Call It Sleep

by Henry Roth

  More than any other section of the book, this final sequence, with its Joycean epiphanies and stream of consciousness and with a collage of disembodied voices reminiscent of Eliot’s Waste Land, identifies Roth as a modernist writer. The italicized section is very deliberately artistic in the tradition of English and European literature, with languages and constructions that are borrowed from medieval romance quests and from epics. The dipper is like a “sword in a scabbard” (413), “like a dipped metal flag or a grotesque armored head” (414), his father is a mythical figure, “the splendor shrouded in the earth, the titan, dormant in his lair” (418), and his action of inserting the dipper is compared to the end of a romantic quest, “the last smudge of rose, staining the stem of the trembling, jagged chalice of the night-taut stone with the lees of day” (418). The moment of his electrocution is filled with “radiance,” “light,” “glory,” and “galaxies.” It is self-consciously literary to the point of even tunneling into the “heart of darkness” (429). In this section of the book, Roth demonstrates clearly his identification with a tradition of English literature. There is only one reference to another culture, and it is to “Chadgodya” and also to the father’s command: “Go down” (428), with Moses clearly implied.

  In the reported speech of the bystanders, Roth makes use of dialect: Yiddish, German, Irish, and Italian, and selective reproduction of other languages, namely Yiddish and Italian. But, most important, he depicts the convergence of the English/Christian tradition and the Yiddish/Hebrew Jewish tradition, and their equivalents in the social/historical and psychological motifs of the book.

  In psychological terms, David’s thoughts about the crack between the car tracks where he seeks a spiritual rebirth through contact with a masculine God also evoke his desire to return to the womb, to the mother and the source of that oceanic oneness that he now seeks in a sublimated form. It is his mother who forces the separation by sending him into the street to escape his father’s tyranny, and therefore David is both running away from his actual mother and running toward an image of that mother in the crack between the car tracks. The electric force between the tracks is thus the power of both the male and the female principles, his father and his mother, the God of Isaiah and the mother image at once. At the same time, as David flees from his wrathful father brandishing a whip, and he seeks refuge in the divine power between the cracks, in a paternal God who will punish his punitive father, he also imagines his own father as that male God who will punish him for his sin of denying his real fatherhood and taking on a Christian past. David dies a symbolic death as he imagines that he no longer sees his own face when he peers into a series of mirrors reflected infinitely. As he is driven out of his home and exposed to the electric charge, he feels himself become “the seed of nothing.… And he was not…” (429). Bystanders conclude that he is dead. The first glimmer of regaining consciousness – “And nothingness whimpered being dislodged from night” (430) – occurs as he recalls coal in the cellar below the city streets, the light of God powerful enough to strike down his father, to still “the whirling hammer.” Just as David had symbolically killed his father when he invented a story about a Christian father who was an organist, so, in his semiconscious state, a divine power greater than that of his father stills the dread hand and voice and frees him. The psychological dimension of his ordeal is one of a transformation of identity away from the parental and toward the spiritual.

  While the social backdrop for this scene of death and rebirth is multilingual, the individual experience as rendered through David’s semiconscious monologue is entirely in a lofty and literary English, as if David dies out of his immigrant life and is born into the world of English literacy and culture, the world of Henry Roth’s literary identity, but at the cost of killing both the father and the mother. In traditional Ashkenazic Jewry, Yiddish is referred to as the mother tongue, mame-loshn, and the sacred language Hebrew as the father language, or fotershprakh.19 In this case, David abandons both Yiddish and Hebrew, and the multilingual immigrant din of the street, for an English literary language that speaks through him. It is presented as an accident brought on by multiple misunderstandings in a multicultural world. David becomes an emblem of Henry Roth, the bilingual immigrant and Jewish writer, who is cut away from the mother tongue, whose proficiency in the newly acquired language exceeds that of the mother tongue, but who cannot transfer his emotional involvement to that acquired language.20 Furthermore, the loss of the mother tongue in the process of Americanization carries an additional hazard for the Jewish writer, namely the Christian culture with which English is imbued. This is developed in the liberation from slavery theme which Roth pursues throughout the last section of the novel.

