Pajamas and Nightdresses

If we keep coming back to how much Philip Roth loved his family and his Weequahic community growing up, it’s because of scenes like the following in which the seven-year old narrator Philip Roth tells of the anger his neighbors experienced when the fictionalized anti-Semitic Charles Lindbergh wins the Republican nomination for President on a summer night in 1940.  The scene in The Plot Against America begins with the family inside the Roth home listening to Lindbergh in Philadelphia accepting both the party nomination and a mandate to stay out of the war in Europe. Lindbergh didn’t include earlier vilifications of the Jews in his speech, the narrator says, but nonetheless a piercing group anger “carried every last family on the block out into the street at nearly five in the morning.”

 So there Roth has us and holds us--on the street.

“Entire families known to me previously only fully in daytime clothing were wearing pajamas and nightdresses under their bathrobes and milling around in their slippers at dawn as if driven from their homes by an earthquake. But what shocked a child most was the anger, the anger of men whom I knew as lighthearted kibbitzers or silent, dutiful breadwinners who all day long unclogged drainpipes or serviced furnaces or sold apples by the pound and then in the evening looked at the paper and listened to the radio and fell asleep in the living room chair, plain people who happened to be Jews now storming about the street and cursing with no concern for propriety, abruptly thrust back into the miserable struggle from which they had believed their families extricated by the providential migration of the generation before.”

The scene’s not quite finished.  Roth brings us back inside:

“After their having gone without sleep all night long, there was nothing that these bewildered elders of ours didn’t think and nothing that they didn’t say aloud, within our hearing, before they started to drift back to their houses (where all the radios still blared away), the men to shave and dress, and grab a cup of coffee before heading for work and the women to get their children clothed and fed and ready for the day.”