Dania Khandaker:
Good evening, good afternoon, and good morning to the more than 800 Brandeis alumni, parents, Brandeis National Committee members, and friends who registered for this event across geographies and time zones. Today's event is being co-sponsored by the Brandeis National Committee and the Brandeis University Alumni Association. My name is Dania Khandaker. I'm the staff here at Brandeis National Committee. Before I introduce our speaker, I want to share a few housekeeping items. This event is being recorded and can be viewed at a later time in our virtual events library on the Brandeis website. There are a lot of exciting virtual events taking place throughout the fall from Brandeis, so please be sure to check your email for the weekly virtual programming e-newsletter and on our social media.
Dania Khandaker:
Lastly, we encourage you to send us questions using the question and answer button at the bottom of your screen. We will leave time at the end of the talk to address some of your questions. Without further ado, it is our absolute pleasure to introduce our speaker today, Billy Flesch, professor of English at Brandeis. Professor Flesch received his BA from Yale and his masters and PhD from Cornell University. In the Brandeis tradition of interdisciplinary coursework, Professor Flesch is a member of three academic departments; comparative literature, medieval and renaissance studies, and English The courses he teaches include introduction to literary method, Victorian poetry, classic Hollywood cinema, romanticism, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, and of course Shakespeare.
Dania Khandaker:
He's a recipient of two Brandeis teaching awards, the Michael L. Waltzer Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Lerman-Neubauer Prize for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring. We are excited that he's able to join us here today, and we look forward to learning from him. Welcome Professor Flesch.
Billy Flesch:
Thank you. It's my turn.
Dania Khandaker:
Yes.
Billy Flesch:
Okay. Hello Mr. and Miss Brandeis and all the chefs in DC. I know you're all laughing. Even though you can't hear each other, I hear just a big swell of laughter which is great, and you see my little joke there Adam Schiff and my little illusion here to Walter Winchell. If you've read the book or if you've watched the series, and those are two different things, you'll know how important the fictional Walter Winchell is to what's going on. I also have to say that Dania is frozen. Can you text me if you're hearing me, Dania?
Dania Khandaker:
Yes, Professor Flesch, we can hear you.
Billy Flesch:
Okay, good. All right.
Dania Khandaker:
Go ahead.
Billy Flesch:
I just wanted to be sure and oh, so should I be talking louder does that mean?
Dania Khandaker:
No, I think you're good.
Billy Flesch:
Okay, good. Also, if some of you ever took a class from me, you'll know that I usually dress up in bespoke suit and in cravat, but for today, I decided to wear this very old T-shirt. The one problem with it is that I sometimes notice it, and I see the T-R-U-M at the bottom for the vice presidential candidate. It takes me a while to realize that it's Truman and not someone else whose name begins with T-R-U-M. Behind me is if you have the book of The Plot Against America, at least the original hardcover, you will know that that is at the back of the book, and it is Yosemite on one of the stamps that young Philip has collected. Yosemite was a park founded by Theodore Roosevelt, the other R, the other Roosevelt.
Billy Flesch:
Philips being a stamp collector is an interesting thing about him and an important part of the plot. It's part of what makes the plot of The Plot Against America, the plot in The Plot Against America work. I also wanted to point out, I'm actually going to start screen sharing now because we're going to be looking at various passages that... How'd that go there? Oh, that today is the anniversary of the Munich accord of 1938. In real life and also in the book, The Plot Against America, Chamberlain and Hitler came to an accord which will be echoed in the book as the Iceland accords between Lindbergh and Hitler, and that was September 30th, 1938.
Billy Flesch:
That was 82 years ago and it is mentioned in the book if Herman Roth is explaining to Sandy what it is that he doesn't like about Lindbergh and about Lindbergh's presidency, and the fact that von Ribbentrop will go to a party at the White House. He says, "The friends of von Ribbentrop are no friends of ours." Every dirty scheme that Hitler has foisted on Europe, every filthy lies he's told other countries has come through the mouth of Mr. von Ribbentrop. Someday you'll study what happened at Munich. You'll study the role that Mr. von Ribbentrop played into tricking Mr. Chamberlain into signing the Munich accords. One of the things that the TV series,
Billy Flesch:
which in a lot of ways is faithful to the book and in a lot of ways isn't, and if you want to know more about that, if you want to know the thinking of Simon and Burns, there is a really good podcast that Simon made when HBO was dropping the show episode by episode. There was a podcast about each episode, and that's full of really interesting information and definitely worth listening to, but one of the things that they are doing in the TV show is updating what is essentially a book most relevant to the Bush presidency to W's presidency.
