World War II

World War II is presented as both a distant global catastrophe and a looming threat to life at home. Newsreel images show the war’s devastation, while Shepsie Tirschwell’s prediction connects its possible outcomes to the political future of the United States and to his family’s decision to flee.

War on the Newsreel Screen

The newsreel offers a succession of scenes from the war: armies, aircraft, ships, ruined infrastructure, mass graves, and civilian suffering. The montage stresses repetition across different places and peoples, making the conflict seem at once geographically vast and relentlessly similar. In this alternate history, the United States alone among the great powers has been spared the destruction shown on screen.

The sequence then turns from footage of war to a formal presidential dinner. That abrupt cut places public pageantry beside images of distant devastation. The contrast makes the war’s apparent remoteness unstable: the country may be spared the fighting for now, but the surrounding political events give no assurance that it will remain untouched.

Shepsie Tirschwell’s Forecast

After watching years of unedited newsreel footage, Shepsie Tirschwell becomes convinced that the agreement Charles A. Lindbergh and Adolf Hitler reached in Iceland in 1941 conceals a plan for further conquest. In his forecast, Hitler first defeats the Soviet Union and then invades England. Meanwhile, Japan overruns China, India, and Australia, extending its power across Asia. Only after these victories, Tirschwell believes, will Charles A. Lindbergh establish an American Fascist New Order modeled on Hitler’s dictatorship, preparing for a later German invasion and Nazification of South America.

Tirschwell projects the danger forward by two years. He imagines Hitler’s banner flying over London’s Parliament, Japanese rule established over Sydney, New Delhi, and Peking, and Charles A. Lindbergh reelected for another four years. In that future, the border with Canada closes and diplomatic relations between the two countries end. The government then turns against the country’s four and a half million Jews, using the external danger as justification for curtailing constitutional rights. This is Tirschwell’s prediction, not an account of events already fulfilled in the narrative.

Departure and Narrative Significance

Tirschwell’s fear has a concrete consequence: his family prepares to leave for Winnipeg. Members of Winnipeg’s Jewish community help arrange work for him as a projectionist, find housing for the extended family, and provide a low-interest loan to assist with the move and support his wife’s elderly parents until she can find employment. The practical detail of the arrangements makes emigration more than an abstract possibility: it is a costly, organized break with home.

Tirschwell hates leaving his city, his friends, and his distinctive job at Newark’s leading theater, but the footage has convinced him that staying is more dangerous. His departure shakes the narrator’s father, who had not heard of any Jewish families he knew personally making this choice. The war’s significance therefore lies not only in the destruction displayed on screen or in Tirschwell’s forecast of expanding conquest. It also lies in the moment when those images and predictions alter a family’s sense of safety, making refuge in Canada seem worth the losses of departure.