Union

Union is a working-class town in New Jersey that embodies an early, consequential choice for the Roth family: whether to pursue homeownership and greater financial security despite the prospect of living as the only Jews in their immediate community. A proposed move there offered Herman Roth a path upward at Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, but the family’s visit made the social cost of that opportunity difficult to ignore.

Setting and the Promise of Advancement

About thirteen months before Charles A. Lindbergh’s presidential nomination in June 1940, Herman Roth was offered a promotion to assistant manager at the insurance company’s office in Union, six miles west of the family’s home. The promotion recognized his strong sales through the worst of the Great Depression. It promised an immediate increase in income to about seventy-five dollars a week, with the possibility of earning as much as one hundred dollars a week later—substantial sums for a family accustomed to tight finances.

The offer also seemed to bring within reach a goal Herman had cherished since growing up poor in a Newark tenement: owning a house. In Union, modest single-family homes were selling for only a few thousand dollars. The family’s prospects appeared to include not just a better salary but a home of their own and a measure of security that had previously seemed out of reach.

A Visit Shadowed by Isolation

The Roths drove to Union on a Saturday after lunch to look at houses. They passed modest two-story homes, each with a screened porch, lawn, shrubs, and a driveway leading to a one-car garage. The houses offered more room than the family’s two-bedroom apartment and suggested the domestic stability associated with small-town American life.

That promise was shadowed by the town’s social character. Union, like nearby Hillside, was a Gentile working-class community. The family understood that Herman might be the only Jew among roughly thirty-five people in his office, Bess Roth might be the only Jewish woman on their street, and their sons, Sandy Roth and Philip Roth, might be the only Jewish children at school. Their concern drew on Bess’s childhood in Elizabeth, where she had grown up in a flat above her father’s grocery store before finding greater confidence after marriage and a move to Newark’s Jewish neighborhood. The imagined isolation in Union threatened to make a home purchase feel less like arrival than exposure.

The Promotion Declined

After the family visited Union, their initial excitement about moving into the home-owning class gave way to anxiety about how their neighbors would treat them. Bess’s apparent enthusiasm for the move was recognized by the children as feigned. The family’s fear was not that the houses themselves were unsuitable, but that the promise of economic advancement came with the prospect of being conspicuously alone as Jews in ordinary settings: at work, on the street, and at school.

Herman ultimately went to the company’s New York home office and told the superintendent of agencies that he could not accept the promotion. He gave up a position he had long wanted and the income and homeownership it might have enabled. The family stayed in Newark rather than move to Union. In the novel’s account of the decision, the town marks an early instance in which the Roths’ pursuit of security is constrained by the threat of religious exclusion.

Later Echoes in the Family’s Circumstances

Union reappears in the account of Herman’s later work at a produce market. During demanding overnight shifts, he sometimes drove before dawn to farms in Passaic and Union counties to bring in produce himself when that arrangement offered a better deal. The reference places Union not only in the family’s abandoned housing plans but also within the surrounding region of Herman’s work.

The original promotion and the later government relocation scheme are separate episodes, but both involve the family’s relationship with Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. In 1942 the company participated in Homestead 42, a federal program offering relocation opportunities to senior employees. Herman later quit rather than cooperate with that initiative, while Bess left her job to help keep the family ready to flee to Canada if necessary. Against that later history, the earlier decision not to move to Union foreshadows the family’s increasingly fraught calculation of security: economic opportunity offered no guarantee of belonging, and staying put could itself become a form of resistance.