In the view of Philip Roth’s narrator in The Plot Against America—a fictional account of how fascism might have come to the United States in 1940—history as schoolchildren study it is the story “turned wrong way around”: a tale told after the fact, with “everything . . . chronicled on the page as inevitable.” By contrast, the narrator asserts, history experienced in real time is a story of the “relentless unforeseen.”
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More about: Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, History & Ideas, Holocaust, Israel & Zionism, Poland, Vladimir Jabotinsky