Cross-cultural communication （151）　

151) The Plot Against America
From fall 2023 to spring 2024, I read Philip Roth's novel “The Plot Against America”. It's a 460-page paperback novel, and it took me half a year to finish. You might wonder why it took so long even though it's in English. Lately, I've been busy with my hobbies. I'm always reading multiple French books, and since early 2024, I've also started a French blog on my own website. At night, I have to carve out time for watching Netflix, which is my beloved hobby. (It's not a duty; I just enjoy watching it...) Of course, Japanese paperbacks are a must-have item on the train. So, the only time I dedicate to English books is the 30 minutes before my four weekly shifts at the nursing home, when I “eat-in” at the Seven-Eleven.

This novel was published in 2004 by Philip Roth, a Jewish-American writer who passed away in 2018. It's a wild story where Charles Lindbergh, who became a national hero after successfully flying solo across the Atlantic Ocean, defeats the incumbent Roosevelt in the 1940 U.S. presidential election. While this may sound like a dream-like novel, Lindbergh did successfully complete the solo transatlantic flight, became popular in Europe, and was even invited to Germany under the Nazi regime, where he was treated as a state guest and awarded a medal by Hitler. Further details would reveal key plot points, so I will refrain from elaborating further. Suffice it to say that this novel is a dystopian tale of a nightmare scenario for Jewish-Americans, depicting actual recent history with real-life characters.

There was an interesting point that deviated slightly from the main plot of the novel. I myself spent three years in New York City (NYC) as a resident physician in the early 1980s. Unlike other U.S. cities, NYC is a city where Jewish residents are the majority. Among physicians, almost all white doctors were Jewish. Given this context, I had assumed that anti-Semitism did not exist in the United States at least until the immediate pre-World War II period. However, reading about the daily lives of Jewish citizens in the 1940s depicted in this novel, it seems that was not the case. This was quite surprising. Additionally, there were many episodes that seemed to foreshadow the internal issues in the United States, such as President Trump's “America First” policy and the growing division among American citizens.

As of May 2024, Israel's unilateral military actions in the Gaza Strip are reportedly sparking significant backlash in the United States, particularly among college students. In understanding the current relationships between Jews scattered across the world and the non-Jewish world, as well as the psychology of Jewish people, The Plot Against America serves as a timely and valuable resource.

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