Henry Roth was 28 when he wrote Call It Sleep. He did not publish another novel for sixty years.
The novel depicts the Jewish immigrant life
from the eyes of a very young boy before the outbreak of the First World War,
in the slums of the Lower East side, New York, an area densely populated by
impoverished, semiliterate immigrants who led hand to mouth existence by doing
manual labours. But the novel is a lot more than just a chronicle of the Lower
East Side’s squalor. As Alfred Kazin observed, it interweaves a number of
taboos—religious, sexual, cellar and gutter—that makes it a work of great art.
The protagonist of the novel is a young
boy—David Schearl, who lives with his mother, Genya, and father, Albert. Albert
is a bitter, unhappy man of violent temper, who is prone to read hidden
demeaning messages and take offence at the innocuous remarks and gestures of others,
where none is intended. ‘They look at me crookedly, with mockery in their
eyes!’ he complains. ‘How much can a man endure?’ The reasons behind Albert’s
rancour, which borders on misanthropy, are never fully explained till almost
the end of the novel, and even then the reader is left with the feeling that
the explanation is only a part of the jigsaw. David, whom Albert seems to hate
with a passion—the explanation comes only towards the end—, bears the brunt of
his father’s ugly temper. Albert has shades of the violent father in D.H.
Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. The little boy is passionately loved and
fiercely protected by his mother. The shy, introverted little boy has few
friends. He is frequently bullied by urchins in his neighbourhood, and is
solely and intensely dependent on his mother for meaningful human contact as
well as inner growth. The relationship amongst the three individuals in this
unhappy household is very Freudian: the son seems to have replaced the father
in his mother’s affection; the father is excluded, or has excluded himself,
from the close bond the mother and son share. Having realised that he has
become emotionally otiose the father can only make his presence felt by violent
displays of his temper. The newly immigrant family is striking it out in the
‘Golden Land’, uneasily, not least because of Albert’s inability to stick it
out with jobs he dislikes.
The novel is divided into four sections.
The first section, appropriately titled ‘The Cellar’, deals with the darker
elements of life—aggressive and sexual. There is, in fact, a palpable sexual
tension—one of its many strands—throughout the novel. David observes early that
his mother is attractive to a ‘fellow countryman’ of his father who visits the
household regularly, at Albert’s behest—Albert suspects nothing—, to have
dinners with them, and, on one occasion, when Albert has gone out, makes a
sexual proposition to Genya. David is filled with an impotent rage: he
desperately wants to ask Lutar, the acquaintance, to get out, wants to
physically harm him, but can do nothing other than go with his mother to their
upstairs-neighbours in order to avoid meeting him, where the neighbours’
crippled daughter, a few years older than David, drags him to a closet and
‘plays bad’. David knows that he has crossed some awful threshold and is filled
with self-loathing and disgust, which is compounded because he cannot confide
in his mother. ‘She didn’t know as he knew how the whole world could break into
million little pieces. . .’
In the fourth and last section, ‘The Rail’,
David enters the house when his mother has just finished taking a bath and
opens the door for him wearing just a bathrobe, which, he notices, is clung to
her breasts and thighs. Later, down on the streets he hears some boys in the
street bragging about how they spied on a woman taking bath, describing in
graphic details what they saw—‘big tids stickin’ oud in frund . . .Big bush
under duh belly . . .Fat ass . . .’—and realises that it is his mother they are
talking about. ‘The rush of shame set his cheeks and ears blazing like flame
before a bellows, drove blood like a plunger against the roof of his skull. He
stood with feet mortised to the spot, knees sagging, quivering.’ Later, in the
same section, David becomes friendly with a Polish Christen boy, Leo, and
allows himself to lead him (Leo) to the house of his aunt where he (Leo) ‘plays
bad’ with David’s step-cousin, Esther, in the cellar while he, David, ‘lays
chickee’ (be a lookout). It is this transgression, together with the religious
one—leading a goy into a Jewish household—that leads to the novel’s violent
climax.
There are those who think that at its heart
Call
It Sleep is a religious work. The third of the book’s four section is
called ‘The Coal’, a reference to a passage from Issaih, which describes the
purifying touch of the fire, brought by the angels, to the prophet’s lips, and
which David first hears in the ‘Cheder’, the Hebrew school he attends to learn
the ‘God’s language’. The passage makes a deep impression on the young boy’s
mind, and he becomes preoccupied with finding a similar spark of light in his
own life—his admiration for Leo is best understood in this context. This
obsession eventually, in the violent dénouement of the novel, nearly
costs him his life.