Billy Flesch:
They are updating it to make it relevant to President Trump's presidency, and part of that update, although it's not a part of what we can see maybe in the background of that update, is that Lindbergh is his relation to Hitler might be thought of something like Trump's relation to Putin, that is that the idea of an alliance or of a junior senior partnership going against what you would expect as a junior, senior partnership, that's part of the relevance at least of the HBO series for The Plot Against America. In 2003, when Roth was writing the book and in 2004, when the book is published, but Roth is thinking about W, thinking about Bush, not Trump.
Billy Flesch:
Trump now is a cloud no bigger than a person's hand, and one reason of many, one thing about Roth as a writer is that he's an amazingly lucky writer, but that's what genius does, is it finds luck where it needs it, and all the real history goes so well with the made up structure that he's coming up with that he can really put this book together in a fantastically great way. In his version of the story, Lindbergh who was a fascist sympathizer, Nazi sympathizer, was anti-Semitic, was also a pilot.
Billy Flesch:
When Bush did his mission accomplished stunt on May 1st of 2003, there was a way in which Bush was channeling Lindbergh, that is the heroic pilot and looking very dashing, looking very charismatic, and that then makes it obvious how you can link what's going on in America in 2003 to America in 1940 and 1941 and 1942. The very recent updating of this was in the Wall Street Journal and other places earlier this week, which is when as I'm sure a lot of you know, Michael Caputo had a freak out and did a Facebook video which was taken down very quickly, but it was a Facebook video which warned of the plot against the president. That would be president not Truman, but Trump and Truman was the vice president who became president.
Billy Flesch:
Some of you may remember that Lyndon Johnson was vice president who became president so as George HW Bush. Who knows if that will ever happen again, an ex-vice president becoming president, but here there is a plot against the president, and then there's an apology for that. The title of the book, The Plot Against America is a title which is interestingly ambiguous and says something about the way political struggle works, especially there's the famous line that war is politics by other means. Politics is also war by other means, and part of that the way that war or that politicking or that attempt to claim the high ground, which is a military idea claiming the high ground takes place is to accuse the other side of what the other side wants to accuse you of.
Billy Flesch:
Roth gets this. In The Plot Against America, the phrase, it's always a joy when you're reading a book to come upon the phrase that gives it its title, but that actual phrase, The Plot Against America appears twice. It is used once as the plot against Lindbergh and his administration against Burton Wheeler, and then used another time earlier as The Plot Against America that Lindbergh is fomenting. It's the fascist plot against America according to FDR, or it's the insurrectionary plot against the administration according to Burton Wheeler. The title itself what The Plot Against America is, we don't quite know, but there is one. It is something that both sides are claiming the other side is involved in.
Billy Flesch:
There's the fascist plot against America. There's the Jewish plot against America to go to Burton Wheeler's phrase in the book. That's part of what the political interest of the book is about, but it is, and I'm going to be talking mostly about the book. If there's time, I'm going to show you a clip and compare it from the series and compare it to a moment in the book. The differences are very interesting. One of the things that David Simon says in the podcast is that Roth is not writing the kind of thing that a TV show and a TV series needs in terms of how plot develops, how plot resolves itself. They had to invent stuff, and they're going to be spoilers here. I just have to warn you, a lot of spoilers.
Billy Flesch:
Among the things they invent is they make Alvin a much more interesting... Well, no, he's really interesting in the book, that's the wrong way to put it. They make Alvin someone whose role in the world turns out to be much more important than his role in the world in the book is. In the book, he's an idealist who gets disappointed and crushed and embittered. In the movie or in the series rather, his character is the same, except he's always something of an idealist and he gets misunderstood by Herman, but we'll be looking at passages from the novel.
Billy Flesch:
The first thing that I want to say is and I hope we'll get to some of this, but to a lot of this, is that Roth is although he was intent, he said he was intent on never writing in such a way as to say I am trying to write a great novel, he is always trying to write a great novel. He always wants his aim, his ambition is to be one of the great novelists, and one way that you can see this and that's interesting are in his literary allusions to other novelists, not only American novelists, but yes to American novelists. Henry James was always really, really important to him.
Billy Flesch:
Gore Vidal in an odd way is at the back of Roth's American history series of which The Plot Against America is a counter history, but if you think of American Pastoral, or The Human Stain, or I Married a Communist, or Indignation which is about the Korean War or Nemesis which is about the plague of polio in the United States, Roth is interested in how his life and human and American history overlap, and what he could observe as Philip and what he now observes as Roth. Gore Vidal had also written a series of novels about American history starting with Burr and going all the way to the late 20th century.
