Herman Roth’s refusal of the Homestead 42 relocation and resignation is a consequential act of resistance in which a family’s ordinary dependence on employment becomes a point of political coercion. Rather than accept a government-backed transfer administered through Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, he leaves a twelve-year career and takes exhausting night work. The decision keeps the family in their home on Summit Avenue, but it costs them security and brings the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s attention back to Herman.

The promise of advancement and the relocation directive

The choice carried particular weight because Herman had once come close to realizing a long-held ambition through the same employer. In 1939, after consistently strong sales through the worst of the Great Depression, Metropolitan Life offered him promotion to assistant manager at its office in Union, six miles west of the family’s home in Newark. The company expected him to move his family there. The position could pay seventy-five dollars a week, with the prospect of reaching one hundred; at the time, those earnings might have allowed him to buy one of Union’s inexpensive houses and become a homeowner. For someone who had grown up penniless in a Newark tenement, ownership meant standing as a provider, not merely acquiring status.

The possible move also carried an isolation the financial promise could not erase. Union, like Hillside, was a Gentile working-class town. Herman would probably be the only Jewish man in an office of about thirty-five employees; Bess Roth would be the only Jewish woman on their street, and Sandy Roth and Philip Roth the only Jewish children at their school. The offer thus brought together economic advancement and the prospect of raising the family apart from a Jewish community.

By May 22, 1942, the company was participating in a more extensive relocation policy. A Metropolitan Life letter, issued in compliance with Homestead 42 and the Office of American Absorption in the United States Department of the Interior, offered relocation opportunities to senior employees judged eligible. Its language presented the program as a patriotic renewal of the Homestead Act of 1862: families would move at government expense, settle in regions newly opened to them, and strengthen their Americanness over generations. The promise of opportunity softened the appearance of a directive, while the company’s participation made government policy part of an employee’s working life. Herman understood the relocation plan as anti-Semitic subterfuge, not a neutral offer of advancement.

Resignation and the cost of staying

Herman rejected the transfer and quit Metropolitan Life, surrendering the security of his long affiliation with the company. His refusal did not carry the family away from the danger he perceived: they remained in their home on Summit Avenue, while his wife considered escape to Canada as another way to protect them. Bess had left her job at Hahne's and saved enough in Montreal to get the family across the border and started there at short notice. Herman, however, resisted both compliance with relocation and flight. His decision was not simply a choice between two destinations; it was a refusal to let either the government’s directive or fear alone determine where his family belonged.

He began working at the Miller Street market, using Uncle Monty’s truck and laboring overnight. From Sunday night through Friday morning, he came home at nine or ten in the morning, ate, and went to sleep by eleven. Philip had to avoid slamming the back door when he returned from school. Herman rose before five in the afternoon to meet farmers arriving with produce, while retail grocers, restaurant owners, hotelkeepers, and the city’s remaining horse-and-wagon peddlers bought through the night. He relied on coffee in a thermos and sandwiches Bess had prepared. Sometimes he drove out before dawn to farmers in Passaic and Union counties to collect produce himself when Uncle Monty could secure a better deal.

The strain became visible in a change of habit. Before, a bottle of Four Roses could last for years in the household. Now, after returning from the market in dirty clothes, Herman poured a shot before washing and eating. The drink enabled him to settle enough to manage a full meal without indigestion. The contrast between the former insurance agent in polished shoes and the market worker in thick-soled boots makes the loss of professional standing concrete; the shot and solitary morning meal show how the new schedule entered even the household’s daily rhythms.

A family remade, and a community scattered

Herman’s decision altered the shape of the household as well as its finances. Bess was again at home when the boys returned from school and monitored them during the summer. Sandy Roth, whose earlier display of self-importance had put him at odds with the family, appeared to return to his quieter, more conscientious self after Philip’s hospitalization and the family crisis. The account leaves open whether this change followed Herman’s intervention, the shock of events, or some other cause. What it makes clear is the reversal: the family was declassed by Herman’s resignation but, for the moment, remained rooted together in Newark.

That rootedness had a painful contrast. The other families from the local Metropolitan district who had been designated for relocation departed one by one, visiting on summer Saturdays before settling around the country ahead of the school year. Their tearful farewells made the family’s exposure unmistakable: Herman and Bess alone among their group had chosen to stay. By September 1, Seldon Wishnow was to be living with his mother in Danville, Kentucky, as the only Jewish child there. The separation of friends and neighbors turned the program’s promise of new opportunity into a visible dispersal of the community around the Roths.

When the last of the six families seemed to have vanished, Herman took Bess, Sandy, and Philip for ice cream at a drugstore on Chancellor Avenue. Bess could not eat at first and cried; the family sat together in the shaded booth, exhausted and without any assurance about what would come next. Her observation that Lindbergh was teaching them what it meant to be Jews, and Herman’s insistence that their American belonging was not negotiable, expose the identity question at the heart of the refusal. The family’s remaining in place was neither proof that they were safe nor a simple return to normal life. It was a decision to claim their home and their American identity while others were leaving and the future remained uncertain.

Surveillance and the price of defiance

The resignation also made Herman newly legible to the authorities as a dissenter. After the family had already encountered an agent asking questions about Alvin, the same Agent McCorkle appeared at the produce market and lingered at the diner where workers ate and drank coffee in the middle of the night. He asked what Herman was saying about the country and the president. Word reached Uncle Monty through Longy Zwillman’s associates: the report framed Herman as a man who had housed and fed a supposed traitor and then abandoned a good Metropolitan Life job rather than participate in a program said to unify and strengthen the nation.

Uncle Monty tried to defend his brother as a poor man with a wife and two children, unlikely to harm the country by hauling produce crates six nights a week. When Longy Zwillman came to the market office, Uncle Monty sought time to resolve the threat. He then met McCorkle at Sammy Eagle’s and bought his breakfast. The bribe silenced the immediate pressure, but it added another private cost to Herman’s refusal: Philip later learned that the full payment was to be repaid to Uncle Monty out of Herman’s already meager wages, at ten dollars a week for six months. Herman could do nothing about the arrangement, and described his brother’s controlling nature as lifelong.

The episode shows the relocation scheme operating through more than a formal order. Metropolitan Life’s cooperation connected a government program to employment, while the loss of a secure job exposed Herman to economic dependency, surveillance, and pressure mediated through his own family network. His resistance did not defeat Homestead 42 or prevent the dispersal of friends. It did, however, make his principles visible in the ordinary consequences of staying: a changed occupation, a depleted paycheck, a closely watched home, and a family that refused to treat its belonging as negotiable.