We once escaped a ‘Plot Against America.’ Can we now? – Forward

Not that long ago, America welcomed its first Nazis.

They made their presence known in the spring of 1933 as the Friends of New Germany, re-branded three years later as the German American Bund and mutated from there until they were nearly indistinguishable from most Americans concerned with another World War. But before they looked like everyday Americans, they dressed like brown shirts. They ran summer camps for children and beer gardens for adults. They rallied at Madison Square Garden with cries of “Heil Hitler.” They carried swastika banners, sang anthems to the fatherland and marched through the streets of American towns.

One place with an acute Nazi presence was northern New Jersey. In 1939, an FBI report declared the township of Irvington, N.J., which bordered the largely Jewish Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, a “hotbed” of Nazi activity.

On October 11, 1938, two weeks before a Bund rally near Irvington, a nine-year-old boy named Bernard Cohen was walking through Irvington Park when two teenagers attacked him. They dragged him from the top of a flight of stone steps and, with the words, “Let’s try it on him,” threw him to the ground and carved a two-inch swastika into his left forearm with a pen knife. According to the Newark Evening News, the maiming by the teenagers — a 17-year-old of German extraction, and a 14-year-old of Italian descent — was regarded as “mischief rather than an example of racial intolerance.” The Irvington magistrate punished them with a lecture on “Americanism.” Four days later, a two-foot-high wooden swastika was burned in the park where the crime occurred “in full view of the Cohen apartment house.”

One mile from Irvington Park lived another Jewish boy a few years younger than Cohen. His name was Philip Roth.

Roth knew about Nazis and anti-Semitic politicians from his father. But it was only as an adult, when he stumbled on a reference to a Nazi-friendly hero being considered as a Republican presidential nominee, that Roth began to wonder what Nazi doctrine would have looked like as American policy.

The result of that thought experiment was his 2004 novel “The Plot Against America,” now an HBO miniseries arriving in time for a pivotal presidential election, one where hopes and fears trail voters to the ballot box.

“Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear,” Roth begins his counterhistory, “no childhood is without its terrors, yet I wonder if I would have been a less frightened boy if Lindbergh hadn’t been president or if I hadn’t been the offspring of Jews.”

Roth imagined himself, at the ages of seven, eight and nine, living through the administration of Republican president and Nazi sympathizer Charles A. Lindbergh, who had flown to victory over FDR in 1940 on the wings of a family tragedy, a legendary transatlantic flight and a promise not to involve America in another war. In real life, Lindbergh was the spokesman for the anti-interventionist America First Committee, a group that peaked at 800,000 members, many of them former German American Bundists. Early in his imagined presidency, Lindbergh signed nonaggression understandings with Hitler and the Japanese emperor and praised the Third Reich’s wartime maneuvers as a deterrent for the spread of communism. In the book, these actions cast a pall over Roth and his neighborhood.

Roth had nightmares about the American stamps in his collection being replaced by swastika-inked profiles of Hitler. He saw his older brother, Sandy, become the poster child for an Americanization program seeking to erode the Jewish identity of “city youth.” His bitter (and fictional) cousin, Alvin, unable to fight for an America that remained neutral, volunteered for the Canadian Army, and lost half his leg in the process. Roth’s family narrowly missed being forcibly relocated from Newark to Kentucky. And, as word spread of nationwide pogroms against Jews, the White House remained silent — by then, the Roths were not surprised.

II: NAZIS IN NEW JERSEY

In “The Plot Against America,” Roth envisions how a Jewish family might have responded to a national threat akin to what European Jews faced in the 1930s. Their Americanism is questioned, their livelihoods are threatened and even their assimilated, overwhelmingly Jewish corner of the earth cannot escape the anti-Semites emboldened by Lindbergh’s victory. The family he used — names and all — was his own. The setting was his home.

Roth grew up at 81 Summit Avenue in Weequahic. His childhood house still stands, a yellow-green clapboard affair built, he writes, for “two-and-a-half” families; the Roths lived on the second floor. Save for some faux-sandstone siding on the first floor — an addition shared by its frame house neighbors — it resembles his description from the book, with a notable exception: There’s a plaque outside marking it as a historic site. Two sisters, one 90, the other in her 80s, live there now. (Roth visited them while he was working on “Plot,” going upstairs to refresh his memory of the house’s layout.)

The block has kept its quaint, middle-class profile, filled with gable-roofed homes with garret windows, small patches of yard and room in between residences to park the family car — only SUVs and satellite dishes betray the passage of time. Three minutes away, Weequahic High School and the elementary school on Chancellor Avenue, where some of the novel is set, still stand: stone, Art Deco buildings, where many Jewish artists, musicians, doctors and writers completed K-12. But the neighborhood has changed since Roth graduated from those institutions and from living in Newark.

Across the street from the high school, at the crest of a hill, are two churches, a small, red brick Baptist chapel, and a larger Assembly of God building with a soaring, white cross spire. More churches and two mosques are nearby. The neighborhood is 93% black today, and the I-78 highway, built in 1957, forms a gridlocked border between the enclave and Irvington.

Gone are the neighborhood’s delis, the shuls and the home of Newark’s first and only Jewish mayor, Meyer Ellenstein. Gone too are many of the sites where, in the 1930s, a group of Jewish gangsters fought Nazis with fists and rubber-wrapped pipes.

“From the time I was 12 or 13 years old, I knew the story about how Longie Zwillman’s gang beat up Nazis in Newark,” Warren Grover said one afternoon over a “fully-dressed” turkey sandwich at Hobby’s delicatessen in downtown Newark, about three miles from Weequahic. The over 100-year-old deli, with its red vinyl chairs and dark, faux-wood-paneled walls, is the kind of old school Jewish institution where words like “shtarker” are tossed around with abandon by the owners as they sit near the entrance looking over receipts.

Grover, 81, comfy in a black sweatshirt and known to the staff, is co-founder of the Newark History Society. He spent three years in the New Jersey Room of the Newark Public Library researching his 2003 book “Nazis in Newark,” which the Newark Public Library staff found in his Connecticut farmhouse, his copy brimming with margin notes.

Grover’s history, sourced from nearly a decade’s worth of back issues of the Newark Evening News and The Jewish Chronicle, tracks the evolving Friends of New Germany and German American Bundist presence in Essex County from the early 1930s to 1941. At its peak, the Bund had 25,000 members and a strong foothold in northern New Jersey.

“Newark was one of the handful of cities in the country where Germans emigrated in the first big immigration after the 1848 revolutions in Europe,” Grover said. “There were seven or eight major cities in the United States where Germans moved, and Newark was one of them.”