Billy Flesch:
There's a way in which what Roth is doing is saying Vidal who was somewhat credibly accused of anti-Semitism, how to do it right and how to do a version of American history, which is all American and all Jewish because it's the experience of one group of people in America. One of the lines in the book is that you can be a Jew and an American, and those two things are not separate from each other, and those two things are not partial. Those two things are not in any way interfering with each other, and that that is what's really important, is about what Mayor Dinkins called the gorgeous mosaic. He's that metaphor instead of the melting pot, that America should be.
Billy Flesch:
A little bit of the book is a rebuke of Vidal and as I say, I hope we'll get back to him, more important are allusions to Kafka. One of Kafka's great themes is the theme of the father who loses power, and that's what happens in The Plot Against America, is that Herman Roth who is the compelling, self-assured, opinionated father figure finds himself more and more helpless. Roth also is alluding to Saul Bellow, and Roth said once that what was most liberating for him as a writer is the beginning of Saul Bellow's novel, The Adventures of Augie March. Here's the beginning, first sentence and it's a crucial one.
Billy Flesch:
"I am an American, Chicago born, Chicago, that somber city and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way, first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent, but a man's character is his fate says Heraclitus and in the end, there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles." Roth just loved I am an American Chicago born, that here was a Jewish novelist who begins by saying not, I am a Jew or an American Jew. Just I am an American Chicago born, but then Roth has Rabbi Bengelsdorf echo this, here where I marked it.
Billy Flesch:
"I am an American born and raised, and so I ask you how would my pain be lessened if America were now to enter the war?" This is isolationism and it is the Jewish rabbi, the kind figure that Roth expects at least some of us to hear echoing Bellow, anticipating Bellow in the timeline of the book, echoing Bellow in the time that the book is published. There's the question, if you are a minority in America, if you are a minority looked on with suspicion by, I don't know, proud boys for example, then the question is, can you both be Jewish and American? Bengelsdorf who is the villain of the book, not the atrocious villain, but the villain nevertheless, he's echoing bellow and there's an implicit question at least about Bellow's self-confidence there.
Billy Flesch:
Not only however Bellow, but also Melville. I'll give you Roth echoes Melville a lot and in particular, if you've ever read Moby Dick, you know that there are tons and tons of chapters which you should not skip of about whaling and detect the techniques and technology and industry of whaling. Many people skip them which is too bad because those chapters are hilarious, and Roth in his later books got very, very interested in the minutiae of American industry, in glove making, in butchery, in puppetry. In The Plot Against America, he gets really, really interested well in how groceries work, in butchery, and also taking off from that, in amputation, in the pathology of amputation.
Billy Flesch:
The explanations that he gives you of what happens when Alvin Stump breaks down, and he really does his research. That's something that is part of an American tradition, not a Jewish tradition, but American tradition. Dickens is also really important in Roth, important in The Plot Against America where we have so many orphans. We have Seldon the orphan, we have Alvin the orphan, we have the home for orphans and the orphan that young Philip wants to be. The last word of Melville's Moby Dick is the word orphan. The idea of orphans is a Dickensian idea, but also a Melvillion idea, is a character in Melville who has exactly the same name as a character in Dickens's great expectation.
Billy Flesch:
That's the character of Pip and Roth in his book, Operation Shylock, gives his alter ego the name Pip in Dickens. Pip is short for Philip, so that's part of Roth's luck that he could be a Pip who is a Philip, who can refer through his name can echo both Moby Dick and great expectations. He is as I say echoing Dickens here, and this is I think what is maybe most interesting are the echoes of Tolstoy. Here on page two, I took pictures of the pages so that when you get the recording or if you want to know the pages, you will see at the bottom what page they are. Here on page two, we have we were a happy family in 1940. What he is thinking of there of course is the beginning of Anna Karenina.
Billy Flesch:
All happy families are alike, first sentence of Anna Karenina. All unhappy families or each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and what that means is when you have a novel, it's always going to be about an unhappy family and not a happy family. The novel begins at the end of happiness. We were a happy family in 1940. What family is that it's the family of the Roth, the family of Hermann Roth, of Sandy Roth to whom the book is dedicate. If you look at the dedication page, which I didn't take a picture of, it's dedicated to SFR to Sandy Roth, his brother of his mother, Bess Roth. In the show, if you watch the HBO series, the last names are changed to the Levins, not the Roths and that was something that Philip Roth insisted on and insisted on it because they were not his family as he's writing.
Billy Flesch:
I think this is what makes the book so powerful and so moving. As he's writing even though what he's writing is fiction, the people in the fiction are real. Not only the famous people like FDR and Lindbergh and Burton Wheeler and Walter Winchell and people like that, not only the baseball players who are also real and the baseball scores, I checked are all accurate, but most importantly, the family members are real. What he's done is he's put, and as I said I think this is what makes the book so moving, is he has put his real family. His parents he will say later, I hope we get to this, now dead. It's 2003, it's been over a hundred years since their birth, but he is putting them in an act of filial.
