1. Roth, Henry, Call It Sleep (New York: Avon, 1964).Google Scholar All textual references to Call It Sleep in this essay are to this edition.

2. There have been a number of interesting literary approaches to the novel. See especially the outstanding collection in New Essays on Call It Sleep, ed. Wirth-Nesher, Hana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).Google Scholar These essays are tantalizing and take as their point of departure contemporary literary criticism. American historians have not written about the novel, and Richard Pells suggests that Roth was more interested in the “problems of personal psychopathology than in the demands of any collective movement” (Pells, , Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years [New York: Harper and Row, 1973], 220).Google Scholar There has been interest in the novel abroad for over two decades. In addition to the international essays in the Wirth-Nesher collection, see Seed, David, “The Drama of Maturation: Henry Roth's Call It Sleep”, Etudes Anglaises 32 (1979): 46–55.Google Scholar

3. There is a vast literature on the Eastern European Jewish experience in urban America. For a good understanding of this experience, see Howe, Irving, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976)Google Scholar; Weinberg, Sydney Stahl, The World of Our Mothers: The Lives of Jewish Immigrant Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Rischin, Moses, The Promised City: New York's Jews, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962)Google Scholar; and Ressner, Thomas, The Golden Door: Italian and Jewish Mobility in New York City 1880–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

4. Call It Sleep has been compared with Farrell, James T.'s Studs Lonigan (New York: Vanguard, 1935)Google Scholar, which addresses a similar urban experience, although it places at the center of the story an Irish-American boy and locates his maturation in Chicago. Other novels that describe the American Jewish immigrant experience include Cahan, Abraham, The Rise of David Levinsky (New York: Harper, 1917)Google Scholar, and even Schulberg, Budd, What Makes Sammy Run? (New York: Sun Dial, 1941).Google Scholar For the specifically female experience, see Yerzierska, Anzia's fiction and most particularly The Breadgivers (New York: Doubleday, 1925).Google Scholar For an interesting contrast of Roth and Cahan, see Howe, , World of Our Fathers, 585–98.Google Scholar See also Inge, M. Thomas, “The Ethnic Experience and Aesthetics in Literature: Malamud's The Assistant and Roth's Call It Sleep,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 1 (1974): 45–50Google Scholar; and Schwartz, Elias, “‘Pylon,’ ‘Awake and Sing!’ and the Apocalyptic Imagination of the 30's,” Criticism: A Quarterly Review for Literature and the Arts 13 (1971): 131–41.Google Scholar

5. For more on this generation of writers and the crisis of bourgeois humanism, see Barrett, William's Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, 1958)Google Scholar, and his Time of Need: Forms of Imagination in the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1972).Google Scholar The phrase “impotence of reason” is Barrett, 's (Irrational Man, 31).Google Scholar

6. For a discussion of this theme, see Barrett, William, “Myth or the Museum,” in Time of Need, 312–50.Google Scholar

7. For a good biographical discussion of Henry Roth, see Lyons, Bonnie, Henry Roth: The Man and His Work (New York: Cooper Square, 1976).Google Scholar See also Lyons, Bonnie, “An Interview with Henry Roth,” Shenandoah 25 (1973): 48–71Google Scholar; Roth, Henry, “On Being Blocked and Other Literary Matters: An Interview,” Commentary 64, no. 2 (08 1977): 27–38Google Scholar; and Hana Wirth-Nesher, Introduction, in Wirth-Nesher, , New Essays, 1–15.Google Scholar

8. See Sollors, Werner, “‘A world somewhere, somewhere else’: Language, Nostalgic Mournfulness, and Urban Immigrant Family Romance in Call It Sleep”Google Scholar (in Wirth-Nesher, , New Essays, 127–82)Google Scholar, for the impact of anti-Semitism in the early 1930s on Roth's depiction of the period before World War I. See also Bayor, Ronald, Neighbors in Conflict: The Irish, Germans, Jews and Italians of New York City, 1929–1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; and Gerber, David, ed., Anti-Semitism in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986).Google Scholar

9. Freedman, William, “Henry Roth in Jerusalem: An Interview,” Literary Review 23 (Fall 1979): 5–23.Google Scholar Roth explains that he joined the Communist Party early in 1934, left after several years, and then rejoined after Hitler “began to move”. In an earlier interview, Roth said he joined the Communist Party in 1933. Sollors (“A world somewhere,” 162–63)Google Scholar suggests the “interconnectedness of the ethnic childhood of 1911–1913, the romantic and aesthetic tribulations of the Village, and the political situation of the early 1930's in the making of the novel”.