  This theme is cast in language beyond the boy’s personal plight, language with social, historical, and religious dimensions. The social and historical motifs are conveyed in references to the class struggle, as expressed in the dates of attempted revolutions and periods of worker oppression; recent Jewish history in the form of the pogrom; and the American dream as a form of liberation from bondage for the immigrant. An unidentified voice proclaims the message of socialist ideology: “‘They’ll betray us!’ Above all these voices, the speaker’s voice rose. ‘In 1789, in 1848, in 1871, in 1905, he who has anything to save will enslave us anew!” (417). Such passages are often cited as evidence that Call It Sleep is truly a proletarian novel. In addition to the class struggle, Roth also refers to the Eastern European background of his characters in the Yiddish calls for rescue, quoted in Yiddish and without translation, “‘Helftz! Helftz! Helftz Yeedin! Rotivit!’” (421). Finally, the same soapbox orator alludes to the national American context in the mocking evocation of the Statue of Liberty, symbol of the Golden Land: “And do you know, you can go all the way up inside her for twenty-five cents. For only twenty-five cents, mind you! Every American man, woman and child ought to go up inside her, it’s a thrilling experience” (415). That David’s oppressive life and near-death run parallel to the lives of these immigrant bystanders is further emphasized by Roth’s reference to them as “the masses … stricken, huddled, crushed by the pounce of ten-fold night” (422). All of this is rendered in a multilingual collage.

  The Christian strain in this entire last section is very bold, with numerous references to the New Testament, and primary focus on the betrayal of Christ. The poker players rejoice “T’ree Kings I god. Dey came on huzzbeck!” – and vulgar jokes are cast in biblical terms – “How many times’ll your red cock crow, Pete, befaw y’ gives up? T’ree?” (418). The red cock metaphor condenses the religious and the sexual connotations, and even refers to a historical one, for Emma Lazarus, the Jewish poet whose poem appears on the base of the Statue of Liberty, was the author of a poem entitled “The Crowing of the Red Cock,” which reviews the persecution of the Jew by the Christian through the ages. The satiric treatment of these Christian elements is also evident in the reference to the woman Mary who was with child, but had an abortion. In this climactic chapter, David becomes the paschal lamb, the one only kid in Ḥad gadya, but also a Christ figure, as the Jewish and Christian traditions are conflated. When he is first noticed by the people, a bystander shouts, “Christ, it’s a kid!” (420). When the hospital orderly administers ammonia, a member of the crowd claims that it “stinks like in de shool on Yom Kippur” (431).

  David thinks of himself as the kid in the Passover liturgy, and he seeks the God of the Book of Isaiah in the Jewish scriptures. But he is perceived by the crowd of immigrants, by America’s melting pot, as a Christ figure. As he leaves Yiddish behind, the mame-loshn, the language of nurture but not literacy for him, and Hebrew and Aramaic, loshn-koydesh, the “foreign” languages of his liturgy and his spiritual identity, he is left with English, his genuine native language, which is at the same time the language of the “other,” the language of Christianity. At the end, in his semiconscious state, the English language speaks through him, as it does throughout the book, and it kills the kid w
ho is reborn as Christ. To assimilate, for Roth, is to write in English, to become the “other,” and to kill the father. At the time that Roth wrote Call It Sleep, he identified as a Communist and he consciously embraced a vision of assimilation into a larger community beyond that of religion and nationality. In 1963, he made his often quoted and later recanted statement that the best thing that Jews could do would be “orienting themselves toward ceasing to be Jews.”21 In Call It Sleep, Roth’s central protagonist, a Jewish child, is shown to be overly assimilated, to become Christ. This is not what he consciously seeks; it is an imported self-image, an archetype taking root in his consciousness as the English language becomes his sole means of expression. In the climactic linguistic and cultural collage of the last section, David becomes a naturalized American by becoming a Christ symbol, and the English language is experienced as a foreign tongue and a foreign culture inhabiting his psyche. Whether he desires it or not, David is destined to live a life in translation, alienated from the culture of his language. It is no wonder that Roth could write no second book.

  Among the few stories and sketches that he did write in later years, now collected in Shifting Landscapes, are two that further demonstrate this dilemma of the Jewish writer in his relation to his languages and culture. In “Final Dwarf” a naive Maine farmer (Roth’s occupation at that time) nearly kills his immigrant New York father, but he cannot bring himself to do so. But more significantly, in “The Surveyor” an American Jewish tourist to Spain is apprehended for attempting to determine, with precision, the exact site of the auto da fé in Seville in order to lay a wreath. When asked by the police about his action, he says, “I was attempting to locate a spot of some sentimental value to myself … A place no longer shown on the maps of Seville.”22

  In Call It Sleep, Roth’s fiction conveys the cultural ethos of immigration, of ethnicity, of living at the nexus of several cultures, of being haunted by missing languages, of being intellectually estranged from the mother tongue and emotionally estranged from one’s native language. He did so by various techniques of translation, linguistic and cultural, woven throughout his novel. But to write another novel, he would have had to kill his father and to embrace the Christian world, the one of the Inquisition in Seville, of the rosary innocently cherished by David. This he could not do. Yet he gave his readers a brilliant artistic document of a cultural dead end. Yiddish has the last word in the street chorus, and it is a disembodied and anonymous voice, “Gott sei dank.” It speaks for Roth’s readers.

