by Henry Roth
“I—I don’—” His father sounded stunned. “I—I—you—”
“Sure. C’mon goils. De kid’s gotta get some quiet now. Waddayuh say? All right, gents.”
“Vee know dem,” voices objected. “Vee liff heyuh.”
“Not hea’,” indulgently. “Not all o’ yiz. C’mon. Come in later—one at a time—”
There was a general shuffling of feet, murmured protests.
“Er fumfit shoin far a bissel geld,” sneered the woman with the bare arms as she went out. “Gitzeem a krenk!”
“I god Davy’s shoes and stockin’, Mister,” a boy’s voice piped. “He goes to my cheder.”
“Atta boy. Just leave ’em hea. C’mon de rest o’ yiz. Dat goes fer you too, Solomon.”
Feet went through the doorway, voices dwindled. The door was shut.
“Well, I got de place quiet for yuh,” said the policeman. “Funny all de trouble dese kids o’ ours gives us, huh? You said it. Geeziz I’m a cop an’ I can’t keep mine in line, bringin’ home repawt co’ds dat’d make yer hair toin grey. Well, my beat’s aroun’ hea’ in case yuh wanna see me sometime. Walsh is de name.” He loomed up in the doorway. “How’re yuh feelin’ now, kid? He’ll be all right. Sure. He’s full o’ de devil a’reddy. I’ll fan yuh wit’ me stick if I catch yuh foolin’ aroun’ dem tracks again. See? ’Night.” He flicked an open palm, turned and went out.
He had finished his tea. The sudden, flushing surge of heat that filled the hollows of his tired body drove stipple of perspiration to his brow and lips. His underwear clung to him cutting at the crotch. The trough of the bedding where he lay had become humidly warm and uncomfortable. He wriggled closer to the cooler edge of the bed where his mother was seated and lay back limply.
“More?” She asked putting the cup down on the window sill.
“No, mama.”
“You’ve had nothing to eat since the morning, beloved. You’re hungry, aren’t you?”
He shook his head. And to ease the throbbing in his right foot, slid it furtively from under the covers at her back to cool it.
His father stood in the doorway, features dissolved in the dark. Only the glitter in his eyes was sharply visible, fixed on the puffy grey ankle. His mother turned at his tread, spied the swollen foot also. Her sucked breath hissed between pain-puckered lips.
“Poor darling! Poor child!”
His father’s hand fell heavily against the door-frame. “He’s written down the name of some medicine for us to get,” he said abruptly. “To smear on his foot.”
“Yes?” She half rose. “I’ll go get it.”
“Sit there!” His peremptory tone lacked force as though he spoke out of custom, not conviction. “It will be quicker for me to get it. Your neighbors outside won’t delay me with their tongues.” But instead of going he stood where he was. “He said he’d be better in a day or two.”
She was silent.
“I said he’d be better in a day or two,” he repeated.
“Yes. Of course.”
“Well?”
“Nothing.”
There was a pause. His father cleared his throat. When he spoke his voice had a peculiar harshness as though he were at the same time provoking and steeling himself against a blow.
“It— it’s my fault you’d say. Is that it?”
She shook her head wearily. “What use is there to talk about faults, Albert? None foresaw this. No one alone brought it on. And if it’s faults we must talk about it’s mine as well. I never told you. I let him listen to me months and months ago. I even drove him downstairs to—to—”
“To protect him—from me?”
“Yes.”
His teeth clicked. His chest rose. The expulsion of his breath seemed to rock him slightly. “I’ll go get it.” He turned heavily out of the doorway.
David listened to his father’s dull, unresilient footfall cross the kitchen floor. The door was opened, closed. A vague, remote pity stirred within his breast like a wreathing, raveling smoke, tenuously dispersed within his being, a kind of torpid heart-break he had felt sometimes in winter awakened deep in the night and hearing that dull tread descend the stairs.
“Perhaps you’ll be hungry in a little while,” his mother said persuasively. “After you’ve rested a bit and we’ve put the medicine on your foot. And then some milk and a boiled egg. You’d like that?” Her question was sufficiently shored by statement to require no answer. “And then you’ll go to sleep and forget it all.” She paused. Her dark, unswerving eyes sought his. “Sleepy, beloved?”
“Yes, Mama.”
He might as well call it sleep. It was only toward sleep that every wink of the eyelids could strike a spark into the cloudy tinder of the dark, kindle out of shadowy corners of the bedroom such myriad and such vivid jets of images—of the glint on tilted beards, of the uneven shine on roller skates, of the dry light on grey stone stoops, of the tapering glitter of rails, of the oily sheen on the night-smooth rivers, of the glow on thin blonde hair, red faces, of the glow on the outstretched, open palms of legions upon legions of hands hurtling toward him. He might as well call it sleep. It was only toward sleep that ears had power to cull again and reassemble the shrill cry, the hoarse voice, the scream of fear, the bells, the thick-breathing, the roar of crowds and all sounds that lay fermenting in the vats of silence and the past. It was only toward sleep one knew himself still lying on the cobbles, felt the cobbles under him, and over him and scudding ever toward him like a black foam, the perpetual blur of shod and running feet, the broken shoes, new shoes, stubby, pointed, caked, polished, buniony, pavement-beveled, lumpish, under skirts, under trousers, shoes, over one and through one, and feel them all and feel, not pain, not terror, but strangest triumph, strangest acquiescence. One might as well call it sleep. He shut his eyes.
