Sanford Roth

Sanford Roth, usually called Sandy, is the elder son of Herman Roth and Bess Roth and the older brother of Philip Roth. A gifted, unassuming artist, he first appears as a boy whose skill at drawing earns him an audience wherever he goes. His participation in the Lindbergh administration’s Just Folks program changes that local distinction into public influence: after a summer working on a Kentucky farm, he returns with new confidence and becomes a recruiter for a policy aimed at Jewish boys. His arc gives the family’s political crisis a personal shape, as artistic talent and youthful independence become entangled with the pressure to assimilate.

Identity and Early Talent

At twelve, Sanford Roth is a seventh-grader known throughout the neighborhood for being able to draw almost anything. His particular interest has turned to faces. After school, he settles with a large spiral pad and mechanical pencil while other children gather around and call out requests for portraits. He looks up and down from his page, and the people nearby emerge as recognizable likenesses. His usual answer to their amazement is a shrug or a smile; his modesty, the account suggests, is part of the quiet seriousness that makes his talent compelling.

At home, his artistic practice is becoming more ambitious. Rather than merely copying illustrations from magazines or photographs, he is studying the human figure in an art manual he won in a school Arbor Day poster contest. The poster’s design drew on a red two-cent stamp from Philip Roth’s collection, linking Sandy’s work to his younger brother’s early enthusiasm for philately. Art in the family is not a solitary accomplishment: Sandy’s skill grows in a household where Philip’s stamp collection can supply an image and a starting point.

The brothers’ family stories also give Sandy a place in a private mythology of Lindbergh. Before he was born, Bess Roth learned she was pregnant on the day Charles A. Lindbergh completed his celebrated solo flight to Paris. At nine, Sandy drew the two events together: his mother, wearing her kitchen apron amid a crowd in downtown Newark, points toward the Spirit of St. Louis as she realizes she has conceived him. The drawing turns coincidence into a family legend, associating Sandy’s arrival with the aviator whose public reputation would later divide the household.

Portraits and Political Change

Sandy’s drawings of Lindbergh reveal how difficult it is, at first, to reconcile the admired aviator with the political danger his nomination represents to the Roths. A few days after Walter Winchell’s broadcast criticizing Lindbergh, Sandy brings his portfolio to the dining room and lays out three portraits. In one, Lindbergh wears his leather flying cap; in another, heavy goggles rest above his eyes; in the third, he is bareheaded, his gaze directed toward the horizon. Together the images present a courageous, physically commanding hero, not an obvious villain. Sandy tells Philip that Lindbergh will become president, repeating Alvin Roth’s prediction.

That judgment contrasts with the fear felt by Herman Roth and the wider Jewish neighborhood. Sandy’s ability to render Lindbergh as an impressive individual does not mean the political threat has disappeared; rather, the drawings preserve the appeal that makes Lindbergh’s rise consequential. The same gift that once earned Sandy admiration for its modesty will later help him influence others, though the move from making images to speaking on behalf of a political program marks a substantial change in his public role.

Just Folks and the Kentucky Summer

In 1941, Sandy leaves home for an eight-week placement with a tobacco farmer in Kentucky through Just Folks, a program created under the Office of American Absorption. The administration presents the scheme as a volunteer work program introducing city youth to traditional rural life. Its practical plan is to send Jewish boys between twelve and eighteen away from their city schools and families to work as field hands and day laborers. Notices appear at Chancellor Avenue School and nearby Weequahic High School, and an OAA representative explains the program to the boys. Sandy brings an application home requiring a parent’s signature.

The decision produces an anxious departure. Sandy has never been away from home, and the family is already living with uncertainty about its place in the country. Herman objects to what the Office of American Absorption implies about Jewish citizenship; Alvin’s service with the Canadian army adds another source of worry. Sandy nevertheless applies, supported by Aunt Evelyn, who works with Lionel Bengelsdorf, New Jersey’s director of the OAA. Her encouragement helps him persist despite his parents’ opposition, and Herman eventually yields rather than make an already uncertain family situation more difficult.

During the summer, Sandy’s weekly letters offer brief reports on farm work and the weather, but the drawings below his signature occupy more space than the messages. He sketches a pig weighing more than three hundred pounds, Orin Mawhinney’s dog, a lamb, or the farm’s recently painted barn. Bess Roth’s practical questions about whether he needs clothes, medicine, or money often go unanswered. The pictures show that he continues to draw after a day’s labor, while their subjects record how thoroughly his attention has shifted to the farm around him. At home, the empty chair at dinner makes his absence felt through the ordinary arrangement of family life.

Return, Recruitment, and Family Tension

When Sandy returns to Newark in late August, Aunt Evelyn recognizes him first. He has gained about ten pounds, grown several inches, and acquired a sun-lightened appearance, a stronger build, and a new, outdoorsy way of walking. His family greets him with affection and jokes, but Philip’s impression is that his brother looks almost like a stranger. The journey has altered not only his appearance: in the car, the family hears a huskier voice and a drawl for the first time.

The summer soon becomes the basis for a more consequential role. Of the one hundred New Jersey boys who went west with Just Folks, Sandy is selected as the statewide recruiting officer. He is to speak as a former participant to eligible Jewish boys and their families, describe the program’s benefits, and encourage applications. He begins spending afternoons at Aunt Evelyn’s OAA office. What might have remained a personal summer experience is thus made into organized advocacy, with Sandy’s own example serving the administration’s effort to attract other boys.

The appointment changes how his family and neighbors see him. By spring 1942, Sandy is a few months from high school, neat in his dress and carefully groomed, with a posture compared to that of a West Point cadet. His work as a Just Folks spokesman has given him unusual authority for his age. Adults respond to his influence, and younger neighborhood children look up to him, hoping to qualify for the farm program. His parents, surprised by the force of his persuasion, find him more imposing at home than the amiable boy whose artistic gift had once seemed his defining trait.

Alvin Roth interprets Sandy’s advancement as opportunism, a judgment that Philip registers through Alvin’s disgust. The evidence does not settle whether that accusation is fair. It does establish the contrast: Sandy’s public success rests on qualities—composure, confidence, an ability to win listeners—that his earlier modesty had kept unobtrusive. His story therefore resists a simple account of either innocent independence or deliberate political calculation. He is both a boy shaped by a new experience and a young advocate whose growing authority serves a program his father distrusts.

Narrative Role and Significance

Sandy’s trajectory links intimate family details to the broader machinery of the alternate political order. A school art contest, a stamp, a mother’s empty dinner chair, and a series of farm sketches trace the gradual change in his life more concretely than political slogans could. Just Folks reaches the Roth household through a familiar route—an application, an aunt’s support, a summer job—and returns with Sandy as its most effective local representative.

His changing relationship to Lindbergh’s image is central to that arc. The boy who draws the president as a compelling aviator becomes a spokesman for an administration’s program of assimilation, while the family’s fear makes the costs and implications of that program impossible to ignore. Sandy’s development also alters his place among the brothers: he remains the admired older brother, but his political alignment strains the understanding between him and Alvin and unsettles the household. The evidence follows him through his recruitment work and the debates it provokes; it does not provide a final resolution of his political commitments.