 election. I am
      not pretending to be interested in those two years--I am
      interested in those two years ... Kafka's books played a strong
      role in the imagination of Czech writers who were opposing the
      Russians' puppet government in Communist Czechoslovakia in the
      1960's and 1970's ... Obviously, it wasn't to inspire those
      future writers or to intimidate their future rulers that Kafka
      wrote "The Trial" and "The Castle." (The New York Times Book
      Review, September 19, 2004)

All true. But as Roth surely knows, great fiction withstands the test of time precisely because it carries contemporary currency regardless of the era. And the enduring conspiratorial tradition from which Lindbergh's anti-Semitism emanates accounts for a few disturbing modern-day parallels.

As, for example, during the prelude to Desert Storm in 1991, when Patrick Buchanan, echoing Charles Lindbergh, perpetuated the canard that "the two principal groups beating the drums for war were the Israeli Defense Ministry and their Amen corner in Washington." The columnist-candidate even resurrected "America First" as his Presidential campaign's rallying cry; castigating "Goldman Sachs" bankers for financing the war but not fighting in it. Indeed, "Pitchfork" Pat eventually triumphed over President Bush I in New Hampshire's Republican primary, in part, because of the appeal of his xenophobic, chauvinist message.

Or witness, a decade later, the Jew-fixation Al-Qaeda's strike on the World Trade Center and Pentagon awakened. New Jersey's pan-African poet laureate Amiri Bakara (who appeared briefly as a street prophet in Warren Beatty's Bulworth) accused Israel of complicity in the attacks. Radio sports personality, Mike Francesa, icon of New York City's working-class, opined that the day would soon arrive when American Jewry would have to declare their loyalty to Israel or to the U.S. Celebrated essayist Joan Didion mused in the pages of perhaps the country's preeminent liberal periodical. The New York Review of Books, that on September 11th, the U.S.'s Israel-leveraged foreign policy "came home".

President Bush II's subsequent war with Iraq only seemed to cast the phantom Jewish menace across a wider and more salient stage. Virginia Congressman James Moran declared that "were it not for the Jewish community's strong support for war" we wouldn't have invaded Iraq; South Carolina Senator Ernest Hollings seconded the notion. And populist Everyman and video muckraker, Michael Moore, in front of a sympathetic British audience attributed the war to "The oil companies, Israel, Halliburton ... all part of the same ball of wax, right?" Meanwhile Ralph Nader, Moore's erstwhile political icon, campaigned for President claiming Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is "Bush's puppeteer." These widespread anti-Semitic undertones prompted New York Times editor Bill Keller in a March 8 Op-Ed to write

      Maybe we're all a little too desperate these days for a simple
      formula to explain how our safe world came unhinged. That, as
      much as anything, may explain one of the more enduring conspiracy
      theories of the moment, the notion that we are about to send a
      quarter of a million soldiers to war for the sake of Israel ...
      The idea that this war is about Israel is persistent and more
      widely held than you may think.

VI

So then, are Jews in the U.S. threatened by anything like the pogroms and anti-Semitic paranoia The Plot Against America conjures? No, of course not. But what it does imply is that Roth again has succeeded in continuing the project he began with Goodbye, Columbus. He has revealed a more ambiguous, complex and contradictory understanding of America and its Jews than their boosters often have cared to see and which his detractors, whether accusing him of hatred for his people or condescension for his country, never fail to miss. For Roth loves his Jews and his America in both their noblest strengths and their basest foibles. And his fiction's stark, hard-headed critical truth is the better part of that love; a love in the grandest tradition, at once, of the Jewish sages and of the American solitary--that single, incisive, eloquent "majority of one" and Thoreauvian voice of dissent.

      For good or bad, the exalted egoism of an Abe Steinem or an Uncle
      Monty or a Rabbi Bengelsdorf--conspicuously dynamic Jews all
      seemingly propelled by their embattled status as the offspring of
      green-horns to play the biggest role they could commandeer as
      American men ... There were the bosses and there were the bossed,
      and the bosses usually were bosses for a reason and in business
      for themselves for a reason, whether that business was
      construction or produce or the rabbinate or the rackets ... It
      was the best they could come up with to remain unobstructed--and
      in their own eyes unhumiliated--not least by the ... Protestant
      hierarchy that kept ninety-nine percent of the Jews employed by
      the dominant corporation uncomplainingly in their place ...
      (emphasis added)

It was the best these machers could come up with. It was the best that Roth himself could come up with. And for those secular American Jews--Jewish because American; America because Jewish--who have so viscerally identified with Roth's work over the years, the best we may, in the end, hope to come up with as well.