Family and Home Theme Analysis

Philip Roth chose to set The Plot Against America in his hometown of Newark—and to use the real names and, to some extent, biographies of his family members as he drew the characters who would populate the novel, installing a younger version of himself as the book’s narrator and protagonist. In doing so, Roth examines an environment he knows intimately as he shows how the Roth family navigates a time of great social, political, and emotional turbulence. By investigating how the Roth family is placed under intense pressure by the uncertainty of wartime and the looming specter of anti-Semitism, Roth ultimately argues that “a family is both peace and war”—in other words, the members of a family unit can act as one another’s most important allies or most devastating enemies.

Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America consists of an alternate history not just of 1940s America, but of his own family. Roth uses the journeys of three major characters to show how members of a single family might grow to resent one another or even betray one another in times of intense uncertainty or under extreme duress. The first major character to struggle with betrayal and resentment of and toward his family is Alvin, the Roths’ “ward” and the orphaned son of Herman’s older brother. Alvin, an older teenager, flees to Canada shortly after Lindbergh’s election to fight for the British in Europe—but just a few months into his service, he loses a leg in battle and is sent home. Alvin is emaciated, broken, and alone in figuring out how to move through the world on his new prosthetic leg while contending with a stump that constantly “breaks down,” leaving him vulnerable to wounds and infections. As the months and years go by, Alvin becomes a gangster and moves to Philadelphia, which enrages Herman and leads to horrible emotional and physical fighting between them, even as they should come together in sorrow and solidarity as Lindbergh’s administration tightens its grip on the American Jews. Alvin’s journey is significant in many ways. The Roths are, at the start of the novel, a safe harbor for Alvin—they represent “peace” in the wake of his parents’ deaths, and though he resents his own losses, he more or less fits in. After defying Herman and running away to Canada only to return permanently disabled, Alvin resents Herman more directly and even claims that Herman is the one who pushed him into joining up with his endless rants against Lindbergh. Alvin seeks to defy his family and make “war” with them even in a turbulent time—he destroys the safe haven of home and chooses a series of difficult paths which alienate him from his family. His failures to make a difference in the war against Germany result in his waging war against his own family.

The second major character to betray his family’s love and values is Sandy, Philip’s older brother. Sandy’s early fascination with Lindbergh signals that he feels different from the rest of his family—rather than being repulsed by Lindbergh’s anti-Semitic speeches and coziness with Hitler himself, Sandy admires Lindbergh’s feats as an aviator and keeps secret drawings of him beneath his bed. Sandy enrolls in the Just Folks program and spends a summer living in Kentucky with a Gentile family—when he returns, he speaks with an accent and dreams of leaving his family behind and returning to the heartland of America. Sandy alienates himself not just from his family by referring to Jews as “you people” or “you Jews” and suggesting that he himself is not a Jew any longer. Sandy’s betrayal is rooted in an exhaustion with the burdens of being Jewish in America—and thus the burden of being considered the other in America. Sandy admires Lindbergh and dreams of a simpler life not marked by any difference from the rest of his country. He is lulled by the idea of simplicity and social ease—so much so that he seeks to turn his family upside down and go to “war” with his parents, just as Alvin does, over his identity, his choices, and his hopes for the future.

Evelyn, Bess’s sister and Sandy and Philip’s aunt, is the third major character who wages war against her family. When Evelyn becomes engaged—and later married—to the controversial Rabbi Bengelsdorf, Bess and Herman are perturbed but not angry. As Evelyn’s behavior continues to change, however, and as she accompanies her new husband to a state dinner hosting Hitler’s minister for foreign affairs, her family becomes incapable of supporting her choices any longer. Sandy and Philip remain drawn to Aunt Evelyn and her glamorous lifestyle—but by the end of the novel, after Lindbergh disappears and Bengelsdorf is taken into FBI custody, Evelyn is more alone and isolated from her family than ever before. She insists that Bengelsdorf knew of a Nazi conspiracy to install Lindbergh to the presidency as a puppet leader by blackmailing him with his stolen son, Charles Jr.—presumed dead in the 1930s but in fact alive and well, touted as a poster child of Aryan superiority in Nazi Germany. Evelyn is deemed crazy by most of her family, and the rifts she has created are impossible to mend. Evelyn essentially sells out her identity and her religion—and thus, by extension, her family and its values—for access to wealth and power. She fraternizes with Nazis, knowing all the while the truth of what is happening to America and the dark bargain Lindbergh has made. Evelyn resents her family’s ordinariness and longs for more, and she betrays them (and indeed herself) in pursuit of it. Roth shows how Evelyn wages war on her family much like Sandy does, by forgetting where she has come from and prioritizing an erasure of the otherness her Jewishness represents over the values in which she was raised.

By suggesting that a family can be either a source of peace or war, Roth argues that in complicated times, family members have only one another to cling to. By the same token, however, he also suggests that families can find that the influences of the outside world—especially a turbulent or dangerous one—often exacerbate and heighten the small, everyday “wars” that comprise life within a family unit, making harmony and togetherness in the face of danger all the more difficult.