Billy Flesch:
I wouldn't call it piety, but intense filial remembrance. He is bringing them back to life, not by remembering what they did, but by remembering who they were and by doing that, he is able to remember them by what they would do in the situation that he's describing. I'm sorry, I wanted to show you another Tolstoy reference. This now is 50 pages later. This is Herman Roth explaining to Alvin why not everyone is trying to escape to Canada, and he says, "They stay because they're a family." There we have it again, the family. All families go through a lot. A family is both peace and war. Again, you can see the tip of the hat, or the Easter Egg or the passover or the Afikoman.
Billy Flesch:
We shouldn't talk about an Easter Egg. We should talk about Afikoman. We should talk about the Afikoman here to war and peace. A family is both peace and war. That line, a family is both peace and war, that is Tolstoy mashed up. All happy families are alike, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. All happy families are at peace, all unhappy families are at war, and peace and war of course is war and peace. That is the thought behind the book, what makes it so moving. Not what makes it politically important, except that politics is about what happens to human beings, but what makes it moving as a novel, rather than as a historical intervention, a political intervention is just how beautifully, how movingly he describes the Roth family.
Billy Flesch:
I wanted to show you... I think oh maybe, I didn't have it. Where did I put it? I may have screwed up. Won't be the first time that happened. No, I screwed up, but maybe not as badly as I thought, or maybe as badly as I thought. Give me... Oh, here we go. I want to show you what appears across from the title page of the book, which is a list of books by Philip Roth. The way he lists those books is by category, and this is just the way that I want to make this point, that they're the Zuckerman books which are the books in which Nathan Zuckerman is the narrator, sometimes the main character, not always. The first of the Zuckerman books is actually this tetralogy, which all together are called Zuckerman bound.
Billy Flesch:
The Ghost Writer is about Anne Frank, and it's a counter history where Anne Frank has survived. Then another Zuckerman book, The Counterlife. Then the three historical books, American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain. This is what I wanted to point you to the really interesting Roth books because the Roth books include the facts and patrimony, and those are presented as straightforward memoir, what really happened to Philip Roth. Then there's a book which is obviously fiction, The Plot Against America. Then there are books that we know are fiction, but we are not 100% sure. There's a one in a million chance that Operation Shylock is not fiction.
Billy Flesch:
If you go to the very end of Operation Shylock, the main character is named Philip Roth. If you go to the end, it has the disclaimer. Everything in this book is fiction and any relation to real events is purely coincidental, but at the end of the book, Philip Roth has to sign a contract with Mossad agreeing to put that disclaimer outside of the narrative itself. The book itself says don't believe the disclaimer. In the book, Philip Roth works for the Mossad. He then has to disclaim it, and he does disclaim it, but do we believe it? In deception, Philip Roth is writing about what looks like a diary of his own adultery which gets found by the clear bloom character.
Billy Flesch:
He says, "No, it's not a diary, it's a novel." Essentially, she says, "Prove it," and he says, "Okay," and hen he publishes it as a novel. It may be that its existence as a novel is an alibi for the truth that it's telling. At any rate, there are a lot of families in the book. There is of course the Roth family, but there's also the Wishnow family and then very interestingly, look at this moment when the Roths in... Again in the series, it's the Levins are visiting Washington, and they go to Mount Vernon. As you will see, this is page 74. They go to Mount Vernon and Mr. Taylor who is this wonderful guide, one of the righteous of the nation is taking them around and explaining things. He's a tour guide.
Billy Flesch:
I will say by way of parenthesis that the Taylor is for those of you who do who don't know, Taylor is a word which sounds like Taylor with an I and Taylor with an I, that is someone who cuts and fixes clothing. The Russian word for tailor is portnoy. Here's another little Afikoman in the book that there's a kind of American allusion to portnoy. Mr. Taylor is showing Mount Vernon, and Bessy says, "Oh, this is the real house where George Washington lived and his wife Martha," Mr. Taylor reminded her, "and his two step-children whom the general doted on." Notice we then immediately get to the stamps.
Billy Flesch:
I didn't know that my younger son is Martha Washington on a stamp, but the stepchildren whom the general doted on, think of all the stepchildren, the foster children, the orphans who are taken in like Seldon in The Plot Against America. Here, just this tiny, tiny touch is Roth again reminding us of the familial relationship, the difficulties, the needs to take in the widow and the orphan to "President Lincoln", and the way all of those things go together. Washington doted on his step children, but then the other family that sees tragedy of course in The Plot Against America as in real life is the Lindberghs. The kidnapping and murder of their child in real life and in the book, that's something that they could never get over.