Afterword
Between Mother Tongue and Native Language in Call It Sleep
HENRY ROTH’S Call It Sleep is a multilingual book, although it is accessible to the American reader who knows none of its languages other than English. In order to portray a world that was both multilingual and multicultural, Roth used a variety of narrative strategies, some designed to simulate the experience of his immigrant child protagonist and others designed to translate these experiences for his general American reader. Call It Sleep is a classic example of a work in which several cultures interact linguistically, thematically, and symbolically, and it is also an interesting case of ethnic literature, the Jewish-American novel.
Henry Roth offers a classic example as well of the author of a brilliant first novel who keeps the critics speculating as to whether his second work will live up to the first. In his case, the silence that followed that first dazzling performance could be interpreted as a larger cultural phenomenon than a mere individual writer’s block. Occasionally what appears to be one artist’s dilemma can also be a symptom of a cultural cul-de-sac. Such was the case of Thomas Hardy’s last novel, Jude the Obscure, which carried the bleakness of the Victorian age and the Victorian novel to its limits, and such was the case of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, which embodies the paralyzing ambivalence of the Jewish immigrant writer in America, although not every writer’s response to this conflict has been silence. Throughout Jewish literary history, writers have developed different narrative strategies for representing the multilingual and multicultural world which they inhabited.
As early as 1918, the Yiddish literary critic Baal Makhshoves argued that the mark of Jewish literature is its bilingualism. Although he was taking this position within the cultural context of the Czernowitz conference and the antagonism between Hebrew and Yiddish, he made claims for the status of Jewish literature from biblical times to the present. In every text that is part of the Jewish tradition, Baal Makhshoves wrote, there existed explicitly or implicitly another language, whether it be Chaldean in the Book of Daniel, Aramaic in the Pentateuch and the prayer book, Arabic in medieval Jewish philosophical writings, and, in his own day, Yiddish.
“Bilingualism accompanied the Jews even in ancient times, even when they had their own land, and they were not as yet wanderers as they are now,” he wrote.1 “We have two languages and a dozen echoes from other foreign languages, but we have only one literature.”2 When Baal Makhshoves refers to bilingualism, he means not only the literal presence of two languages but also the echoes of another language and culture detected in the prose of the one language of which the text is composed. “Don’t our finer critics carry within them the spirit of the German language? And among our younger writers, who were educated in the Russian language, isn’t it possible to discern the spirit of Russian?”3
Bilingualism and diglossia, in their strict linguistic sense and in their broader culture meanings, have always been distinguishing features of Jewish culture and one major aspect of that enigmatic concept, Jewish literature. By bilingualism, I mean the alternate use of two or more languages by the same individual, which presupposes two different language communities, but does not presuppose the existence of a bilingual community itself.4 Diglossia, on the other hand, is the existence of complementary varieties of language for intragroup purposes, and therefore it does not necessitate bilingualism, as the linguistic repertoires are limited owing to role specialization.5 In short, as Fishman has pointed out, bilingualism is essentially a characterization of individual linguistic versatility whereas diglossia is a characterization of the societal allocation of functions to different languages. Diglossia is obviously not unique to Jewish civilization. In European culture, for example, the idea that certain languages were specially proper for specific purposes lasted into the sixteenth century, with one of its literary products being macaronic verse.6 But both bilingualism and diglossia are central concepts in any discussion of Jewish literature, for they presuppose that a truly competent reader of the text must be in command of more than one language, and consequently of more than one culture. When Henry Roth used Hebrew, Yiddish, and Aramaic for specific purposes in his novel, he was employing a device used widely within Jewish literature, and within what has come more generally to be called ethnic literature.7
The centrality of both bilingualism and diglossia in Jewish culture has been explored extensively by scholars and literary critics, among them Max Weinreich, Uriel Weinreich, Joshua Fishman, Itamar Even-Zohar, Benjamin Harshav, and Dan Miron.8 The extent to which bilingualism is rooted in European Jewish life is expressed by Max Weinreich in his History of the Yiddish Language: “a Jew of some scholarly attainment, born around 1870, certainly did not express only his personal opinion when he declared that the Yiddish translation of the Pentateuch had been given to Moses on Mt. Sinai.”9
Both the diglossia and bilingualism of Jewish literature are particular variants of Bakhtin’s concept of heteroglossia in the novel. According to Bakhtin, prose fiction maintains an inner dialogue between different languages, so that a text in one language, from the linguistic perspective, contains within it other languages, which can be social, national, generic, and professional, among others. These languages do not exclude one another, but intersect in a variety of ways. “All languages of heteroglossia, whatever the principle underlying them and making each unique, are specific points of view on the world, forms of conceptualizing the world in words, specific world-views, each characterized by its own objects, meanings, and values.”10
Bilingualism and diglossia pose interesting mimetic challenges for the writer who aims for a community of readers beyond those who are competent in all of the language variants employed in his text. Moreover, in the Jewish literary tradition, multilingualism often means allusions, metaphors, and tropes that are derived from at least two widely divergent traditions, the Jewish and the non-Jewish worlds. This cultural situation necessitates various translation strategies for the author, ranging from literal translation from one language to another in the text (sometimes consciously underscoring the differences in world-view of the languages) to the felt sense of translation, as the language of the text contains within it the shades of the other absent language or languages. All authors dealing with a multilingual and multicultural reality have had to devise mimetic strategies for conveying a sense of foreignness, whether it be explicit attribution of speech in “translation,” selective reproduction of the source language, or more oblique forms, such as verbal transpositions in the form of poetic or communicative twists.11 The most challenging for the reader has been the transposition of a different set of values, norms, images, or allusions from an alternative culture.
