Call It Sleep by Henry Roth
With an Introduction by Alfred Kazin and an Afterword by Hana Wirth-Nesher

About the Book
Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep tells the story of David Schearl, a young boy who immigrates to the United States with his family from Austria in 1907. At the heart of the novel are two intertwined stories: the drama of David’s family and the drama of his confrontation with, and acclimation to, life in New York’s immigrant ghettos. The relationships among the members of the Schearl family are complex. David and his mother are deeply attached to one another and David’s father, who is a very angry character, feels excluded from this twosome and hostile toward his son. David, in turn fears his father’s volatility. The family dynamics are further complicated by the relationship between David’s parents --- a relationship whose complexity is revealed over the course of the novel. This family drama unfolds alongside the story of David’s first encounters with America: its streets, its language, its authority figures, and its children. Over the course of the novel, David is initiated into the life of the street and the life of the cheder (religious school) and witnesses his parents’ vulnerability as immigrants in America’s economic and social networks. For David, the new world of immigrant New York is one of vitality, sexuality, camaraderie and violence.

In writing Call It Sleep, Roth was deeply influenced by the writing of James Joyce and other modernist writers. With the exception of a few scenes, the novel is written entirely from David’s perspective. There is no omniscient narrator to tell us what other characters are thinking or to reveal contexts or meanings that David himself is not privy to. We see David’s family, neighbors and environment through his eyes and our understanding is shaped and limited by his. To read this book is to be a visitor inside David’s consciousness and experience.

Call It Sleep has had a bizarre and dramatic publication history. When the book was first published in 1934, it received rave reviews from critics who hailed it as a modernist masterpiece and a compellingly realistic account of life in New York’s immigrant ghettos. Despite critical acclaim, the book was not a long-lived commercial success and was out of print for nearly 30 years. In 1960, The American Scholar, the journal of the national Phi Beta Kappa society ran a special feature entitled “the most neglected books of the past 25 years.” Call It Sleep was the only book to be mentioned by two contributors to this feature. Both Irving Howe and Leslie Fiedler acclaimed it as an American classic and, for the first time, as a specifically Jewish book. As a result, the book was republished in 1960 and issued in paperback in 1964, becoming first paperback to be reviewed on the front page of the New York Times book review. As the scholar, Hana Wirth-Nesher notes, this publication history reflects the richness of the novel and the ways in which its different aspects have appealed to various generations of readers. (“Introduction” New Essays on Call It Sleep), pp. 2-4) The readers of the first edition were compelled by the delicate combination of modernist interiority and gritty urban realism. While the novel was not political enough to please many of Roth’s communist associates, other readers praised the novel’s ability to maintain the integrity of David’s world view while also giving readers insights into the grittiness and violence of immigrant New York.

By the 1960’s and 70’s, American Jews, like other ethnic groups in America, were becoming increasingly interested in defining, exploring, and articulating their own particular ethnic experience. Consequently, when it was re-issued, Call It Sleep was identified by Jewish critics and intellectuals as a specifically Jewish book. Since its re-issue, it has been included in courses on American Jewish Literature and hailed as a masterful reflection on the American Jewish immigrant experience (Wirth-Nesher, “Introduction”, 4)

It is this richness that makes Call It Sleep such a remarkable book. It is simultaneously a Freudian case study, a modernist masterpiece, a chronicle of the American immigrant experience in general, and specifically, the Jewish immigrant experience. The interaction among each of these elements is one of the most compelling (and at times challenging) aspects of this fascinating book.

About the Author
Henry Roth was born in Austro-Hungary in 1906. He arrived in New York with his parents at the age of two and settled in the immigrant enclave of the lower east side. When he was eight, his family moved to East Harlem, which was then a largely Irish Catholic neighborhood. As a young man, Roth attended City College where he encountered the work of the modernist writers and became a communist and political activist. Following the publication of Call it Sleep in 1934, Roth did not publish any other books until 1994, when he published two-volumes of an autobiographical fiction, Mercy of a Rude Stream. While Roth did not publish any novels over the course of the intervening 60 years, he did continue to write and fragments of his work as well as his reflections on the project and difficulties of writing are collected in Shifting Landscape, edited by Mario Materassi.

Questions for Discussion

Old World/New World

• Unlike other immigrant stories in which the protagonist fully experiences both the old country and the new, in Call It Sleep, David has only the vaguest memories of the country of his birth. His understanding of the old world is shaped almost entirely by his parents’ recollections and references. At the same time, David is still thoroughly an immigrant, to whom American culture is new and unfamiliar.

  How is the Schearls’ European Jewish culture represented?
  How is American culture represented?
  How would you describe David/Roth’s attitude toward the old and new worlds?