Billy Flesch:
It doesn't prevent them in the book, doesn't prevent Charles in the book from doing it to other people, but that's another aspect of the book. At the end, Seldon will become the stepchild or the stump for which Philip will be the prosthesis because of what Philip did, which inadvertently got Seldon's mother killed. The other thing to say about The Plot Against America to bring it back to 2003 and also to bring it back to... Oh, I say I did that twice, that's how I got it wrong, to bring it back to 2020 is that it is about being Jewish in America, but that also means or is a stand-in or a parallel or a way of describing being black in America.
Billy Flesch:
There are some complaints when the book came out that Roth was acting as though Jews in America was having as hard a time as blacks were, that the Roth family or the Levin families experienced in Washington wouldn't have happened to Jews, but would have happened to blacks. It turns out it would have happened to Jews. The hotel they tried to stay in was restricted. They probably would have been kicked out, but it's also worth noticing, remembering how much Roth is intent on making that connection. He's not trying to displace black experience with Jewish experience. It's not competitive, but it is something that he is thinking that his Jewish readership should be able to see the parallel.
Billy Flesch:
The parallel in Roth's work between the experience of blacks and the experience of Jews, that's something that he thinks about. Also, the divergence of their experience, but if you think of The Human Stain, another spoiler, there is a black person in that novel. The main character in the novel is a black man who is passing not as white so much as Jewish. He's a light-skinned black man, and he can therefore look like an olive-skinned Jewish man. Passing as a Jewish man, yes, his life is easier than if he is known to be black, but it also means that there is a reasonable overlap in not only their relation to the rest of America, but a reasonable overlap in their own experience and in being able to call upon their own experience to know what the experience of the other group is like.
Billy Flesch:
In The Plot Against America, what Philips suggests to Sandy when Sandy is doing the Arbor Day Poster, Philip has a stamp that he thinks Sandy should model it on, but he, Sandy adds a black man to the poster, a third figure in the poster, and that is again adding, alluding to, making sure that the importance of the sense of persecution that some lives don't seem to matter to those in power, but that those lives do matter too. That's something that the book is again keeping its eye on that ball, so that when Sandy goes off to Kentucky and talking about Mr. Mawhinney who's a good guy, but then here's the description, that Mr. Mawhinney could saddle a horse, drive a tractor, operate a thresher, ride a fertilizer drill, work a field as easily with the team of mules as with the team of oxen.
Billy Flesch:
He also has all this technical knowledge. He could rotate crops and manage hired men, both white and negro. He could repair tools, sharpen plow points and mowers, put up fences, string barbed wire, raise chickens, dip sheep, dehorn cattle, slaughter pigs, smoke bacon, sugar-cure ham. You can see Roth's own research into what you would have to do on a farm, and he raised watermelons that were the sweetest and juiciest sand he had ever eaten. By cultivating tobacco corn and potatoes, Mr. Mawhinney was able to make a living right out of the earth, and then at Sunday dinner where the 6-foot, 3-inch, 230-pound farmer consume more fried chicken with cream gravy than everyone else at the table combined, eat only food that he himself had raised and all my father could do was sell insurance, which their father really did do in real life.
Billy Flesch:
Then it went without saying that Mr. Mawhinney when he was a Christian, a longstanding member of the great, overpowering majority that fought the revolution and founded the nation, and conquered the wilderness and subjugated the Indian, and enslaved the negro and emancipated the negro, and segregated the negro, one of the good clean hard-working Christian millions who settled the frontier, tilled the farms, built the cities, governed the states, sat in congress, et cetera. Again, this question of what groups are excluded from equality, what groups have power, what groups are being excluded, that's explicitly here being connected to the experience of black people in America enslaved and then emancipated and then segregated.
Billy Flesch:
The TV series obviously is about Trump and to give you another spoiler, but I did warn you. The TV series unlike the book ends with the election of 1942 about to take place, but it turns out that ballots are being destroyed. The people are voting and that those in power apparently in the employ of the government are destroying ballots and carting away voting machines, and not counting the votes. This is 2018 that the series is being made, and the issues that we are now facing that came up in the debate yesterday, the issues that have been dear to our own president's heart over the last couple of 2000 tweets. The TV series is anticipating or at least keeping track with those things, so that again is an interesting way to talk about the relevance of the book.
