Aunt Evelyn

Aunt Evelyn, the younger sister of Bess Roth, is a politically active Newark teacher whose support for the Lindbergh administration’s assimilation programs puts her at odds with her family. She urges Sandy Roth to join Just Folks, a program that sends Jewish boys away from their city homes to work on farms, and later becomes engaged to Lionel Bengelsdorf, a leading official in the Office of American Absorption. Her story connects the intimate bonds of a family to a government project that presents assimilation as opportunity while raising fears of separation and diminished communal power.

Identity and Background

In 1941, Aunt Evelyn was thirty and worked as a substitute elementary-school teacher in the Newark school system. She had helped found the left-wing, largely Jewish Newark Teachers Union, whose few hundred members competed with a more established, politically unaligned teachers’ association in negotiating contracts with the city. Her union work placed her among the advocates of organized labor, a commitment she would later leave behind.

For about a decade, Aunt Evelyn had also cared for her invalid mother in the small apartment they shared on Dewey Street. Bess Roth helped when a neighbor could not stay with their mother, and the sisters’ parents sometimes arranged to have their grandmother spend an evening with the Roth family. The arrangement shaped the household’s routines: when Aunt Evelyn went to New York or returned late from work, Bess might have to spend the night away from her husband and children to take over the care. Bess later believed that the years devoted to their mother had cost her sister opportunities to settle down after teacher training. That was Bess’s interpretation of Aunt Evelyn’s earlier life, not a stated account from Aunt Evelyn herself.

Just Folks and the Family Dispute

Aunt Evelyn’s influence became especially consequential when the Office of American Absorption promoted Just Folks. The office described it as a volunteer program introducing city youth to traditional heartland life. Its plan was to send hundreds of Jewish boys, ages twelve to eighteen, from their homes and schools for eight weeks of field work and day labor with farm families hundreds of miles away. By spring 1941, although the office’s announced purpose referred broadly to religious and national minorities, its attention appeared to be concentrated on Jewish Americans.

Notices went up at Chancellor Avenue School and the neighboring Weequahic High School. After an office representative spoke to the boys, Sandy brought home an application requiring a parent’s signature. His parents objected: Herman saw the program as an attempt to separate Jewish children from their families and weaken family solidarity, while Bess worried about the danger to Sandy’s hands and the interruption of the drawing classes he had planned to take. Sandy was nevertheless eager to go, and Aunt Evelyn’s encouragement helped give him the confidence to apply.

Aunt Evelyn made her support explicit at dinner. Bess had invited her while Sandy was away, hoping to keep him out of the argument she expected between her sister and Herman. Instead, Aunt Evelyn arrived and announced that she would handle Sandy’s application as soon as it reached the office. Herman rejected her intervention and questioned why she believed Sandy should go. Their disagreement sharpened into a dispute over what the program meant: Herman saw a policy threatening the security of Jewish family life, while Aunt Evelyn treated opposition as an expression of fear and narrowness. Her advocacy was not merely private encouragement; as an employee of the office, she could help move the application forward.

Political Realignment and Lionel Bengelsdorf

Aunt Evelyn’s work for the administration marked a striking break with her earlier affiliations. She resigned from teaching, left the Newark Teachers Union, and went to work for Lionel Bengelsdorf, whom Lindbergh’s administration had appointed the first director of the Office of American Absorption in New Jersey. She became his executive assistant. The shift placed her inside an agency whose language of incorporating minorities into a larger society sat uneasily beside its concentrated attention to Jewish families and programs such as Just Folks.

Her connection with Bengelsdorf was personal as well as professional. They met at a reception after he spoke to the Newark Teachers Union on the development of American ideals in the classroom. Her family did not initially understand the nature of their relationship; several months passed before they recognized that she was Bengelsdorf’s mistress. The engagement became public when Bengelsdorf, then sixty-three, announced that he would leave the New Jersey office to become federal director at the national headquarters in Washington and that he and his thirty-one-year-old assistant were to marry. The announcement joined Aunt Evelyn’s private future to the national administration’s political center.

Family Conflict and Narrative Significance

Aunt Evelyn’s position strains her relationship with Herman, her brother-in-law, because the same program she helps promote appears to him to endanger the family’s cohesion and the community’s standing. Their clash is also part of a wider break in the Roth family’s political landscape: Evelyn supports a government initiative that Herman opposes, while Sandy’s wish to take part makes the disagreement immediate and personal. The conflict is not resolved by their competing definitions of the program. Instead, the application becomes the point at which an abstract policy enters the household, testing who may make decisions for a child and what it means to protect him.

Her trajectory also complicates any simple division between public conviction and private attachment. Aunt Evelyn had organized with a left-wing teachers’ union, cared for her mother, and remained close enough to the Roth household to intervene in Sandy’s plans. She then left her teaching and union work for the administration, backing a program that her family regarded with suspicion, and formed a partnership with the official directing that program. The novel offers these changes without making her a mere symbol: they are enacted through concrete ties—to her sister, nephew, brother-in-law, employer, and future husband. Through Aunt Evelyn, the political pressure to define Jewish belonging as a matter of greater incorporation becomes a family argument over separation, loyalty, and the cost of accepting the government’s promise of opportunity.