by Henry Roth
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Introduction by Alfred Kazin
PROLOGUE
BOOK I / The Cellar
BOOK II / The Picture
BOOK III / The Coal
BOOK IV / The Rail
Afterword by Hana Wirth-Nesher
Copyright
To Eda Lou Walton
Introduction
Call It Sleep is the most profound novel of Jewish life that I have ever read by an American. It is a work of high art, written out of the full resources of modernism. It subtly interweaves gutter, cellar, sexual and religious taboos with the overwhelming love between a mother and son. It brings together the darkness and light of Jewish immigrant life before the First World War as experienced by a very young boy, really a child, who depends on his imagination alone to fend off a world so hostile that it begins with his own father.
It was first published in that most unpromising year at the bottom of the Great Depression – 1934! Looking at that date and marveling at this novel, which took in so much of Henry Roth’s central experience that he never published another, people must rub their eyes. Surely the depressed 1930s produced nothing but “proletarian literature” and other instances of left-wing propaganda? A fashionable critic in the opulent years after 1945 scorned the 1930s as an “imbecile decade.” He explained – with the usual assurance of people who have more than enough to eat – that the issues in literature are “not political but moral.” Anyone who thinks political and moral are unrelated is certainly living in a world very different from the 1930s – or the 1990s.
The art-fever of the modernist 1920s (more first-rate work was produced than in any other single period of American literature) continued well into the 1930s and did not fade until Hitler’s war. Henry Roth, twenty-eight when Call It Sleep was published, was as open to the many strategies of modernism as he was to political insurgency. The book owes a great deal to a remarkable woman teaching literature at New York University, Eda Lou Walton. Her bond with Roth helped make his book possible. Though the book was not properly welcomed or understood until it was reissued in paperback in 1964, it has become a world favorite, with millions of copies in print. We can see now that the book belongs to the side of the 1930s that still believed in the sacredness of literature, whether or not it presumed to change the world. People discover with a start that the 1930s saw the best of Faulkner’s novels from The Sound and the Fury to The Wild Palms, Eliot’s Ash Wednesday, Hart Crane’s The Bridge, Dos Passos’s U.S.A., Katherine Anne Porter’s Flowering Judas, Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle, Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, Richard Wright’s Native Son, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.
What Call It Sleep has in common with these lasting works is a determined sense of art sustaining itself in a fallen world, a time of endless troubles, of political and social fright. The world was visibly shaking under the blows of economic catastrophe, political mob hysteria, the Fascist domination of Europe, fear of another world war. And no one was likely to feel the burden of the times so keenly as a young Jew starting life in a Yiddish-speaking immigrant family enveloped in the Lower East Side’s physical and human squalor.
That last sentence could describe Michael Gold in his autobiographical Jews without Money (1930), an eloquent but primitive outpouring of emotion that concludes with a rousing call to Communism as the new Messiah. What from the very beginning makes Call It Sleep so different from the usual grim realism of Lower East Side novels is the intractable situation described in Albert Schearl’s bitterness against his tenderly loving wife, Genya, and their little boy, David. The father is an uncompromisingly hostile workingman, a printer by trade, driven from one shop to another by his ugly temper. “They look at me crookedly, with mockery in their eyes! How much can a man endure? May the fire of God consume them!” This is his complaint, spoken in Yiddish and rendered by Roth in an English that sounds more lofty than it was in Yiddish. Albert Schearl has been driven almost insane by his resentment of his wife’s ancient affair in the Old Country with a Gentile. It pleases him to suspect that David is not his son. This, the dramatic foundation and background of the book, may not be enough to explain Albert’s unrelenting vituperation of his wife and his rejection, in every small family matter, of the little boy. David is not just unloved, he is violently hated by his father. The father shudderingly regards him as a kind of untouchable. The boy not only depends exclusively and feverishly on his mother but, in the moving story of his inner growth, becomes a determined pilgrim searching for light – light away from the cellar whose darkness pervades the first section of the novel, away from the dark cave in which the father has imprisoned mother and son.
Albert Schearl is a violent character, at times so frenzied in his choked-up bitterness and grief that the introspection at the heart of his son’s character – the boy wanders the neighborhood and beyond in search of a way out – must be seen as the only rebellion open to him. Whatever the sources of Albert Schearl’s madly sustained daily war on his wife and son – he is perhaps less a jealous husband than a maddened immigrant unable to feel at home in the New World – Roth’s honesty in putting this at the center of the book is remarkable. The idealization of family in Jewish literature does not necessarily subscribe to actual facts. Jews from Eastern Europe did not always emigrate because of anti-Semitism. The enmity sometimes lay within the family itself, as has been known to happen everywhere. Instead of sentimentalizing the family situation, Roth turned husband, wife, and son into the helpless protagonists of an obvious and uncompromising Oedipal situation. I can think of no other novel except D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers in which mother and son are so fiercely glued to each other. The father is excess, the outsider he has made of himself and plainly wants to remain.