  Hana Wirth-Nesher

  Tel Aviv University

  NOTES

  1. Baal Makhshoves (Israel Isidor Elyashev), “Two Languages – Only One Literature” [Yiddish], in Geklibene verk (New York, 1953), p. 122 (my translation). English version in What Is Jewish Literature?, ed. Hana Wirth-Nesher (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1992).

  2. Ibid., p. 119.

  3. Ibid., p. 117.

  4. William Mackey, “The Description of Bilingualism,” in Readings in the Sociology of Language, ed. Joshua Fishman (The Hague, 1968), p. 554.

  5. Joshua Fishman, Sociolinguistics: A Brief Introduction (Rowley, Mass., 1972), pp. 52–54. Fishman is basing his definitions on the work of Charles Ferguson, “Diglossia,” Word 15 (1959).

  6. Leonard Forster, The Poet’s Tongues: Multilingualism in Literature (Cambridge, 1970), p. 4.

  7. The hidden and entirely inaccessible language to David is Polish, which appears in the text only as gaps to be filled by the child’s misguided speculations.

  8. See Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language (Chicago, 1980); Uriel Weinreich, Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems (New York, 1953); Itamar Even-Zohar, “The Nature and Functionalization of the Language of Literature Under Diglossia” [Hebrew], Hasifrut 2 (1970): 286–302, and “Aspects of the Hebrew-Yiddish Polysystem,” in Polysystem Theory (forthcoming); Benjamin and Barbara Harshav, American Yiddish Poetry (Berkeley, 1986); Dan Miron, A Traveler Disguised: A Study in the Rise of Modern Yiddish Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1973).

  9. Max Weinreich, p. 249.

  10. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin, 1981), p. 292.

  11. Meir Sternberg, “Polylingualism as Reality and Translation as Mimesis,” Poetics Today 2 (1981): 225–32.

  12. Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton, 1978).

  For illuminating readings of Call It Sleep see Murray Baumgarten, City Scriptures: Modern Jewish Writing (Cambridge, Mass., 1982); Naomi Diamant, “Linguistic Universes in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep,” Contemporary Literature 27 (1986): 336–55; Wayne Lesser, “A Narrative’s Revolutionary Energy: The Example of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep,” Criticism 23 (1981): 155–76.

  13. Max Weinreich, “Yiddishkayt and Yiddish: On the Impact of Religion on Language in Ashkenazic Jewry,” in Readings in the Sociology of Language, ed. Joshua Fishman (The Hague, 1968), p. 410.

  14. Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, p. 252.

  15. See American Yiddish Poetry, p. 404.

  16. Sternberg, p. 225.

  17. Henry Roth, Call It Sleep, p. 16. All further page references will be cited in the text.

  18. See Hana Wirth-Nesher, “The Modern Jewish Novel and the City: Kafka, Roth, and Oz,” Modern Fiction Studies 24 (1978): 91–110.

  19. Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, p. 270.

  20. Uriel Weinreich, Languages in Contact, p. 76.

  21. Bonnie Lyons, Henry Roth: The Man and His Work (New York, 1976), p. 172.

  22. Henry Roth, Shifting Landscapes (Philadelphia, 1987), p. 142.

  I am grateful to David Roskies and Zephyra Porat for their excellent suggestions during revisions of this essay.

  CALL IT SLEEP. Copyright © 1934, copyright renewed 1962 by Henry Roth. Introduction copyright © 1991 by Alfred Kazin. Afterword copyright © 1990 by The John Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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  The introduction by Alfred Kazin first appeared in The New York Review of Books. The afterword by Hana Wirth-Nesher first appeared in Prooftexts 10 (1990): 297–312, reprinted by permission of the author and The Johns Hopkins University Press.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Roth, Henry.

  Call it sleep / Henry Roth ; with a new introduction by Alfred Kazin.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-312-42412-4

  EAN 978-0-312-42412-1

  I. Title.

  PS3535.0787C34 1991

  813'.52—dc20

  91-21130

  This edition first published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  eISBN 9781466855281

  First eBook edition: September 2013