Posted by:
Nightingale
(
)
Date: January 03, 2020 03:19PM
Brother Of Jerry Wrote:
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> And the quote wasn't even off topic.
Oh, how funny. Your observation led me to realize that I had taken it as off topic (and political), due largely, I suspect, to the book title. But on a re-read, after seeing your comment, I can see how the quote could pertain also to religious leaders, like, oh, say, the Q12.
> I have no
> idea what the book is about, and unfortunately my
> reading list is long enough, that I likely will
> never get to it. Pity.
Here is the intro of an enticing synopsis in The New Yorker (by Richard Brody, Feb 1, 2017):
"Philip Roth’s novel “The Plot Against America” is a masterwork of counterfactual history, a what-if story in which Charles Lindbergh, the aviation hero and Nazi sympathizer, is elected President in 1940, leading to the widespread persecution of Jews in the United States. The novel is also a counterfactual masterwork of personal history. (Judith Thurman recently interviewed Roth about it in The New Yorker.) It’s not one of Roth’s Zuckerman novels or one of his Kepesh novels; it’s a Roth novel, composed as if it were an autobiographical tale, written by the adult Philip Roth about the child Philip Roth and his family—endowed with their real-life names, his parents, Herman and Bess, and his brother, Sandy—and set in Newark’s Weequahic neighborhood, where the novelist was, in fact, raised.
"The Philip of the story is born, like the real-life novelist, in 1933. Soon after Lindbergh takes office, federal policies are implemented to disperse Jews from urban communities and into the American “heartland,” and, in turn, to move non-Jews into Jewish neighborhoods. Philip’s father, Herman, is a staunch opponent of Lindbergh who’s horrified by the country’s turn; Philip’s brother, Sandy, sent to rural Kentucky for the summer as part of a federal program, has become an enthusiast for farm life among Gentiles; his older cousin, Alvin, joins the Canadian Army to fight with the British in Europe; and Philip’s aunt, marrying a collaborationist rabbi, glories in her presence at Lindbergh’s state dinner in honor of the Nazi Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop. As anti-Semitic pressure mounts, neighbors plan to emigrate to Canada, and Philip’s own parents consider doing the same. The leading journalistic critic of Lindbergh, the gossip columnist Walter Winchell (who was, in fact, Jewish), is assassinated, and American anti-Semites launch a wave of pogroms against American Jews that moves from the smashing of store windows and the burning of synagogues to murder."
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-frightening-lessons-of-philip-roths-the-plot-against-america