The time is ripe for HBO's "The Plot Against America," which has been filming Tuesday and Wednesday in Paterson.

Riper, certainly, than the fruit.

Pears, peaches, apples and grapes, piled high in crates and barrels and being sold from a picturesque 1940s sidewalk stand on Ellison Street, certainly looked good. Juicy enough to eat, in fact — until strollers stopped by to give them a squeeze.

Fake.

"They're for the movie — they're plastic," said Carolyn Mitchell, a production assistant, as passer-by Diego Maya stopped to inspect a plum.

"The plums look so good, people want to buy them," Mitchell said.

Elsewhere in the downtown City Hall district, old DeSotos, Packards and Dodges were being readied for a Wednesday night shoot that was expected to last until 3 a.m.

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A vintage newsstand displayed McCall's, Home & Garden, and 1941 newspapers ("FDR Sells Ships to U.K."). Somewhere extras were off in dressing rooms, dolling up in their 1940s A-line skirts and fedoras.

""It's like going back in time," said Marcia Sotorrio, director of Paterson's division of cultural affairs. "It was such an experience to see downtown Paterson, dressed up like the '40s, with the women and men walking down the street. In those days, people dressed up to go out."

Shops along Ellison and Washington Streets had false fronts: "Lesser and Brothers Butcher Shop," "Josephine's Custom Hats," and — ominously — "Judah's Luncheonette."

Ominous — because, in Philip Roth's 2004 speculative novel "The Plot Against America," an "alternate history" of the 1940s, things don't go too well for America's Jews.

"He captures the feeling of the oppression that is initially subtle, and gradually increases, and builds to a crescendo," said Dave Evans, a fan of the book.

Evans was there on business: He's one of the drivers, in period clothes, who motor around the film locations in vintage cars (in his case, a '39 DeSoto). He's done similar duty on other film and TV projects: "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," "Batman Forever," "The Irishman."

But he's also a retired schoolteacher. He reads. And like many readers, he was blown away by Roth's novel about — SPOILER ALERT — an alternate America in which Charles A. Lindbergh, the hero aviator (and isolationist) is elected President of the United States during World War II, and begins a program of soft fascism and oppression of Jews that turns out to be inspired by — wait for it — collusion with a hostile foreign power.

Sound familiar? It didn't to readers in 2004 — because the events it seems to anticipate, with uncanny accuracy, hadn't happened yet.

That's what many readers can't get over. How did he know?

"That Philip Roth could predict the future, that's kind of amazing," Evans said.

Maybe not so much, says Ian Marshall, who has taught modern American literature at William Paterson University in Wayne.

Roth ("Portnoy's Complaint," "The Human Stain"), the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who died in 2018, was looking at a deeper dysfunction than can be pinned on any one president, any one era.

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"One of the ways that political power has historically been cultivated in America is that we pit working class groups against each other," Marshall says. "Our current president basically takes a whole subset of the working class and pits them against everyone else. He takes Mexican-Americans, and he says they're rapists, they're murderers, they're the guys you need to be worried about. Roth anticipates that — not because he was looking forward, but because he was looking back. Because there's a history of exactly this kind of political manipulation in this country. Roth wasn't necessarily omniscient. What he had was an accurate, clear-eyed view of what America historically has done."

Roth's novel is set in Newark, where he himself grew up (the main character is named Philip Roth). And it's Newark that Paterson is standing in for in the film — just as it did several days earlier, when the "Sopranos" movie prequel, "The Many Saints of Newark," was filming here. "The Plot Against America" also has reportedly been filming — or will film — in Jersey City, Elizabeth and Newark.

The series stars Winona Ryder and John Turturro (neither was sighted in Paterson this week), and was co-adapted by "The Wire's" David Simon for a 2020 run on HBO. We're not as omniscient as Philip Roth — but if it airs in the months leading up to election day, don't be surprised.

"The Plot Against America" is one of many new movie projects, filming in Paterson in recent months (Steven Spielberg's "West Side Story" remake is slated to shoot there over the summer) that is making Paterson, the old and storied mill town that has suffered in recent decades from crime and decay, the new darling of Hollywood's eye. The city fathers, and mothers, couldn't be more excited.

"This is generating a lot of buzz because now people are starting to see a pattern as far as filming here," said Paterson mayor Andre Sayegh. "This is helping to rebrand Paterson. We're not the Silk City anymore. We're like the Silver Screen City."

Email: beckerman@northjersey.com; Twitter: @jimbeckerman1