“If I didn't see it with my own eyes, I'd think I was having a hallucination”: Re-Imagining Jewish History in Philip Roth'sThe Plot Against America

This essay reads Philip Roth'sThe Plot Against America(2004) as a novel about childhood fears, revisited by the mature author in the form of an alternative history that is both personal and collective. The essay examines the tropes of dreams and hallucinations in the novel to suggest that Roth creates an uncanny site in his novel as means of engaging with the unimaginable scenario of American Jews living under a fascist regime in the early forties. However, Roth does not go as far as to imagine a “Holocaust” for American Jews and diverts his alternative history back to the “right course” thus both evoking the fear of Nazi rule and avoiding it at the same time. The essay employs Freud's “The Uncanny” as a way of reading Roth's text in psychological rather than overtly political terms and claims that the overtly political readings of the novel have missed out on its more nuanced engagement with the Jewish condition as an ongoing state of mind, rather than a contemporary or (imagined) historical crisis.