Billy Flesch:
I wanted to look at one scene, which I think is a pretty amazing piece of writing, but I'm not sure... I'm wondering whether I should skip it or not. Now let's just look at it. This will be a way back to Vidal. I'm going to stop and open this for questions in a minute, but this is in the chapter called following Christians. What's happening is that Philip and Earl play this game, where they pick a Christian at random and follow him till he gets home. They do it by riding the bus and they are followed, but they think they are unseen. It's a really amazing set piece in the book. In the show as well, but a really amazing set piece in the book.
Billy Flesch:
I'll just tell you that it's part of the exquisite Swiss clock-like construction of The Plot Against America, that this is part of an explanation within the book of how it is that Philip learns to ride the buses and gets where he needs to go by bus in ways that astonish his parents. It's partly that Earl is training him because they have this little game. They follow this guy and then they see a Christmas tree. "Look," Earl whispered. "See the top? At the very top of the tree, see that? It's Jesus." "No, it's an angel," says Philip. "What do you think Jesus is?" I whispered back, "I thought he was their God and chief of the angels, and there he is."
Billy Flesch:
They don't really know, "This then was the culmination of our quest Jesus Christ, who by their reasoning was everything and who by my reasoning had fucked everything up because if it weren't for Christ, there wouldn't be Christians. If it weren't for Christians, there wouldn't be anti-Semitism and if it weren't for anti-Semitism, there wouldn't be Hitler. If it weren't for Hitler, Lindbergh would never be president and if Lindbergh were the presi... Suddenly, the man we'd followed standing now in the open doorway with his shopping bags twirled around and softly as though exhaling a smoke ring called boys.
Billy Flesch:
So flabbergasted were we by being caught that I for one felt summoned to step forward onto the path leading up to the house, and like the model child, I'd been two months before clear my conscience by telling him my name." The model child, that's what Philip will no longer be. This is a book about his loss of innocence. He is trying to be the best boy in the world. He puts it earlier in trying to help Alvin. He's trying to be a better boy than he could possibly be. I wanted to clear my conscience by telling him my name. "Only Earl's arm held me back." Boys, don't hide. You don't have to," the man said. "What now?" I whispered to Earl. "Shhhhhh," he whispered back.
Billy Flesch:
"Boys, I know you're there. Boys, it's getting awfully dark," he warned in a friendly voice. "Aren't you freezing out there? Wouldn't you like a nice cup of cocoa? Inside now children, quickly inside now before it snows. There's hot cocoa and I have spice cake, and I have seed cake and gingerbread men. I have animal crackers frosted in all different colors, and there are marshmallows. There are marshmallows boys, marshmallows in the cupboard that we can toast over a fire." When I again looked at Earl to find out what to do, he was already on his way back to Newark. "Run for it," he shouted at me over his shoulder, "beat it, Phil, it's a fairy."
Billy Flesch:
Obviously, this is a grotesquely comic scene, but it's also very serious scene. The seduction of this man who may be trying to help them, who may see that they're in trouble, but the way he can convince them is a little stronger than that. What we have here I think is not a fairy, but a figure out of fairy tales that is to say a witch, and this is telling us that the book in a sense is a fairy tale. Like fairy tales, remember that Evelyn is going to think of herself as Cinderella when she gets to the White House. Later she's going to think of herself or rather Philip is going to think of her as Thumbelina when she embraces him. Like a fairy tale, the book, not the show, but the book ends with Lindbergh disappearing.
Billy Flesch:
It's just like in Hansel and Gretel. When Hansel and Gretel return home after defeating the witch, after pushing her into the oven, after she offers them all sorts of good things to eat, seed cake and hot cocoa, and spice cake and gingerbread men. They get home and they find that the stepmother who is the source of everything bad that happened to them has died, has disappeared, is gone. In the book, that's what happens to Lindbergh. In the show, it turns out Alvin is part of a plot against Lindbergh, and that Lindbergh has been British intelligence essentially has managed to make him disappear. I'll just say just to finish with this, that I think that's another Gore Vidal moment.
Billy Flesch:
The pilot who did disappear, the great pilot who just disappeared into thin air was Amelia Earhart, and that putting Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart together, that's a set of heroic early mid 20th century pilots to think about. Lindbergh never disappeared, but Amelia Earhart did, but one really interesting thing that Gore Vidal reports is that Vidal's father was the head of FDR's precursor to the FAA. Vidal's father was a pilot, and he was also a regulator of the skies. He and Amelia Earhart had an affair, and then maybe about 20, 25 years ago, I don't know if you remember this, a body was found on a pacific island in western clothes. One of the interesting things about the body was that it was a woman's body, but wearing male underpants.