10. For Roth's obituaries, see Nicholls, Richard E., “Henry Roth, 89, Who Wrote of an Immigrant Child's Life in Call It Sleep is Dead,” New York Times, 10 15, 1995, sec. 1, p. 41Google Scholar; and Rosen, Jonathan, “Lost and Found: Remembering Henry Roth,” New York Times, 12 10, 1995, sec. 7, p. 47.Google Scholar On the resurrection of Call It Sleep, see Fiedler, Leslie, “Henry Roth's Neglected Masterpiece,” Commentary 30 (1960): 102–7Google Scholar; and Ledbetter, Kenneth, “Henry Roth's Call It Sleep: The Revival of a Proletarian Novel,” Twentieth Century Literature 12 (1966), 123–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Call It Sleep was first reviewed in New Republic (02 27, 1935)Google Scholar; New York Times (02 17, 1935)Google Scholar; and Springfield Republican (04 14, 1935).Google Scholar On the writer's block, see Freedman, “Henry Roth in Jerusalem,” 22. Roth saw parallels with the sterility experienced by Ralph Ellison, following publication of The Invisible Man.

12. Roth explains that his mother wanted to be closer to her parents who had recently arrived and had rented a “steam-heated, hot water apartment in Harlem” (Bronsen, David, “A Conversation with Henry Roth,” Partisan Review 36 [1969]: 266–67).Google Scholar

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. Lyons, , “Interview,” 52.Google Scholar

19. There is some confusion over Roth's membership in the Communist Party (see Lyons, , “Interview,” 54–55Google Scholar; and Freedman, , “Henry Roth in Jerusalem,” 13).Google Scholar

20. Morris Dickstein points out that Roth, likes others, had difficulty “reconciling the aesthetic attitudes of the twenties with the social consciousness of the thirties” (see Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties [New York: Basic, 1977], 30).Google Scholar

21. Lyons, , “Interview,” 67.Google Scholar

22. It is important to note that Parker was not Jewish. During these years of silence, Roth did do some writing. For the best collection, see Roth, Henry, Shifting Landscape, ed. Materassi, Mario (Philadelphia: St. Martin's, 1987).Google Scholar

23. Sollors, (“A world somewhere,” 129)Google Scholar rehearses how critics see the decidedly Jewish immigrant experience as an issue for readers as well. Need one be an immigrant Jew to understand the novel? Who was the novel written for? Some argue the experience described in the novel can be universalized, whereas others argue that it is unique to the Jewish experience and therefore limits Roth's writing to a variety of regionalism. Similarly, literary critics have approached the symbolism in the novel as Jewish, Christian, pagan, or all three.

24. Freedman, , “Henry Roth in Jerusalem,” 9.Google Scholar

25. See Kazin, Alfred's proposal for “The Most Neglected Books of the Past 25 Years,” American Scholar 25 (Autumn 1956): 486.Google Scholar On the significance of a newfound interest in ethnic studies in the 1960s, see Howe, , World of Our Fathers, 588.Google Scholar

26. For reviews of these novels, see especially Gordon, Mary, “Confession, Terminable and Interminable,” New York Times Book Review, 02 26, 1995, 5–6Google Scholar; and Kermode, Frank, “Holistic Rendering of My Lamentable Past,” New York Times Book Review, 07 14, 1996, 6.Google Scholar

