I Married a Communist

In the midst of reading Philip Roth's I Married a Communist (don't act all surprised) and I'm early into it, but I stumbled across this passage and I wanted to unpack it.

I wanted to partake of the national character. Nothing had seemed to come more naturally to my American-born parents, nothing came more naturally to me, and no method could have seemed any more profound than participating through the tongue that Norman Corwin spoke, a linguistic distillation of the excited feelings of community that the war had aroused, the high demotic poetry that was the liturgy of World War II.

History had been scaled down and personalized, American had been scaled down and personalized: for me, that was the enchantment not only of Norman Corwin but of the times, You flood into history and history floods into you. You flood into America and America floods into you. And all by virtue of being alive in New Jersey and twelve years old and sitting by the radio in 1945. Back when popular culture was sufficiently connected to the last century to be susceptible still to a little language, there was a swooning side to all of it for me.