Billy Flesch:
Vidal reports that Amelia Earhart used to fly wearing his father's, that is Gore Vidal's father's underwear, that she wore them for good luck whenever she flew. Vidal thinks that that's proof that that really was Amelia Earhart, and that she was wearing Gore Vidal's father's underpants. I think there's again a nice tiny, tiny, tiny little bit of Afikoman there, which is that having Lindbergh disappear in this historical novel or this counter-historical novel is a little bit like another nod at or gesture against Gore Vidal. As you can probably tell, I can go on forever, but you don't want me to do that. I'm going to stop now and happy to take questions.
Dania Khandaker:
Thank you Billy. We received quite a lot of questions. We'll try our best to get through them in the time that we have left. One of the first questions we received is, what is the lesson in the movie about the kind but naive rabbi who seem to have blinders on? That's true. How careful do we need to be about supporting causes that may have an underlying anti-Semitic theme?
Billy Flesch:
The idea of Rabbi Bengelsdorf and this is what John Turturro who played him, this is on the podcast what he said about him, is that he's playing him like Rumkowski who was the Jewish go-between, in lauds between the Nazis and the Jewish community, and part of the idea was if you try to placate those who are on the verge of oppressing, maybe they won't. If you play nice with them, maybe you can make things better, and then that ended up corrupting him as it corrupted the Capos and the concentration camps, as it corrupted anyone who attempted to mediate between their own community and the Nazis. It just made the Nazis work easier, and that is the best you can say about Bengelsdorf is that that's what he's trying to do, and that he is a failure.
Billy Flesch:
The worst that you can say about him is that he's an opportunist, and he is not that you would see anything like that in the Trump administration, but he is someone who is being treated by his natural enemies as an alibi to prove that they're not as bad as they're said to be. He knows that that's happening and it is happening. One difference I'll just quickly say between the series and the book is the book is entirely from Philip's point of view. The series is from the point of view of six different characters. Every scene in the series has one of six different characters in it, and those six characters are essentially all the Levin family.
Billy Flesch:
The six characters are Roth and Sandy and Bess and Herman, but also Evelyn and Alvin. Philip isn't there for a whole large number of those scenes, and that means that they can show the courtship and the marriage of Evelyn and Bengelsdorf in a way that the book doesn't, but in order to make that plausible, they have to make him more humane and human than he is in the book.
Dania Khandaker:
Thank you. Another question we had was, in watching the show on HBO, I didn't understand the ending as I have never read the book itself. I don't know if the book ends the same way. If it does, can you please explain the ending?
Billy Flesch:
The book ends with FDR is elected in 1942, which was not an election year, but there is a law. I actually looked it up. I got into an argument with a lawyer who thought that this was contrary to what would actually happen and contrary to American law, but there was a law of presidential succession that was passed in I think 1877, and then was superseded in 1947. According to that law and according to a law review article that I read about it, you could have a special election in a case where the president disappeared the way Lindbergh did on and off year. They have another election in 1942. FDR is elected and he is a year behind the real FDR, but he's reelected.
Billy Flesch:
He's a year behind the real FDR. Okay. Japan attacks Pearl Harbor a year later, FDR goes to war. By the time we get to 1945, real history and fictional history have merged. The only exceptions being that in real history, Lindbergh and Winchell lived to the '60s and '70s, but in The Plot Against America, they're dead, but other than that, we've gotten back to the history that we know.
Dania Khandaker:
One of our viewers wanted to know about the name of the podcast that you had mentioned in the beginning of the talk.
Billy Flesch:
I think it's just called The Plot Against America. If you go to Spotify, I'm pretty sure you can find it on Amazon or Apple. I'm positive it's Plot Against America, but I'm just going to make myself even more positive. You can keep asking, but I'm just going to go look at my version of Spotify.
Dania Khandaker:
Okay. Another question we had is, has Roth ever addressed the internment of Japanese Americans under Roosevelt? I studied about this under Professor Erica Harth and thinking about it a lot due to recent news about abuse in ice camps.
Billy Flesch:
Yeah, it is The Plot Against America Podcast. I think that it's highly reasonable to regard the intermittent of Japanese Americans as another thing that he's thinking about in this book, that is the Jews are standing in for the experience of Jewish people, but also black people and also Japanese Americans. I am reasonably sure that he's talked about it elsewhere and more explicitly, but I can't say for certain.
Dania Khandaker:
I saw the title phrase on page 260 called the Hitlerite plot against America must be stopped. Interesting how Herman and Bess reverse roles in being more stand up in opposition. The author says one line about that.