27. Adams, Stephen J., “The Noisiest Novel Ever Written: The Soundscape of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep,” Twentieth-Century Literature 35 (Spring 1989): 43–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28. Bronsen, , “Conversation,” 156.Google Scholar

29. For more on the unique and interesting character of Brownsville, see Rischin, , Promised City, 92Google Scholar; Kessner, , Golden Door, 147Google Scholar; and Howe, , World of Our Fathers, 131–32.Google Scholar

30. Isaiah VI–VII, in the Soncino Chumash (London: Soncino, 1966), 464–67.

31. Abraham Cahan wrote a fascinating short story of life on the Lower East Side about an equally appealing wife and unlikable husband (Yekl [New York, 1896]).Google Scholar This story ends in divorce.

32. There is a lengthy discussion of the use of language in Call It Sleep in Wirth-Nesher, , New Essays.Google Scholar

33. Springfield Republican, 1935.Google Scholar

34. As part of the ritual preceding the Passover holiday, Jews are required to clean their homes thoroughly and then dispose of the bread crumbs by a small fire. Chumitz or hametz is considered literally as “any mixture of flour and water that has been allowed to ferment for more than 18 minutes.” Hametz stands in contrast to matzah (unleavened bread). The philological similarities between the two Hebrew words point to certain implications. One interpretation suggests that whereas matzah represents the simple life, hametz represents the complexities of civilization. Thus the “bread embargo” returns Jews to the simplicities of nature. For this interpretation and more, see Passover Haggadah: The Feast of Freedom (Rabbinical Assembly, USA, 1982), 17.Google Scholar

35. See Lawrence, Karen R., “Roth's Call It Sleep: Modernism on the Lower East Side”Google Scholar and, for a Jungian explanation, Fiedler, Leslie, “The Many Myths of Henry Roth,” both in Wirth-Nesher, New Essays, 107–26 and 17–28, respectively.Google Scholar

36. An existing literature discusses the theme of redemption set forth in the novel. See especially the thesis that analyzes the mystical motif of the novel developed by Ita Sheres, “Exile and Redemption in Henry Roth's Call It Sleep,” Markham Review 6 (1977): 72–77Google Scholar; and Walden, Daniel “Henry Roth's Call It Sleep: Ethnicity, ‘The Sign’, and the Power,” Modern Fiction Studies 25 (Summer 1979): 268–72.Google Scholar

37. See Passover Haggadah, in particular page10. The word seder translates to order. In this interpretation, I differ markedly from the fascinating discussion presented by Bonnie Lyons in “The Symbolic Structure of Roth, Henry's Call It Sleep,” Contemporary Literature 13 (1972): 186–203.Google Scholar

38. Passover Haggadah, 35.Google Scholar

39. Ibid.

40. For this interpretation, see ibid., 39.

41. See Pells, , Radical Visions.Google Scholar

42. For an interesting discussion of the shift in how the Statue of Liberty was perceived in the United States, see Weisberger, Bernard A., Statue of Liberty The First Hundred Years (New York: American Heritage, 1985).Google Scholar

43. This reading of the protagonist differs substantially from the interpretation offered by Wisse, Ruth in “The Classic of Disinheritance,”Google Scholar in Wirth-Nesher, , New Essays, 61–74.Google Scholar

44. See Exodus, ch. XIX, in Soncino Chumash, 456.

45. Isaiah VI–VII, in Soncino Chumash, 464–67.

46. Ibid., 466.

47. Ibid., 466–67.

48. Ibid., 467.

49. See Lyons, , “Interview,” 68.Google Scholar

50. See especially the notes that accompany this Haftarah in the Soncino Chumash, 464–68.

51. See Winthrop, John, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” in The American Intellectual Tradition, ed. Hollinger, David A. and Capper, Charles, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 1: 6–16.Google Scholar There is extensive scholarship on the Puritan mission. See especially Miller, Perry, Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956)Google Scholar; and Bercovitch, Sacvan, Introduction, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 3–30.Google Scholar

52. For the importance of the theme of redemption, see Freedman, , “Henry Roth in Jerusalem,” 18.Google Scholar