Philip Roth’s novel “The Plot Against America” is a masterwork of counterfactual history, a what-if story in which Charles Lindbergh, the aviation hero and Nazi sympathizer, is elected President in 1940, leading to the widespread persecution of Jews in the United States. The novel is also a counterfactual masterwork of personal history. (Judith Thurman recently interviewed Roth about it in The New Yorker.) It’s not one of Roth’s Zuckerman novels or one of his Kepesh novels; it’s a Roth novel, composed as if it were an autobiographical tale, written by the adult Philip Roth about the child Philip Roth and his family—endowed with their real-life names, his parents, Herman and Bess, and his brother, Sandy—and set in Newark’s Weequahic neighborhood, where the novelist was, in fact, raised.

The Philip of the story is born, like the real-life novelist, in 1933. Soon after Lindbergh takes office, federal policies are implemented to disperse Jews from urban communities and into the American “heartland,” and, in turn, to move non-Jews into Jewish neighborhoods. Philip’s father, Herman, is a staunch opponent of Lindbergh who’s horrified by the country’s turn; Philip’s brother, Sandy, sent to rural Kentucky for the summer as part of a federal program, has become an enthusiast for farm life among Gentiles; his young uncle, Alvin, joins the Canadian Army to fight with the British in Europe; and Philip’s aunt, marrying a collaborationist rabbi, glories in her presence at Lindbergh’s state dinner in honor of the Nazi Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop. As anti-Semitic pressure mounts, neighbors plan to emigrate to Canada, and Philip’s own parents consider doing the same. The leading journalistic critic of Lindbergh, the gossip columnist Walter Winchell (who was, in fact, Jewish), is assassinated, and American anti-Semites launch a wave of pogroms against American Jews that moves from the smashing of store windows and the burning of synagogues to murder.

Though the novel’s overarching drama is the national and international crisis that Roth imagines, its specifics are intimate. Roth revisits his Newark childhood in loving and meticulous detail, and shows how, unbeknownst to a child who has the good fortune to be raised in peace and freedom, so much of daily life depends invisibly but decisively on politics. Virtually all the day-to-day assumptions with which Philip had been raised, even through grim days of the Depression, were overturned by the effect of the Lindbergh Administration’s policies. Philip experiences anti-Semitic invective and discrimination on a family trip to Washington, D.C. He’s pressured by an F.B.I. agent to inform on his own family. His vigorous and young Uncle Alvin returns home with a leg amputated. Political differences tear his family apart. His father’s livelihood is threatened. Above all, the nation’s political crisis destroys the very foundation of Philip’s psychological makeup—his proud certainty of his American identity.

From the time I read “The Plot Against America” when it was first published, in 2004, the detail I found most disturbing concerned the reaction of the Jews of Weequahic to the increasing threat of pogroms against them. The city’s Jewish notables, including politicians, businesspeople, and rabbis, form a civic organization to respond to the threat at an official level. But seeing local police in other American cities standing by idly while synagogues are burned and Jews are murdered, Newark’s Jews decide to form an unofficial defense force, the Provisional Jewish Police, consisting of “incorrigible Jewish kids who had failed to graduate from high school.” Roth writes:

And now they were stationed on every second street corner, our neighborhood’s handful of flops . . . Here they were, the callous and the obtuse and the mentally deficient, the Jews’ very own deviants . . . the brainless few we had been raised to pity and fear, the Stone Age oafs and the seething runts and the ominous, swaggering weightlifters, buttonholing kids like me out on Chancellor Avenue and telling us to keep our baseball bats at the ready in case we were called in the night to take to the streets and going around to the Y in the evenings and to the ball fields on Sundays and to the local stores during the week, shanghaiing the able-bodied from among the neighborhood’s grown men so as to bring to a total of three on each block a squad they could count on in an emergency. They embodied everything crude and despicable that our parents had hoped to leave behind, along with their childhood pennilessness, in the Third Ward slums, and yet here were our demons got up as our guardians, each with a loaded revolver strapped to his calf.

Philip’s own mild-mannered but tough-minded father at first refuses a Mob-connected Italian friend’s offer of a pistol, and then—when gunfire is heard in the street, and what the family thinks is a pogrom begins—he accepts it. But Roth caps the episode with a magnificent and painful touch: in the end, the gunfire isn’t between anti-Semites and Jews but between the Newark police and the gangsters of the Provisional Jewish Police, whom the real cops want off the streets. For all the relief that the Jews of Newark feel upon learning that the clash was no pogrom, the message is clear: Jewish Americans can count neither on the government to protect them nor on their own community’s efforts to defend itself. The gun battle “had left everyone on the street feeling as though a wall had been pulled down that previously protected their families . . . a sheltering wall of legal assurances standing between them and the derangements of a ghetto.” Philip’s family—especially his father, confident in the resilience of American institutions—had rejected the prospect of fleeing to Canada; by the time he changes his mind, it’s too late. The U.S. government has sealed the Canadian border.

Having brought his tale to a crisis of likely catastrophic conclusions, Roth delivers a deus-ex-machina-like resolution that helps the novel synch back up with the actual contours of history. Franklin Delano Roosevelt ends up President again. Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, the U.S. goes to war against Japan and Germany, and, with American help, the Allies win. This narrative maneuver is no mere happy ending, however. It’s an intellectual turn that, while sparing young Philip and the remaining American Jews further calamity, dramatizes two vast and contradictory principles simultaneously: on the one hand, the susceptibility of American individualism to the cult of celebrity, and of American faith in democracy to a tyranny of the majority, leading to a particular vulnerability to unscrupulous politicians who win widespread popular support and gain a grip on the three branches of government; and, on the other, the distinctively American sense of freedom, stiffening the will to resist such political depravities, a will that’s integral to the country’s values, heritage, and history. The novel’s great tragic power lies precisely in the clash between the two. (It also shows America’s unshakable links to its European heritage—the latent and looming inclination to anti-Semitism.) “The Plot Against America” is about how it can happen here; about how, if it were to happen here, American Jews and, for that matter, many other courageous Americans would rise up, organize, and resist; and about how their altogether American resistance against an altogether American abuse of power might nonetheless not suffice.

Just as the very local gangsters whom Philip and his family feared, abhorred, and reviled seemed, for a moment, to be their saviors, so the same anti-Semitic heartland isolationists who voted for Lindbergh become part of the mighty force that fights to defeat Hitler. “The Plot Against America” dramatizes the American character as vast, manifold, and inchoate; it can use its prodigious and uninhibited energy for good or for evil, and it shifts under the sudden force of unforeseeable events. The shifts and pivots of the American nation at large are also those of each individual American. The grand political stage and the intimate life are inseparable; identity itself is inextricable from the currents of history. The novel’s mighty psychological weight rests upon a terrifyingly delicate balance of circumstances that depend on whims of chance. Since the novel involves Roth’s speculations about his own childhood, it’s worth considering what effect its events might have had on young Philip’s literary vocation.