Sandy Roth

Sandy Roth, the older son of Herman Roth and Bess Roth and brother of Philip Roth, is a precocious adolescent whose loyalties become entangled with the political crisis around him. His enlistment in Aunt Evelyn’s efforts to bring him into the White House circle estranges him from his parents; later, amid escalating danger, he returns to the family and travels with Herman Roth to help bring Seldon Wishnow home. His shifts are not presented as a simple conversion: ambition, fear, artistic attention, and attachment to his family pull him in different directions.

Identity and Political Defiance

Sandy’s precocity first gives him a conspicuous role beyond the family. He works for Charles A. Lindbergh’s administration as Aunt Evelyn’s oratorical prodigy and becomes, in the narrator’s description, New Jersey’s leading authority on tobacco farming. Aunt Evelyn’s invitation to the White House seems to Sandy an honor and a chance to matter. When Herman Roth explains that he will not attend and that Sandy is barred from programs sponsored by the Office of American Absorption, Sandy interprets the decision as an attempt to take that opportunity away from him.

Herman Roth tries to puncture the glamour surrounding the visit by describing Joachim von Ribbentrop as a Nazi operative and fraud, and by urging Sandy to learn about the European events and political figures his father believes Sandy does not understand. Sandy rejects the warning rather than reconsidering the invitation. Bess Roth tells him that Aunt Evelyn is using him as a tool, but he insists he cannot let her down. The conflict is therefore not only over a trip: Sandy sees himself as acting on a political commitment, while his parents see him as being drawn into a circle whose purposes he cannot judge.

The breach becomes openly hostile at breakfast. After Sandy likens Herman Roth to a dictator worse than Adolf Hitler, Herman Roth leaves without striking him, consistent with his and Bess Roth’s rejection of corporal punishment. Bess Roth then slaps Sandy and orders him to obey his father’s rule. Sandy does not flinch; instead, he declares his intention to go with Aunt Evelyn and uses the contemptuous language of the political faction he has adopted against his own family. His defiance makes the household’s political division intimate and immediate: the language of public allegiance becomes an insult directed at his parents.

Estrangement at Home

During the family’s mounting uncertainty, Sandy continues to describe Herman Roth and Bess Roth as frightened, paranoid, and irrational. He has absorbed Aunt Evelyn’s distinction between herself and what she calls the Jewish rabble, and repeats that framing to Philip Roth. His sneering is not merely a passing adolescent mannerism in this setting. The narrator emphasizes that Sandy keeps disparaging his parents while the family faces an ambiguously menacing predicament, so that his contempt deepens their vulnerability rather than relieving it.

The change that follows is striking but deliberately unexplained. After Philip Roth is hospitalized with a potentially life-threatening hematoma, Sandy is no longer angry, superior, or contemptuous. The narrator sees the quiet, conscientious boy he had known before Sandy became a precocious public figure. Several explanations remain possible: the crisis may have exhausted Sandy’s taste for stardom and conflict; he may never have believed in the views he was promoting; Herman Roth may have reached him during Philip Roth’s hospitalization; or Sandy may simply be concealing his former self until circumstances change again. The account does not settle which explanation is true. It records instead that, for the time being, shock has steered Sandy back into the family fold.

A Return Marked by Gifts and Unease

Sandy’s altered manner is visible when Alvin Roth returns from Philadelphia. He arrives in a pearl-gray sharkskin suit, conspicuous shoes, and a new Buick, carrying a gift for everyone: an apron for Bess Roth, a sketchpad for Sandy, a Phillies cap for Philip Roth, and a certificate for a free lobster dinner for Herman Roth. Sandy’s sketchpad joins the presents as a sign of the family’s shared history, while the gifts themselves briefly make the household appear undivided.

That appearance cannot hold. Alvin Roth’s return comes after Walter Winchell’s assassination, when the dangers feared since Charles A. Lindbergh took office seem newly close. The narrator anticipates a violent clash between Herman Roth and Alvin Roth despite the warmth of the homecoming and Bess Roth’s preparation of Alvin Roth’s favorite foods. Sandy’s place in the scene is not that of the earlier swaggering political partisan: he is back among his relatives, but their reunion takes place under pressure that threatens to undo it.

The Journey to Kentucky

Sandy later volunteers to accompany Herman Roth on part of the journey to the Mawhinney farm in Kentucky, where they are going to bring Seldon Wishnow back. The trip offers Sandy a chance, as the narrator understands it, to show real bravery, regain standing as the older son, and reenter the family from which he has felt torn away. Yet his effort is vulnerable to misjudgment. At the clinic, while Herman Roth is being treated, Sandy sits on the porch railing sketching patients, including Cecile, a thirteen-year-old girl. Herman Roth sees the drawing, pulls Sandy off the porch by his belt, and orders him to stop. He invokes the lynching of Leo Frank to warn him that drawing people in this place could expose them to danger. Sandy tries to minimize what he has drawn, but the narrator says he is lying. The episode makes his artistic absorption collide with his father’s fear for their safety.

The journey’s geography and precautions turn that danger into a sustained experience. The travelers go through New Jersey to Camden, cross the Delaware to Philadelphia, continue to Baltimore, pass through West Virginia, and head into Kentucky toward Lexington and Boyle County. Bess Roth follows their progress on an encyclopedia map of the states and Canadian provinces; on the road, Sandy uses an Esso map and a flashlight, watching for suspicious people in unfamiliar towns. In West Virginia, Herman Roth repeatedly asks him to pass forward Mr. Cucuzza’s spare pistol when battered trucks, roadside pickups, or hostile-seeming encounters alarm him. Sandy later admits that he was frightened nearly all the time, both in cities where he feared Ku Klux Klansmen and in the impoverished rural landscape beyond them.

Drawing, Fear, and Family

Sandy’s art provides a different record of the expedition from the maps and precautions. Once home, he draws from memory an illustrated account of the family’s descent into a hard American world. Its careful rendering of dilapidated shacks, makeshift stone supports, crude chimneys, and roofs weighted with rocks preserves the terrain he crossed and the fear he experienced there. The drawings that first appear to Herman Roth as a dangerous distraction become, in Sandy’s hands, a sustained act of observation.

Across these episodes, Sandy is neither fixed in his political rebellion nor wholly reconciled with his family. His return to them is expressed through changed conduct, a renewed willingness to help, and an artistic record of shared hardship, but the narrator leaves its permanence uncertain. His arc gives the family conflict a visible generational dimension: public recognition briefly draws Sandy away from his parents, while danger and responsibility draw him back, without erasing either his independence or the consequences of his estrangement.