posted on 15 Jul 2019

Call It Sleep by Henry Roth

The history of this book is remarkable in itself: first published in 1934 and despite decent reviews it sold very poorly and went out of print for the best part of 30 years. Word of mouth between some critics and scholars meant it never quite went away and in the 1960s it was reclaimed as a classic of working class, Jewish life – identified by Leslie Fiedler as part of the 1930’s ‘radical proletarian’ tradition. For others, however, its significance was that it belonged to a more Modernist strand of literature and deserved comparison with the likes of Joyce’s ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’.

For Roth, a Jewish immigrant from Galicia (now the Ukraine) in his late 20s, the book, which was heavily informed by his own experiences, proved to be something of a burden. For a whole variety of reasons Roth developed a monumental case of writer’s block that lasted for over 60 years. He blamed this on a whole host of factors including his loss of belief in Communism, Judaism and odd psycho-sexual disorders but, whatever the reason, his subsequent silence surely added to the neglect of what would turn out to be a book thought by some to be a misunderstood masterpiece.

The story of the book focuses on about two years in the life of a young 6 year old boy, David, who has come as an immigrant to New York with his mother to join his physically and emotionally abusive father, Albert, who is already in the country. The links made with Joyce's Portrait stem from the way we see the world mediated through David’s detailed impressionistic experiences of his life - not in Dublin as is the case with Joyce but in the immigrant dominated, poverty-stricken working class neighbourhoods of New York in the post-Depression years.

In the first UK edition of the book published in 1964 that I have, the introduction by Walter Allen describes David in this way:

“David recreates, transmutes, the world he lives in not into any simple fantasy of make‐believe—we're a long way here either from Tom Sawyer or the young Studs Lonigan—but with the desperate, compulsive imagination of a poet. He is, indeed, for all the grotesque difference in milieu, much closer to the boy Wordsworth of the Prelude.”

This isn’t a book full of big, set-piece ‘events’ but one which is packed with the drama of a young boy seeking to understand the world he is growing up in. Almost every event is new to him, emotionally loaded and packed with tension. The New York Times review of the re-release of the book is really excellent and has this perceptive observation to make:

“Everything is channelled through the child's perceptions. For considerable sections, David's uncorrected apprehensions of the world become the substance of the narrative, a mixture of stony realism and ecstatic phantasmagoria. Yet the book is not at all the kind of precious or narrowing study of a child's sensibility that such a description might suggest; for Henry Roth has taken pains to root it deeply in the external world, in the streets, the tenements, the other children David encounters. We are locked into the experience of a child, but are not limited to his grasp of it.”

There are some (literarlly) electric moments in the book and certain episodes and passages really jump out of the text. David’s first encounter with sexuality when he is trapped in a cupboard with the predatory sister of his friend; the arrival of his rumbustious, profane and rollicking aunt; getting lost on the unfamiliar streets of his neighbourhood; his physical punishments at the hands of his paranoid father; his success as a student when he takes lessons from a Rabbi; and, ultimately, the life-threatening dalliance with a live electric rail.

But the thread that provides the driving force of the novel is the relationship between mother, son and father and the ‘mystery’ behind his father’s hostility towards David. The unravelling of that story – is David really Albert’s son – provides the framework around which all this life swirls.

But despite all this excellent stuff, I have a confession to make. I found the book quite hard work. One of the issues for me was the use of a sort of phonetic depiction of the use of language – Jewish New York accents and Yiddish or Hebrew is presented in a way that often doesn’t make immediate sense until you read them out loud. This may be a particular difficulty for me as a Brit and not someone immediately comfortable with New York working class patois but, truthfully, it rather got in the way for me.

“My ticher calls id Xmas, bode de kids call id Chrizmas. Id's a goyish holiday anyways. Wunst I hanged op a stockin' in Brooklyn. Bod mine fodder pud in eggshells wid terlit paper an' a piece f'om a ol' kendle. So he lefted w'en he seen me.”

If you’re a fan of Jewish American literature and you haven’t read this, it’s surely a must. If, on the other hand, you’re new to this kind of novel, be prepared to take your time and let it seep in.

The book is available in paperback as a Penguin Modern classic with a preface by Alfred Kazin and can be picked up for under £10. Getting your hands on a first edition with the wonderful jacket depicted above is going to cost you a whole lot more.

Terry Potter

July 2019