Billy Flesch:
Yeah, okay. Yeah, what part of what's really interesting about the book and about the series, and the series maybe even more so than the book, is how much Bess has to take over as Herman, all his ideas, all his skills at resistance come to nothing. Bess is just an amazing character, and I think the way she's presented in the series is fantastic, but I think the way she's somewhat different from the way she's presented in the book, but I think the way she's presented the book is fantastic as well.
Dania Khandaker:
Can you explain again the cover graphics for the front and back? I think we have interest in just if you could repeat yourself when you first started.
Billy Flesch:
Okay. The front of the book, if I stop the virtual background, it'll be easier to see. I'm just going to choose none. The front of the book-
Dania Khandaker:
There we go. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Billy Flesch:
... has this stamp, which is a real stamp and it's a Yosemite. I think it's three cents, but I'm not sure, but it's part of the national park series of stamps. FDR himself was a stamp collector, and this was a stamp that he got the post office... This is part of a series that he got the post office to print, and now in the graphics, it's canceled with a swastika. It's canceled and you could say every meaning of the word canceled. The back of the book at least of the first edition, which is what I have, I'm told later editions don't have this, is just what's on the stamp which is that it's Yosemite, and that it was TR who was so instrumental in creating the national parks, and Yosemite in particular.
Billy Flesch:
Philip is the stamp collector and this is a national park. It's America itself and yeah, and the swastika cancellation is from the dream that Philip has, the nightmare that he has. That's right.
Dania Khandaker:
Very nice. How do you explain so many Trumpist advisors with Jewish heritage? Jared, Stephen Miller, Gary Cohn, Michael Cohen, et cetera. How did Philip Roth foresee this?
Billy Flesch:
Well, Philip Roth was a genius, and he really understood what was the strangeness and terror or potentially terrifying aspects of American politics. I think Bengelsdorf is the explanation. Maybe not of Jared who is already part of the family, but people like Miller and Kushner and Cohen and others give the large anti-Semitic faction of those now in power plausible deniability. They're what Stalin called... Well, they're called useful. Let's just say useful. I don't want to call them idiots. I won't use the word at all, but very useful to denial of anti-Semitism on the part of the president says that both sides in Charlottesville had fine people, and one side was chanting Jews will not replace us, but he's the father and father-in-law of a Jew. He can't be anti-Semitic, that's his claim.
Dania Khandaker:
All right. We are at the end of our time, but I am going to try and squeeze in one last question.
Billy Flesch:
Okay.
Dania Khandaker:
Sorry for all those... If your question hasn't been answered, maybe we can get you in touch with profe...
Billy Flesch:
Yeah, you can email me.
Dania Khandaker:
Yes, we will do that for you. Our last question, many stories have been told about what may have happened if World War II went wrong, most prominently Philip K. Dicks, the man in the high castle. What do you believe is the significance of a book where fascism comes to America, not through a foreign invader, but from within? Does it say something more honest or more challenging about America as a nation? Especially with current events in mind, does treating fascism as an outside threat led Americans off the hook too much?
Billy Flesch:
Yeah, I think it absolutely lets at least political dynamism off the hook. The threat of authoritarianism of one sort or another is always there. The threat of a charismatic leader is always there. American institutions are supposed to prevent a charismatic leader from gaining too much power, but they may easily fail to do so. When FDR was first elected, this is true. A lot of his wealthy donors wanted him to declare himself a dictator. That was the only way to get us out of the depression, and the idea that a strong person, a strong man in this case could do it, that democracy as Winston Churchill said was the worst form of government.
Billy Flesch:
He then added except for all the others, that yeah, there's... Churchill also said, I love this line of Churchills, that the United States can always be counted on to do the right thing after it's tried everything else. The idea of trying a charismatic leader who will just make things better act decisively, prevent the messiness of democracy, that's always attractive. The idea that it can't happen here, that's the name of the famous book about how it does happen here. I think it was Mencken. I'm not positive if it was Mencken that, but I think it was Mencken who said of course fascism will come to the united states. They won't call it fascism though, they'll call it democracy. It's always a danger and vigilance is the price of freedom.
Dania Khandaker:
With that, we will end our talk for today. Thank you so much Professor Flesch. This was amazing. I think we probably could have gone on and on. We've received so many comments and questions. This was wonderful, and we had so many attendees talk about their homes where they lived, and it was just lively. Thank you all for...
Billy Flesch:
I'm glad.
Dania Khandaker:
Yes, thank you so much. I did want to mention that our recording will be available for this talk because we did get a lot of questions on that. Yes, a recording will be available on our virtual event library in about a couple weeks. Please keep a lookout for that and that's it. Thank you everyone. Thank you Professor Flesch.
Billy Flesch:
Thank you. It was really fun. Thank you to everyone for staying so long, and take care, stay safe, stay healthy.