397 / 142
The Unlikely Blessings of Living on Borrowed Time in a Leased Land 397
These are strange times to be a Jew.
—
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
(Chabon, 2007: 4)
1
Four years after the 9/11 attacks, Philip Roth published
The
Plot Against America
in which he reimagines a counterfactual
scenario wherein, as a result of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s failure to
win the 1940 presidential election, the United States enters the
Second World War in 1942 rather than in 1941. Due to this one-
year delay anti-Semitism flourishes on American soil, culminating in
the government’s implementing two neo-Nazi programs that curtail
the human rights of American Jews: the Just Folks Initiative, which
takes Jewish children away from their families to be reeducated by
Christian foster families, and the Homestead ’42 Program, which
relocates urban Jews to the Midwest. In speculating on the
possibility that the US, which prides itself on its exemplary
democracy and moral exceptionalism, is quite capable of turning
itself into a neo-Nazi state, Roth uses a counterfactual narrative to
expose a traumatic core of fear at the center of American democracy.
This fear
—
whites’ fear of Jews, or vice versa, among others
—
disrupts the exceptionalist narrative of the nation-state America has
written for itself, displacing the ideology of democracy for all with
the ideology of security for the majority, and in so doing
undermining its claim to exceptionalism.
2Roth’s fiction, with its
1
This statement, or its truncated form, “Strange times to be a Jew,” appears at least
six times in the novel (pages 4, 7, 13, 29, 112, 304), and constitutes a leitmotif of
the novel. In her article fittingly entitled, “Strange Times to be a Jew: Alternative
History After 9/11,” Margaret Scanlan highlights the phrase, “strange times to be a
Jew” (2011: 505), which she culls from Chabon’s novel, to examine what political
and ethical lessons can be derived when Chabon juxtaposes “the shock of 9/11 and
moral outrage at the War on Terror” with the legacies of Holocaust (506). While
Scanlan’s argument is incisive, I agree with Alan Gibbs that Chabon’s ambition goes
beyond the juxtaposition of events, past and present, Jewish and non-Jewish, “as
he uses the counterfactual mode as a means to draw parallels between and
demonstrate the evils of all shades of fundamentalism” (2014: 222).
2
American exceptionalism is a central myth or fantasy governing American’s self-