The Tirschwell family moves to Canada

The Tirschwell family’s move from Newark to Winnipeg is the first departure for Canada that Herman Roth knows personally, making an abstract political danger tangible in the life of an old friend. The family does not leave for an uncertain destination: Winnipeg’s small Jewish community helps secure work, apartments, and a low-interest loan. Yet the practical care that makes departure possible cannot erase what the move costs. The Tirschwells leave their native city and friends, while their decision forces Herman to confront the possibility that staying in the United States may become untenable.

The decision to leave

Herman learns of the move on his way home from work, when he stops at the Newsreel Theater to see filmed coverage of the White House dinner for Joachim von Ribbentrop. After the screening, he visits Shepsie Tirschwell in the projection booth. His boyhood friend tells him that the family will leave for Winnipeg on June 1: Shepsie, his wife, their three children, his mother, and his wife’s elderly parents. The departure is therefore not a solitary escape but a family undertaking that includes several generations and people who will need continuing support.

Shepsie has reasons to regret leaving. He hates parting from Newark and his old friends, and he is giving up what he regards as a one-of-a-kind position at the city’s most important theater. His decision is not presented as a simple preference for a new life. The family has much to lose, but the arrangements in Winnipeg give them a way to go together rather than leave vulnerable relatives behind. Members of the city’s Jewish community find Shepsie work as a projectionist at a neighborhood movie house and apartments for the entire family in a modest Jewish neighborhood resembling their own.

The assistance also addresses the family’s financial obligations. A low-interest loan will cover the cost of moving from the United States and help support the in-laws until Mrs. Tirschwell finds work in Winnipeg and can contribute to their living expenses. The plan makes migration a collective act of protection, sustained by a community that helps with employment, housing, relocation costs, and care for older family members.

Political fear and competing forecasts

Shepsie’s understanding of the danger grows out of his work: for years, he has watched unedited newsreel footage from around the world. In the wake of von Ribbentrop’s Washington visit, he believes the Iceland Pact between Charles A. Lindbergh and Adolf Hitler contains a secret arrangement. In his forecast, Hitler will first defeat the Soviet Union and then conquer England; Japan will overrun China, India, and Australia. Only after these advances, Shepsie believes, will the president establish an American dictatorship modeled on Hitler’s, paving the way for German conquest and Nazification of South America.

He extends this projected sequence into the future of American Jews. Two years later, he imagines, Nazi flags will fly over London’s Houses of Parliament, the Japanese Rising Sun over Sydney, New Delhi, and Peking, and Lindbergh will have won another four-year presidential term. The border with Canada will then close and diplomatic relations between the two countries will be severed. Shepsie expects a mass assault on the four and a half million Jews in the United States, with the curtailment of constitutional rights justified as a response to the danger within the country. This is his forecast, not a confirmed account of later events; its importance lies in how it shapes his family’s present decision to leave.

Herman’s response and the Roth family’s choice

Shepsie’s pessimism goes further than anything Herman has predicted. Shaken by the news, Herman does not tell his family that the Tirschwells are leaving. He fears that the news will terrify Philip, anger Sandy, and prompt Bess to demand immediate emigration. He is also unsettled by the White House footage: Charles A. Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh warmly greet von Ribbentrop and his wife, while prominent guests appear eager to dine and dance with them. Among the guests, to Herman’s dismay, are Lionel Bengelsdorf and Evelyn Finkel. The public welcome makes Shepsie’s fears harder for Herman to dismiss, even though he does not accept his friend’s forecast as a reason to follow him.

Bess eventually learns of the planned move and challenges Herman over withholding it. He explains that Shepsie has reached his decision after watching the news, while insisting that he is informed too and has arrived at a different conclusion. Herman believes the anti-Semitic forces in the country want Jews to become so exhausted that they leave. In his view, emigrating would concede the country to those who seek to exclude them. He points instead to the Supreme Court, to Franklin D. Roosevelt and other public figures he trusts, and to the coming congressional election and the ballot box. Bess doubts that voters will turn against the Republicans; Herman holds to the possibility that legal and political institutions can still protect their rights.

Departure as a measure of what is at stake

The Tirschwells’ move takes on greater weight as other families leave. By the time the summer ends, families among the Roths’ Metropolitan Life Insurance Company friends have departed Newark under Homestead 42, while the Roths remain on Summit Avenue. Their friends’ tearful visits and farewells make the consequences of separation immediate: the children watch as departing cars pull away, and Bess calls after them not to forget to write. The family’s situation differs from the Tirschwells’ chosen refuge in Canada, but both departures reveal how political pressure has entered ordinary decisions about work, home, and family.

Since Lindbergh’s inauguration a year and a half earlier, Herman understands that only an estimated two to three hundred Jewish families have taken up permanent residence in Canada. The Tirschwells are the first such family he knows personally, and their choice leaves him shaken. He neither treats their decision as proof that everyone should go nor regards it as an abstract political gesture. Their move gives the crisis a human scale: a theater projectionist must leave the city and work he loves, and a community across the border must help an extended family begin again. For Herman, the departure becomes both a warning and a challenge to remain—an intimate test of whether his faith in American rights can withstand the evidence of friends preparing to flee.