Herman refuses relocation and quits his insurance company job

Herman’s refusal to relocate and resignation from Metropolitan Life turn a corporate transfer into a test of whether an American family can resist political pressure without surrendering its home. The company presents the move to Danville, Kentucky, as a generous opportunity to deepen a family’s Americanness; Herman sees the coercion behind that language and gives up a twelve-year career rather than take his household where the government wants it sent.

The transfer presented as opportunity

The pressure was especially sharp because work and homeownership had once seemed connected to security and advancement for Herman. During the Depression, strong sales as an agent for Metropolitan Life had brought an offer of promotion to assistant manager in Union, six miles west of the family’s Newark home. The salary promised a remarkable improvement for the family, and the possibility of buying an inexpensive house would have answered Herman’s long-held ambition to become a homeowner. But the prospect also carried the cost of living in a Gentile working-class town where he expected to be the only Jewish man in his office, Bess the only Jewish woman on their street, and their sons the only Jewish children in school.

The later Danville transfer came through a more explicit government-corporate arrangement. In a letter dated May 22, 1942, Metropolitan Life told Herman it was participating in Homestead 42, administered by the Office of American Absorption within the United States Department of the Interior. The program was described as a nationwide initiative offering selected employees relocation at government expense. Its official comparison was the Homestead Act of 1862: families, like earlier settlers, would leave their homes to take root in a new region and strengthen the country. In this language, a forced change of residence became an act of patriotic self-improvement.

Several days passed before Herman could bring himself to show the letter to Bess. The transfer was to take effect on September 1, moving him from Metropolitan Life’s Newark district to a new district office in Danville. He used a map included in the Homestead 42 packet to locate the town, then read from a Chamber of Commerce pamphlet: Danville was the seat of rural Boyle County, about sixty miles south of Lexington. He continued with facts about Kentucky’s settlement and population, as though geographic information might make the assignment reasonable. Bess’s immediate question was how many Jews lived in Danville and in the state. For her, the issue was not the attractions of the countryside but the isolation the move would impose.

A family confronts the assignment

The transfer unsettled a family whose sense of home depended on local ties as much as on its address. Bess pointed to their families, lifelong friends, and children’s friends in Newark, and to the schools and Jewish community in which their sons had been raised. She contrasted that rooted life with her own childhood experience of loneliness. The company’s decision seemed all the more unjust because of the effort and hours Herman had given it.

Sandy’s response revealed that he already knew Danville’s location: it was only fourteen miles from the Mawhinneys’ tobacco farm. He was visibly pleased by the prospect. The narrator understood that the assignment of Herman as one of his district’s seven Jewish homesteaders might not be a coincidence, and connected the family’s fate to the earlier rupture in which Herman had ordered Aunt Evelyn out of the house. The transfer thus arrives not as an isolated administrative decision but as the consequence of conflicts that have already reached into the family home.

That evening, Herman invited his sons to ask whatever troubled them, while Bess remained unconvinced that the family should accept its fate. Herman paced, absorbed in the knowledge that he had been defeated. The scene reverses the family’s earlier roles in confronting political pressure: the people who had once struggled against uncertainty now face a decision whose consequences seem to have gathered suddenly around them. Their continuing attachment to Summit Avenue is set against the prospect of a distant, imposed future.

Resignation and its cost

Herman’s answer was to quit rather than take the transfer. The loss was substantial: he had spent twelve years with Metropolitan Life, and the company’s job had offered the stability on which a family depended. He took work at the Miller Street produce market, beginning with a night shift. He came home around nine or ten in the morning, ate, and went to sleep; before five in the afternoon he was up and preparing to return. Farmers arrived with produce in the evening, while grocers, restaurant owners, hotelkeepers, and peddlers came to buy through the night. He relied on coffee and sandwiches prepared by Bess, and sometimes drove out before dawn to collect produce himself when that would secure a better deal.

The difference between the two jobs registers the price of refusing. Instead of a long-established insurance career, Herman had exhausting night work and, after returning home, a drink before he could settle into a meal. The family’s finances also became less secure. Bess left her position at Hahne’s, as well as her earlier plan to build savings, and the family kept enough money in Montreal to cross into Canada and start again if flight became necessary. Their refusal to go to Kentucky did not mean that they felt safe; it meant they would not cooperate with the transfer.

Their choice also had a social cost. The other families from the local Metropolitan district selected for Homestead 42 left Newark during the summer. Friends came by on Saturdays to say goodbye, and the remaining Roth family watched their cars depart. Herman and Bess alone among that group stayed behind. The departures made the threatened disruption tangible: the family was still on Summit Avenue, but its familiar circle was dispersing.

Resistance as a principle

The narrator eventually understands that Herman’s resignation was not simply a fearful response to an uncertain future. Herman would neither accept a government directive he judged unjust nor follow Bess’s proposal to run to Canada. His resistance was rooted in what the narrator describes as an uncompromising idea of fair play: when superior forces bullied people through a corrupt arrangement, Herman’s instinct was not to yield. His refusal therefore differs from a strategy of escape. He gives up the protection of his job but remains where his family has built its life.

That stance brings material vulnerability rather than triumph. The family loses income, watches friends leave, and prepares for the possibility that it may yet have to flee. The company’s language of opportunity cannot conceal how public policy is being carried into private life through an employer and the power to assign work. Herman’s choice makes that mechanism visible: relocation is formally offered as a benefit, but the practical alternative is to sacrifice a livelihood. His resignation rejects the premise that compliance is the price of belonging, even as the family must live with the consequences of that rejection.