Finally, there’s Alvin Levin ( Anthony Boyle), Phillip’s cousin, who goes to Canada, who has joined the fight against the Nazis, only to come home injured and still be considered a criminal for doing so. It doesn’t help that his aunt Evelyn ( Winona Ryder) gets closer to a local Jewish leader named Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf ( John Turturro), who becomes a mouthpiece for the administration in trying to quell the fears of the Jewish population that what’s happening in Europe could come to the United States. Sandy is old enough to know who Lindbergh is and idolize him a bit, and so he becomes torn between his father’s belief that the President is a dangerous anti-Semite and wanting to trust in American leadership. They have two children, older Sandy ( Caleb Malis) and younger Phillip ( Azhy Robertson), and much of the impact of “The Plot Against America” comes from seeing a changing, increasingly dangerous world through the eyes of children. The six-episode mini-series starts in 1940, introducing us to the Levin family, led by the headstrong Herman ( Morgan Spector) and compassionate Bess ( Zoe Kazan). It helps that we see the changing world through the forced perspective of one family in Newark, New Jersey. In fact, “The Plot Against America” makes this alternate history remarkably believable by paying so much attention to detail and atmosphere over melodrama.
It’s remarkably easy to imagine a candidate arguing that we shouldn’t send our boys to die in a foreign war, and that we should stay out of combat and not get involved in the persecution of Jews, especially if that candidate was himself an American hero. Roth’s novel imagines a world in which Charles Lindbergh ran for President against FDR in the early days of World War II, and he did so on a platform of no involvement in the growing war in Europe.
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