In Sons and Lovers (as in lesser works on the same theme) the father is extraneous because he has lost for the mother the sexual charm that first attracted her. In Call It Sleep Genya timidly loves Albert for all his brutality. She is prepared to love him more freely, if only he can stop berating her. He is so steadily in eruption that he virtually forces mother and son on each other. If Albert in his daily rage somehow reflects his unconscious bitterness at being held down in the “Golden Land,” there is also the fact that Genya became his wife in the Old Country (Austrian Galicia), whatever Albert’s dominating air of superior manhood, because she had to marry. Her father outlawed her for her past infatuation with a Gentile.
In any event, Albert’s war against wife and son sounds an alarm at the very opening of the novel that will keep wailing through these three lives until the last possible moment in the novel. Then the shock of David’s burning himself brings about a necessary but inconclusive pause in Albert’s war on his own family.
* * *
It is 1907, the peak year of immigration to the United States. Wife and son have just been delivered from the immigration station at Ellis Island to the ferry for Manhattan, to be greeted by a somber, frowning Albert. Not in the least prepared to be amiable, he is quickly incensed because his wife doesn’t recognize him without his moustache.
The truth was there was something quite untypical about their behavior … These two stood silent, apart; the man staring with aloof, offended eyes grimly down at the water �
�� or if he turned his face toward his wife at all, it was only to glare in harsh contempt at the blue straw hat worn by the child in her arms, and then his hostile eyes would sweep about the deck to see if anyone else were observing them. And his wife beside him regarding him uneasily, appealingly. And the child against her breast looking from one to the other with watchful, frightened eyes … The woman, as if driven by the strain into action, tried to smile, and touching her husband’s arm said timidly, “And this is the Golden Land.” She spoke in Yiddish.
Astonished by her husband’s haggard appearance, Genya apologizes for not having known him instantly. With the gentleness that is sustained in all the many crises he creates, she says, “You must have suffered in this land.” Indeed he has, and will continue to suffer from himself in a way that turns his harshness into their immediate, their most perilous environment. Albert is his wife’s only New York. She never attempts to learn English, is content just to look after her family, is afraid to transgress beyond the immediate streets in the neighborhood. Her deepest feeling for Albert is not the passion that unsettles him but a concern that comes from a sense of duty. Anything else is unthinkable to her. Deprived of actual love, since Albert’s quarrelsomeness isolates her, she is free to give her entire soul to her little boy.
David observes, very early, that his mother is attractive to a landsman, a fellow “countryman,” of his father’s, Luter. Albert notices nothing, finds Luter one of the few people he can talk to, and insists on repeatedly inviting him to dinner. When Luter is alone for a moment and no longer has to keep up his pose of formal amiability, it is little David, studying his face, who realizes – without knowing the reason – that the man has been playing a part. “And the eyes themselves, which were always so round and soft, had narrowed now … the eyeballs looked charred, remote … It worried David. A faint thrill of disquiet ran through him. He suddenly felt an intense desire to have someone else present in his house. It didn’t have to be his mother.” His still-unconscious gift of observation will soon provide the way out of the dark cave in which his father has shut him up.
Call It Sleep is not a naturalistic novel, one in which character is shaped entirely by environment. Jews are generally so conscious of the pressure of history that it was a notable achievement for Henry Roth, coming out of the Lower East Side at a time when it was routine for people to dream of transforming “conditions,” to put character ahead of environment. As Lower New York in the teens of our century comes alive in David Schearl’s anxious but eager consciousness, Roth presents the city not as external documentary but as formed instant by instant out of David’s perceptions. David Schearl is the artist as a very small boy. With this novel we are in the city-world not of Sister Carrie but of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Here is little David groping his way into New York as winter comes. Notice that Roth spells “grey” in the British fashion, as did Joyce.
The silent white street waited for him, snow-drifts where the curb was. Footfalls silent. Before the houses, the newly swept areas of the sidewalks, black, were greying again. Flakes cold on cheek, quickening. Narrow-eyed, he peered up. Black overhead the flakes were, black till they sank below a housetop. Then suddenly white. Why? A flake settled on his eye-lash; he blinked, tearing with the wet chill, lowered his head. Snow trodden down by passing feet into crude, slippery scales. The railings before basements gliding back beside him, white pipes of snow upon them. He scooped one up as he went. Icy, setting the blood tingling, it gathered before the plow of his palm … Voices of children. School a little ways off, on the other side of the street … Must cross. Before him at the corner, children were crossing a beaten path in the snow. Beside him, the untrodden white of the gutter.
The succession of sweet melodious words recalls Joyce, that most musical of twentieth-century masters. Anyone who recognizes Joyce’s immense achievement in Ulysses will recognize his influence on Roth. In Ulysses, Dublin exists through the word-by-word progression of the subliminal consciousness. This is the mental world that is most ourselves, for nothing is so close to us as our inner thinking. The sources of this interior world remain mysterious as their effects are most inspiring.