• In the Afterword, Hana Wirth-Nesher describes the last section of the book saying that David becomes “overly assimilated . . .David becomes a naturalized American by becoming a Christ symbol . . .” (p. 460).
  

  Do you agree with this comment?
  Is Call It Sleep a story of assimilation and Americanization?

The Family Drama

• David’s father and mother are both presented as complex characters.
  

  How would you describe them and their family relationships?
  How did you respond to them?

• In describing Call It Sleep, Roth said that he divided his own mother into two characters: David’s mother, Genya and her sister, Bertha.
  

  Does this comment help you understand the portrayal of these two characters?
  How did you feel about the portrayal of women and female sexuality in the novel?

• The family drama unfolds alongside the drama of David’s introduction to America and American culture.
  

  What is the relationship between David’s family drama and his experiences on the street?
  What links them together?
  What distinguishes them from each other?
  What do you think Roth is trying to say about the relationship between the “upstairs” and “downstairs” stories?

Language and Languages

• Like many writers writing about immigrant experiences, or experiences of minority cultures, Roth was faced with the challenge of portraying a multi-lingual world in an English text. He chose to render Yiddish, the language of David’s interior life, in highly poetic and nuanced English while portraying English in accented dialect.
  

  What do you think Roth was trying to accomplish through this strategy?
  How did it affect your experience of the book?

• In his introduction, Alfred Kazin states: that “Roth caricatures the terrible English of the street- a “foreign,” external, cold-hearted language- in order to bring out the necessary contrast with the Yiddish spoken at home. This is the language of the heart, of tradition. of deeply felt togetherness.” (xv)
  

  Do you agree with this characterization?
  What do the other languages presented in the novel (Hebrew, Aramaic, the native languages of the other immigrants) represent?
  What do you think Roth is trying to say about the multi-lingual nature of immigrant New York and the multi-lingual experience of the immigrant?

• The book’s title is taken from the novel’s last paragraph.
  

  To what does the “it” in Call It Sleep refer?

• David Schearl’s name is a bilingual pun. David means “beloved” in Hebrew and Schearl means “scissors” in Yiddish.
  

  How does his name relate to his character and his story?

The Rail

• The end of the book elicits a range of responses from its readers. Some read it as a triumphant rebirth, redemption and transformation. Others see the end far more modestly as a small step toward reconciliation in the complicated relationship between David and his father.
  

  How do you understand the novel’s ending?
  Has David been transformed?
  How so?

• One of the most striking aspects of Call it Sleep is the limited, fragmented nature of David’s world view. As a child and as an immigrant, David lacks contexts in which to situate what he sees and hears. Consequently, his understanding of his own experiences is very limited. At the same time, David intuits connections among experiences that are linked to central human experiences and concerns like sex, death and redemption. For example, when David sees the mounted bull’s horns that his father has bought, he understands them as a link between “the man outstretched on the sidewalk, that mysterious look of repose on his mother’s face when he had come in.” (p. 299). In the climax of the book, many of the recurring fragments come together in the conjunction of David’s internal monologue and the conversations of those who witness his electrocution.
  

  What elements come together in this scene?
  How do you understand the meaning of this coming together?
  What do you think Roth is trying to accomplish by bringing these recurring themes together?

Religion, Myths and Symbols

• In the later sections of the novel, religion becomes very prominent. David’s experience in cheder, his fascination with the symbols and ritual objects of Christianity, and David’s growing preoccupation with finding the purifying light mentioned in Isaiah 6 become increasing central to the story.
  

  Do you think that the increasing prominence of religion and religious themes makes Call It Sleep a religious book?
  If so, what are the book’s religious messages?

• Two religious myths are particularly prominent in the novel. One is Chad Gadya (one kid), the Aramaic song that is part of the Passover liturgy (the English translation of the song appears on p. 233); the other is the story of Christ’s death and resurrection which is “told” through the Christian icons that surround David’s friend, Leo.
  

  How do these two myths related to David’s own experience?
  What do you think Roth was trying to communicate by interweaving references to these stories with David’s story?

• Call it Sleep is full of many recurring symbols. Among them, cattle (bulls, cows, kids, milk) and light are particularly prominent.
  

  What do these symbols mean?
  What is their significance in David’s story?

• When Call It Sleep was first published in 1934, it was not identified by readers as a particularly Jewish book. However, in 1960, the critic Leslie Fielder Leslie Fielder described it as “a specifically Jewish book, the best single book by a Jew about Jewishness written by an American certainly throughout the thirties and perhaps ever.”
  

  Do you agree with Fielding? Is Call It Sleep a specifically Jewish book?
  Why or why not?

Suggestions for further reading:
Mercy of a Rude Stream by Henry Roth