The strategies for presenting this multicultural reality are varied within Jewish literature. In the case of Jewish-American writing, of which Henry Roth is a striking example, those writers who actually have some knowledge of an alternative Jewish literary tradition, in Hebrew or in Yiddish, have located their own works between two traditions, the English and the Yiddish, the Christian and the Jewish. This can express itself not only in linguistic borrowings by incorporation of phrases from the other language, but also by allusions to the other traditions, or to the borrowing of models and types from the other canon. Just as Yiddish poets in America placed themselves in the line of Whitman and Emerson, so writers like Henry Roth, Abraham Cahan, Saul Bellow, and Delmore Schwartz, composing in the English language, often draw on quotations from Jewish sources, intersperse Yiddish words, and turn their characters into types within two cultural frames of reference.
In Abraham Cahan’s landmark novel, The Rise of David Levinsky, the alternative tradition is the very theme of the work; the central protagonist traces his intellectual assimilation to the English world to his reading of a Dickens novel, but he continues to measure his moral development against the Jewish world that he has abandoned. In the writings of Saul Bellow, for example, this alternative tradition is evident in the intellectual repertoire of his central protagonists, who are repeatedly invoking European figures as predecessors, muses, and mentors. Just as Augie March is clearly a literary grandchild of Huckleberry Finn, so Herzog and Sammler are children of Montaigne and Dostoevsky, of Continental European thought and letters. In some cases it is the other language that haunts the English prose, at times artfully and self-consciously, as in the stories of Delmore Schwartz, when the English reads like a translation from the Yiddish; at other times unself-consciously, as in the Yiddishized English of Anzia Yezierska’s fiction, suggesting in the languages and syntax a merging of cultures. In one of Cynthia Ozick’s works, to cite yet another variation, the imminent extinction of Yiddish language and culture is the very subject of the story, as the Yiddish writer is left wholly dependent on translation itself to ensure some precarious survival.
In each of the above works, the emphasis is on a divided identification with more than one culture, and while this is not exclusively a Jewish literary characteristic, it has been one very dominant aspect of Jewish literature and culture.
Henry Roth’s novel Call It Sleep is a particularly interesting example of the part that multilingualism and translation play in Jewish literature. In that work, Roth uses languages other than English, as well as textual and cultural references outside of the English and American literary tradition. Roth grew up with Yiddish as the language of his home and neighborhood, among the Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side, and along with many of them, he went on to study at City College. There he was introduced to the world of English literature. He obviously created his novel against the entire backdrop of English literature, and more specifically American literature, referring in his interviews to Shakespeare, Joyce, Faulkner, Frost, Steinbeck, Hart Crane, Daniel Fuchs, and James Farrell, among others. Roth writes for an implied reader who is well versed in English literature and the Western Christian tradition; although he has used a number of translation strategies for the non-English language and culture present in his text, his novel requires that the reader be familiar with some aspects of Jewish tradition. The full artistic scope of his work cannot be comprehended without this multiple cultural grounding. I would like to examine how Roth ma
kes use of multilingualism and translation in his masterful novel as a way of identifying how the book partakes of more than one literary and cultural tradition, and how its artistic strategies express Roth’s specific response to the dilemma of the self-consciously Jewish author writing in a language steeped in non-Jewish culture.
The book is almost entirely narrated12 from the perspective of David Schearl, a boy of eight, with the exception of the Prologue and of one short section seen through the eyes of the Hebrew-school teacher. It is about an immigrant child’s quest for a personal and cultural identity apart from his parents; it traces the arduous and bewildering path of assimilation. It is a book written in the English language but experienced by the reader as if it were a translation, for David’s main actions and thoughts are experienced in Yiddish. The original experience in the source language is almost entirely absent. When the original language is reproduced, it is rendered in transliteration, a phonetic transcription, rather than an authentic recording using the actual alphabet, so that from the American reader’s perspective, the original language is both irretrievable and incomprehensible. Everything is experienced at a remove linguistically. While the Yiddish language is “home” for David and is associated with his parents, particularly with his mother, it can be an alien language for the reader. Occasionally Roth will provide a translation for the reader who is not familiar with Yiddish, but he will also reproduce the Yiddish for its own sake.
