Call It Sleep by Henry Roth

Overpraised novel of Jewish immigrant life

As an avid reader of American realist literature of the early 20th century, Call It Sleep is a book that’s been at the edge of my radar for years. I had heard very good things about this 1934 novel by Henry Roth, so I was happy when I came upon a copy in a used book store. Ultimately, however, I found the novel quite disappointing.

David Schearl is a boy of about seven years old. He and his parents are Jewish immigrants from Austrian Galicia. They arrived at Ellis Island when David was a baby. The family lives in a tenement building in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. David spends most of his time at home with his mother or playing in the streets of his neighborhood while his father is at work. About halfway through the book he begins attending a cheder (Hebrew school) where a rabbi teaches him and other boys to read scriptures. David and his mother adore each other, while David is terrified of his father—a stern, violent, resentful man who is clearly the villain in this story. David’s immaculate view of his mother is disturbed, however, when he picks up inklings that she may be guilty of infidelity.

Although mostly written in the third person, Call It Sleep is told almost entirely through the eyes of David. The problem with that approach is that the story can only move as fast as this child’s mind can understand it. The reader constantly has to wait for the boy to catch up. The parents have an interesting story, but it’s lost in all the juvenile impressions and fears. So much of this book consists of children teasing and taunting each other, as children do, page after page and chapter after chapter. This relentless banter is interspersed with some of the worst stream-of-consciousness writing I’ve ever read, consisting largely of single words followed by exclamation points (Ow! Mama! No! Stop! Papa! Ain’t! Why? Crazy!). The preponderance of this interior monologue increases throughout the book until the final chapters devolve into gibberish. Then, after you’ve endured this slow-witted, whiny kid for so long, Roth wraps up the parents’ story in a stagey melodrama.

And if that isn’t enough, Roth indulges in paragraphs of ostentatiously artsy prose into which he’s clearly squeezed every last drop of juice from his thesaurus. These flowery passages only undermine the Depression-era urban realism of the story. Most of the characters, Mother excepted, speak like crass and vulgar oafs, but Roth feels the need to prove he’s a bard by waxing poetic to the extreme. Call It Sleep is a novel about salt-of-the-earth, working-class people that salt-of-the-earth, working-class people would never want to read. Instead, it reads as if it’s written for literary critics, who eat this kind of stuff up. I’m not inherently against modernism, when it’s done right. From the same time period and urban milieu, for example, I enjoyed the U.S.A. trilogy of John Dos Passos and Jean Toomer’s Harlem Renaissance novel Cane. When modernism is done wrong, however, it’s just a self-indulgent mess, as exemplified by Call It Sleep.

Overlooked in its day, Call It Sleep is now hailed as a masterpiece of Jewish-American literature. After reading it, I find that hard to believe. Because I’m not Jewish, perhaps I’m not fully qualified to review this book. As an outsider, however, I don’t feel like I learned much about the Jewish experience because the book spends way too much time inside a child’s mind. If you want to know about what life was like for Jewish immigrants in New York in the early 20th century, read Abraham Cahan’s far superior novel The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), or Will Eisner’s trilogy of graphic novels A Contract with God (1978), A Life Force (1988), and Dropsie Avenue (1995). Even Philp Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), though somewhat of a science fiction novel, offers a more enlightening view of Jewish American life (in Newark, New Jersey).