Five years after his death, Philip Roth’s concern for the state of American democracy lives on, evidenced during a sprawling celebration and debate of the writer’s legacy on what would have been his 90th birthday.
Dozens of actors, authors and academics descended on Newark, the multicultural industrial city neighboring New York where Roth was born and raised, for a three-day Roth-fest bringing stagings and readings of his work to hundreds of spectators.
Born March 19, 1933 to a middle-class Jewish family, Roth died on May 22, 2018, leaving behind a storied, much-discussed and sometimes controversial career.
Roth often receives credit for predicting the dark chaos of Donald Trump’s presidency with his 2004 novel “The Plot Against America,” which jumped in popularity once again following the Republican’s election, and was adapted into an HBO limited series put out in 2020.
Told through the eyes of a Jewish family living in Newark, the alternate history paints a version of America that gives in to its extremist and anti-Semitic vices, with Jews deported to the Midwest and fleeing to Canada.
A year-and-a-half before Roth’s death, “I remember I got an email from him, just after Trump got elected saying ‘Yes, he will suspend the Constitution,” recalled historian Sean Wilentz during the “Philip Roth Unbound” festival, held in partnership with the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.
– ‘Historical consciousness’ –
Philip Gourevitch, a New Yorker writer, said however that Roth insisted in the wake of Trump’s victory that he had not foretold it.
“He was very clear about, like that sense of… ‘here is the unforeseen with Trump,’ said Gourevitch, “even though of course, he had written a roadmap to it in some way.”
As early as 2017 Roth denied a parallel between his novel and the course of Trump, calling the 45th president “a massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac.”
In comparison, Charles Lindbergh — an aviator with pro-Nazi leanings, who in Roth’s book defeats Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 — “may have been a genuine racist and an anti-Semite and a white supremacist sympathetic to fascism, but he was also… an authentic American hero.”
In “The Plot Against America” as well as in his novels “American Pastoral” and “I Married a Communist,” Roth, armed with a “historical consciousness,” expressed “concern about the fragility of our democracy,” said publishing editor Cary Goldstein, who co-produced the festival.
These concerns are as relevant today as they were then, festival organizers said — a notion indicated by the packed crowds at events including a five-hour minimalist staging of the “Plot Against America,” with actors including Cynthia Nixon and Tony Shalhoub — respectively of “Sex and the City” and “Mrs Maisel” fame.
For the author Francine Prose, Roth’s powerful description of the insidious fear in Jewish Americans shows the “recurring…
