Alvin Roth joins the Canadian Army

Alvin Roth joins the Canadian Army in defiance of the secure future his uncle Herman Roth and employer Abe Steinheim had arranged for him. His departure is driven both by the war against Adolf Hitler and by his refusal to accept the moral compromises he sees in remaining indebted to a powerful employer. In a country whose president has pledged neutrality and whose Jewish citizens fear what that neutrality may permit, Alvin chooses action abroad over opportunity at home.

Background and the decision to leave

Alvin was twenty-one in 1940 and had been part of Herman Roth’s household for close to seven years. Orphaned young, he had lived with the family during his four years at Weequahic High. Herman had taken responsibility for him and hoped to turn a quick-witted, wayward boy into someone with a future. By the time Alvin decided to leave, he had worked for almost two years at Steinheim & Sons, one of Newark’s largest Jewish construction firms. Abe Steinheim had made him his driver, taking him along on errands and visits to construction sites, and had offered to send him to Rutgers University on a full scholarship. The plan was for Alvin to study in New Brunswick and later return to the company.

The family’s political setting made Canada more than a distant battlefield. In the November 1940 election, Charles A. Lindbergh won 57 percent of the popular vote and carried forty-six states. After taking office, he met Adolf Hitler in Iceland and signed an understanding guaranteeing peaceful relations between Germany and the United States. For Alvin, Herman, and others in their community, the administration’s neutrality sharpened the question of what Americans would do while Britain faced Nazi Germany. When the family considered a June 1941 visit to Washington, D.C., they briefly discussed going instead to Canada; some neighbors were already contemplating migration there if the government openly turned against Jews. Alvin had gone earlier, seeking not a refuge but a way to fight.

The rupture with Herman Roth

Herman saw the scholarship and job as a rare chance for Alvin to gain an education and build a stable life. Alvin saw the offer differently: accepting Steinheim’s patronage, he argued, would bind him to an employer who exploited working people. Their dispute widened into a clash over what counted as moral complicity. Herman defended Steinheim as a builder in a cutthroat trade, pointing to the fact that his buildings stood and that he broke no law. Alvin countered that legality did not make the treatment of workers just, and worried that the education offered to him came at the price of lifelong indebtedness.

The argument also exposed different ideas of family and obligation. Herman described families as places of both peace and conflict, and urged Alvin not to abandon college for a hurried attempt to fight Hitler. Alvin accused Herman of isolationism and grouped Steinheim with Lionel Bengelsdorf as Jewish figures who, in his view, accommodated a compromised order. Herman’s insistence that the argument concerned Alvin’s future could not reconcile them: Alvin regarded his own future as inseparable from the people and principles he believed his employer betrayed.

The quarrel lasted four consecutive nights. On the fifth, Alvin did not come to dinner, despite the family’s hope that regular meals would give Herman time to persuade him to stay. The next morning Billy Steinheim called the family. After receiving his Friday pay, Alvin had thrown the keys to the Cadillac at Billy’s father and walked out. Herman drove to Alvin’s rented room above a Wright Street shoeshine parlor, but the landlord told him that Alvin had paid his rent, packed, and left. Herman had not been told in advance and could only learn that his nephew had gone to fight Hitler.

From Canada to commando service

Alvin first imagined that he could see action aboard a Canadian destroyer escorting merchant ships carrying supplies to Great Britain. Newspaper reports of German submarines sinking Canadian vessels in the North Atlantic made the danger plain. Canada had become a crucial source of arms, food, medicine, and machinery for Britain after the Lindbergh administration overturned Roosevelt-era aid legislation, so the losses at sea threatened more than individual crews.

In Montreal, an American defector redirected Alvin toward the Canadian commandos. They carried out nighttime raids in Nazi-occupied Europe, sabotaged German utilities, destroyed ammunition arsenals, and attacked dock and shipyard facilities alongside British commandos and European resistance movements. Hearing about the work changed Alvin’s plan: he abandoned his original expectation of joining the navy and enlisted with the commandos instead. The Canadian Armed Forces accepted qualified American citizens, and after sixteen weeks of training Alvin was assigned to an active commando unit and sent to a secret staging area in the British Isles.

Only then did the family hear from him. Alvin sent a brief, six-word letter saying that he was going to fight and expected to see them soon. The message was a stark contrast to the prolonged arguments that had preceded his departure: no defense of his choice, no settlement with Herman, only notice that he had reached the path he had chosen.

Service and consequences

Alvin’s decision soon became more than a family rupture. After Sandy Roth took the overnight train to Kentucky, the family received a letter from the War Department in Ottawa informing Alvin’s designated next of kin that he had been wounded in action and was recovering in a convalescent hospital in Dorset, England. The news brought the war, previously debated through jobs, elections, and plans to travel, into the Roth household as a direct consequence of Alvin’s enlistment. Herman and Bess Roth sat together to prepare a reply, while Philip Roth watched his mother write and read each sentence aloud for his father’s consideration.

The episode establishes Alvin as the family member who refuses to separate political conviction from personal conduct. Herman understands care as securing education and a future; Alvin understands it as refusing the advantages that, to him, depend on exploitation and passivity toward Nazi aggression. His enlistment does not settle their disagreement, but it gives it a material outcome: the nephew Herman had tried to save leaves the life prepared for him, crosses into Canada, trains for combat, and is sent toward Europe. The later report of his wounding makes clear that the choice carries real cost, while the brief letter preserves the stubborn forward motion of his decision.