In Henry Roth’s novel Call It Sleep (1934), the strands of ethnicity, modernity, and modernism come together inseparably, and at a very high point of American literary achievement. This autobiographically inflected novel is an outstanding example of their fusion into “ethnic modernism.” When the eight-year-old Jewish immigrant protagonist David Schearl attempts, in the experimental twenty-first chapter of book four (“The Rail”), to stick a milk ladle into the electric rail of the Eighth-Street trolley tracks on New York’s Lower East Side, a high modernist verbal explosion accompanies this climactic moment in the novel.

Such external descriptions alternate with, and the pervasive -ing forms here seem to echo, the sounds of the streetcars: “Klang! Klang! Klang!” – as an avant-garde anticipation of Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane’s cheerier and more popular “Trolley Song” in the film Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). A surrealistic melting-pot melange of people’s eyes observes David’s body lying on the tracks.