The novel also vividly depicts, without
descending into hysteria, the immigrant Jewish community’s anxieties about
being engulfed by the all-pervasive Christianity around them. David becomes
utterly fascinated by the rosary-beads which he sees in his ‘friend’ Leo’s
house, and it is in receipt of this rosary that he agrees not only to lead Leo
to his step-cousin’s house knowing fully well what Leo is intending to do.
David is also aware that his mother, years ago, when living in the ‘Old
Country’, had been infatuated with a Gentile, a church organist, and had
disgraced the family. She had married Albert even though he is not ‘suitable’.
Albert has a secret of his own, told to Genya by his mother, although he is not
aware of it. Following the incident at his step-cousin’s house when they are
‘found out’ by his other step-cousin, in the ‘Cheder’, in what can only be
described as a breathtaking leap of imagination, he tells the old Rabbi that he
is only half-Jewish, an off-spring of a liaison between his mother and a
church-organist, a goy; that his mother is really his aunt and his real mother
had died when he was very young. The old Rabbi promptly visits the house to
impart this information, which confirms his father’s worst suspicions, paving
way to the climax of the novel.
A less recognized, certainly less commented
upon, attribute of Call it Sleep is its humour. The novel is suffused with black
humour, at its most prominent in those portions featuring the fat, irascible,
ill-smelling rabbi, Yiddel (‘Little Jew’ in Yiddish), on whom Roth pours his
full scorn. The descriptions of the goings-on in the ‘Cheder’ are very
Dickensenian in their tone. Then there is Bertha, David’s, foul-mouthed younger
aunt, who appears in the second section of the book (The Picture). Bertha, a
larger than life character, is not afraid to call spade a spade and can hold
her own against Albert (who hates her almost as much as he hates his own son).
Bertha offers some light relief in this intense and pensive novel, and it is
easy to warm up to her. Perhaps because of Bertha’s presence this section of
the book is the least broody and gloomy.
Call It Sleep is also
remarkable for the innovative use of language. It functions at two levels and
can be called multilingual, though it isn’t, really. Exclusively set in the
Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrant quarter of New York, almost all the
characters in the novel speak terrible English and are fluent in Yiddish. Roth,
the omnipresent, unseen narrator, lets it be known that the English they speak
at home is in fact translation of the Yiddish. This ‘English’, in contrast to
the guttural, savage English they speak outside, for example while speaking to
strangers, is splendid, almost too splendid. As Alfred Kazin observed, English,
in fact, is the foreign language in this novel which is set in New York! Roth
seems to have used this device to depict, almost exaggerate, the sense of
terrible alienation experienced by the immigrant community; the language itself
touches universal themes that transcend time.
Call it Sleep is, like
all of Henry Roth’s novels, autobiographical. First published in 1934, at
the height of the Great Depression, Call It Sleep was appreciated by critics. It was out of print for several years and its author, nursing the longest writer's block in the history of twentieth century literature, disappeared from public view. It
was reissued in the 1960s. With the reissue (and critical reappraisals) the
novel (and its author) made a comeback and the novel, since, has sold millions
of copies (although Roth would not publish another novel for thirty more
yearsTowards the end of his life, after a silence that lasted six decades, Roth published four volumes of autobiographical novels under the title Mercy of a Rude Stream. The first two volumes were published in Roth's life time while the last two were published posthumously. In it Roth follows the young boy into adolescence and early adulthood, except that he is called Ira Stigman. Last year, full fifteen years after he died came out the last Roth novel, An American Type, which takes over from where Mercy finishes and traces the life of Ira Stigman, Roth's literary alter-ego, into Depression-era America.)
Call it Sleep is many
novels in one. It is a moving chronicle of the now disappeared world of the
Yiddish speaking Jewish immigrant community in America in the first years of
the twentieth century; it is also a compelling chronicle of the lives of the
American poor; the fervidly introspective narrative has subterranean Freudian influences; and its
strange and lyrical language will hold you in its thrall from beginning to end.
Call it Sleep is a
modernist classic of the twentieth century, one of those novels you must read before you
die.