Yet Roth never falls into lyrical expansiveness for its own sake, the usual style of romantic autobiographical novels (say Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel). Roth’s book is always firmly under control. Perhaps the novel is almost too tightly plotted when we come to the seemingly final explosion between the parents that leads David to run away and to seek a burst of light. This is meant to be his epiphany, the self-discovery leading to the artist he will become. Roth doesn’t let his material run away with him. He wishes to show character as fate, character as dominating the most intimate relationships within the family.
He also shows that Genya’s tenderness enveloping her little son is not just “Freudian,” theoretical, but a protectiveness that is incarnate in Jewish history. Its key is the Yiddish that mother and son speak together. It is made to sound effortlessly noble, beautifully expressive, almost liturgical by contrast with the guttural street English that surrounds David in the street. We are startled when he talks in the same horrible, mutilated tones away from Mama. Then he is with strangers. English is the stranger in this novel located in New York, English the adopted language, tough and brazen. It represents the alienation from the larger world of kids competing with each other in toughness. “Land where our fodders died!” becomes a parody of a national hymn that shows how derivative and meaningless the famous line can be when sung by immigrant sweet urchins.
David, searching for experience beyond his immediate neighborhood, discovers that he is “losted” and tells the baffled cop who cannot make out where the boy lives, “On a hunnder ’n’ twenny six Boddeh Stritt.” Later in the novel David is enchanted by the Polish boy Leo flying a kite from the roof. Like Tom Sawyer before Huckleberry Finn, David is astounded by the boy’s freedom. Hoping to see this marvel again, David asks: “Yuh gonna comm up hea alluh time?” Leo carelessly explains: “Naw! I hangs out on wes’ elevent’. Dat’s w’ea we lived ’fore we moved.”
Maybe street kids once talked this way, maybe not. The point is that Roth cariacatures 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. Just as Roth perhaps overdoes the savage English spoken in the street, so he deliberately exalts the Yiddish that he translates at every point into splendid, almost too splendid, King James English. Even when Albert almost comes to blows with his vulgarly outspoken sister-in-law Bertha, he cries out: “I’m pleading with you as with Death!” Storming at his son, he menacingly demands, “Shudder when I speak to you.” The English doesn’t convey the routine, insignificant weight of the word for “shudder” in Yiddish. The people speaking Yiddish in this book are not cultivated, careful in choosing their words. They are hard-pressed, charged-up, deeply emotional. There is nothing about their lives in the “Golden Land” that is not arduous, strange, even threatening. So they talk, as extremely vulnerable Yiddish speakers from the immigrant working class have always done. It is a verbal style, even a routine, in which people respond to each other as if they were breaking all the windows in order to let a little air into the house.
In Roth’s meaningful translation, the Yiddish often sounds just “lovely,” the language of family love and respect for God. The reader from another culture should know that when Albert returns home and, not seeing his son, curtly asks his wife, “Where’s the prayer?”, he is referring to his son as his “kaddish,” the Hebrew prayer over the dead that it is the highest obligation of a son to say in memory of his father.
Yet Albert gives no evidence of being a believer. Genya faithfully lights the Sabbath candles Friday at sundown. But describing her own grandmother to her son, she admits: “But while my grandfather was very pious, she only pretended to be – just as I pretend, may God forgive us
both.” That last phrase is entirely characteristic. You don’t have to be pious in order to be a faithful Jew – you just have to honor the tradition as Genya does, with her separate dishes for Passover and the lighting of the Friday-night candles for the coming of the Sabbath. The Yiddish of such poor immigrants as the Schearls was often quite homey and full of little mistakes. In Roth’s text they speak with grace, longing, nobility. Yiddish is their real home. Even when life is fiercest, their language conveys a seeking for a better world than this, for spiritual heights customary to people who regard themselves as living under the eye of God.
Yet Roth has no love for the rabbi (teacher) who for twenty-five cents a boy tries to drum the actual language of the Hebrew Bible into his cowed pupils. The “cheder,” the primitive Hebrew school in which the boys are pinched, driven, insulted so that they will at least pronounce Hebrew words without necessarily understanding them, is presented in absolutely realistic terms as a Dickens-like schoolroom of torture. The rabbi is the fattish, irascible, ill-smelling Yidel Pankower. Even his first name, meaning “Little Jew,” brings out Roth’s scorn for the place, the practice, the old routine. The rabbi despises his “American idiots.” Everything was better in the Old Country. Teacher and pupils talk Yiddish by contrast with the sacred Hebrew text. Everywhere throughout Call It Sleep, the sacred is shown side by side with the profane, as is usual among deeply observant old immigrant Jews. They ignore the actual sordidness of the life surrounding them in their adoration of the holy word itself.
Awful as Reb Yidel Pankower is, he discerns David’s abilities. He benevolently brings in an old, kindly sage to hear David recite his lessons. Think of it, a kid brought up in New York’s heathen atmosphere who can come so close to the ancient text! David has his first moment of spiritual illumination (he will seek it at its fieriest in coming so perilously close to the third rail) when he hears Reb Yidel pronounce the following over another boy:
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