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Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf
Bess’s sister Evelyn and Philip and Sandy’s aunt is a flighty, easily-influenced woman whose long string of affairs with married men have left her, by the start of the novel, desperate for legitimate companionship. When Aunt Evelyn goes to work in the Office of American Absorption as Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf’s secretary, Evelyn quickly begins an affair with the man—soon, the two are engaged. Evelyn, like Bengelsdorf, is drawn to security and power. Over the course of the novel, Herman and Bess look on helplessly as Evelyn sacrifices solidarity with her Jewish community in order to hobnob with the wealthy and powerful through her fiancé’s (and later husband’s) connections. When Evelyn and Bengelsdorf attend a White House dinner honoring a high-ranking Nazi official, Herman draws the line, ordering Evelyn to stay out of their family’s life forever. Evelyn’s influence on the impressionable young Sandy, however, is immense, and Sandy essentially becomes a mouthpiece within the Roth household for Evelyn and Bengelsdorf’s political rhetoric. Aunt Evelyn detests Jewish people who are “afraid of their own shadow”—she feels that American Jews have nothing to be frightened of. Over the course of the novel, her belief in the truth of Jewish liberation in America turns from a hopeful fallacy to willful, deadly ignorance. By the end of the novel, the “crazed” Aunt Evelyn is on the run from the FBI, believing that they want to arrest her just as they have arrested Bengelsdorf for their knowledge of the true conspiracy behind Lindbergh’s presidency. Whether Bengelsdorf and Evelyn’s story is true is never revealed, yet it is evident that both of them believe it. Aunt Evelyn’s sacrifices of herself and her values serve as a cautionary tale against abandoning one’s background, one’s family, and one’s capacity for canniness and skepticism. Roth uses Evelyn to assert that, unfortunately, Jewish Americans must often be afraid of their own shadow since anti-Semitism is so profound and so ingrained into American society.
Aunt Evelyn Quotes in The Plot Against America
The The Plot Against America quotes below are all either spoken by Aunt Evelyn or refer to Aunt Evelyn. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 3
Quotes
“The Jews of America […] are unlike any other community of Jews in the history of the world. […] The Jews of America can participate fully in the national life of their country. They need no longer dwell apart, a pariah community separated from the rest.”
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Chapter 4
Quotes
“Alvin can’t bear your president,” my father replied, “that’s why he went to Canada. Not so long ago you couldn’t bear the man either. But now this anti-Semite is your friend. The Depression is over, all you rich Jews tell me, and thanks not to Roosevelt but to Mr. Lindbergh. The stock market is up, profits are up, business is booming—and why? Because we have Lindbergh’s peace instead of Roosevelt’s war.”
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Chapter 5
Quotes
My brother had discovered in himself the uncommon gift to be somebody, and so while making speeches praising President Lindbergh and while exhibiting his drawings of him and while publicly extolling (in words written by Aunt Evelyn) the enriching benefits of his eight weeks as a Jewish farm hand in the Gentile heartland—while doing, if the truth be known, what I wouldn’t have minded doing myself, by doing what was normal and patriotic all over America and aberrant and freakish only in his home—Sandy was having the time of his life.
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Chapter 9
Quotes
This was how Seldon came to live with us. After their safe return to Newark from Kentucky, Sandy moved into the sun parlor and Seldon took over where Alvin and Aunt Evelyn had left off—as the person in the twin bed next to mine shattered by the malicious indignities of Lindbergh’s America. There was no stump for me to care for this time. The boy himself was the stump, and until he was taken to live with his mother’s married sister in Brooklyn ten months later, I was the prosthesis.
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Aunt Evelyn Quotes in The Plot Against America
The The Plot Against America quotes below are all either spoken by Aunt Evelyn or refer to Aunt Evelyn. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 3
Quotes
“The Jews of America […] are unlike any other community of Jews in the history of the world. […] The Jews of America can participate fully in the national life of their country. They need no longer dwell apart, a pariah community separated from the rest.”
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Chapter 4
Quotes
“Alvin can’t bear your president,” my father replied, “that’s why he went to Canada. Not so long ago you couldn’t bear the man either. But now this anti-Semite is your friend. The Depression is over, all you rich Jews tell me, and thanks not to Roosevelt but to Mr. Lindbergh. The stock market is up, profits are up, business is booming—and why? Because we have Lindbergh’s peace instead of Roosevelt’s war.”
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Chapter 5
Quotes
My brother had discovered in himself the uncommon gift to be somebody, and so while making speeches praising President Lindbergh and while exhibiting his drawings of him and while publicly extolling (in words written by Aunt Evelyn) the enriching benefits of his eight weeks as a Jewish farm hand in the Gentile heartland—while doing, if the truth be known, what I wouldn’t have minded doing myself, by doing what was normal and patriotic all over America and aberrant and freakish only in his home—Sandy was having the time of his life.
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Chapter 9
Quotes
This was how Seldon came to live with us. After their safe return to Newark from Kentucky, Sandy moved into the sun parlor and Seldon took over where Alvin and Aunt Evelyn had left off—as the person in the twin bed next to mine shattered by the malicious indignities of Lindbergh’s America. There was no stump for me to care for this time. The boy himself was the stump, and until he was taken to live with his mother’s married sister in Brooklyn ten months later, I was the prosthesis.
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