Call It Sleep

INTRODUCTION

Call It Sleep is the most profound novel of Jewish life that I have ever read by an American. It is a work of high art, written out of the full resources of modernism. It subtly interweaves gutter, cellar, sexual and religious taboos with the overwhelming love between a mother and son. It brings together the darkness and light of Jewish immigrant life before the First World War as experienced by a very young boy, really a child, who depends on his imagination alone to fend off a world so hostile that it begins with his own father.

It was first published in that most unpromising year at the bottom of the Great Depression — 1934! Looking at that date and marveling at this novel, which took in so much of Henry Roth’s central experience that he never published another, people must rub their eyes. Surely the depressed 1930s produced nothing but “proletarian literature” and other instances of left-wing propaganda? A fashionable critic in the opulent years after 1945 scorned the 1930s as an “imbecile decade.” He explained — with the usual assurance of people who have more than enough to eat — that the issues in literature are “not political but moral.” Anyone who thinks political and moral are unrelated is certainly living in a world very different from the 1930s — or the 1990s.

The art-fever of the modernist 1920s (more first-rate work was produced than in any other single period of American literature) continued well into the 1930s and did not fade until Hitler’s war. Henry Roth, twenty-eight when Call It Sleep was published, was as open to the many strategies of modernism as he was to political insurgency. The book owes a great deal to a remarkable woman teaching literature at New York University, Eda Lou Walton. Her bond with Roth helped make his book possible. Though the book was not properly welcomed or understood until it was reissued in paperback in 1964, it has become a world favorite, with millions of copies in print. We can see now that the book belongs to the side of the 1930s that still believed in the sacredness of literature, whether or not it presumed to change the world. People discover with a start that the 1930s saw the best of Faulkner’s novels from The Sound and the Fury to The Wild Palms, Eliot’s Ash Wednesday, Hart Crane’s The Bridge, Dos Passos’s U.S.A., Katherine Anne Porter’s Flowering Judas, Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle, Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, Richard Wright’s Native Son, Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.

What Call It Sleep has in common with these lasting works is a determined sense of art sustaining itself in a fallen world, a time of endless troubles, of political and social fright. The world was visibly shaking under the blows of economic catastrophe, political mob hysteria, the Fascist domination of Europe, fear of another world war. And no one was likely to feel the burden of the times so keenly as a young Jew starting life in a Yiddish-speaking immigrant family enveloped in the Lower East Side’s physical and human squalor.

That last sentence could describe Michael Gold in his autobiographical Jews without Money (1930), an eloquent but primitive outpouring of emotion that concludes with a rousing call to Communism as the new Messiah. What from the very beginning makes Call It Sleep so different from the usual grim realism of Lower East Side novels is the intractable situation described in Albert Schearl’s bitterness against his tenderly loving wife, Genya, and their little boy, David. The father is an uncompromisingly hostile workingman, a printer by trade, driven from one shop to another by his ugly temper. “They look at me crookedly, with mockery in their eyes! How much can a man endure? May the fire of God consume them!” This is his complaint, spoken in Yiddish and rendered by Roth in an English that sounds more lofty than it was in Yiddish. Albert Schearl has been driven almost insane by his resentment of his wife’s ancient affair in the Old Country with a Gentile. It pleases him to suspect that David is not his son. This, the dramatic foundation and background of the book, may not be enough to explain Albert’s unrelenting vituperation of his wife and his rejection, in every small family matter, of the little boy. David is not just unloved, he is violently hated by his father. The father shudderingly regards him as a kind of untouchable. The boy not only depends exclusively and feverishly on his mother but, in the moving story of his inner growth, becomes a determined pilgrim searching for light — light away from the cellar whose darkness pervades the first section of the novel, away from the dark cave in which the father has imprisoned mother and son.

Albert Schearl is a violent character, at times so frenzied in his choked-up bitterness and grief that the introspection at the heart of his son’s character — the boy wanders the neighborhood and beyond in search of a way out — must be seen as the only rebellion open to him. Whatever the sources of Albert Schearl’s madly sustained daily war on his wife and son — he is perhaps less a jealous husband than a maddened immigrant unable to feel at home in the New World — Roth’s honesty in putting this at the center of the book is remarkable. The idealization of family in Jewish literature does not necessarily subscribe to actual facts. Jews from Eastern Europe did not always emigrate because of anti-Semitism. The enmity sometimes lay within the family itself, as has been known to happen everywhere. Instead of sentimentalizing the family situation, Roth turned husband, wife, and son into the helpless protagonists of an obvious and uncompromising Oedipal situation. I can think of no other novel except D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers in which mother and son are so fiercely glued to each other. The father is excess, the outsider he has made of himself and plainly wants to remain.

In Sons and Lovers (as in lesser works on the same theme) the father is extraneous because he has lost for the mother the sexual charm that first attracted her. In Call It Sleep Genya timidly loves Albert for all his brutality. She is prepared to love him more freely, if only he can stop berating her. He is so steadily in eruption that he virtually forces mother and son on each other. If Albert in his daily rage somehow reflects his unconscious bitterness at being held down in the “Golden Land,” there is also the fact that Genya became his wife in the Old Country (Austrian Galicia), whatever Albert’s dominating air of superior manhood, because she had to marry. Her father outlawed her for her past infatuation with a Gentile.

In any event, Albert’s war against wife and son sounds an alarm at the very opening of the novel that will keep wailing through these three lives until the last possible moment in the novel. Then the shock of David’s burning himself brings about a necessary but inconclusive pause in Albert’s war on his own family.

* * *

It is 1907, the peak year of immigration to the United States. Wife and son have just been delivered from the immigration station at Ellis Island to the ferry for Manhattan, to be greeted by a somber, frowning Albert. Not in the least prepared to be amiable, he is quickly incensed because his wife doesn’t recognize him without his moustache.

The truth was there was something quite untypical about their behavior … These two stood silent, apart; the man staring with aloof, offended eyes grimly down at the water — or if he turned his face toward his wife at all, it was only to glare in harsh contempt at the blue straw hat worn by the child in her arms, and then his hostile eyes would sweep about the deck to see if anyone else were observing them. And his wife beside him regarding him uneasily, appealingly. And the child against her breast looking from one to the other with watchful, frightened eyes … The woman, as if driven by the strain into action, tried to smile, and touching her husband’s arm said timidly, “And this is the Golden Land.” She spoke in Yiddish.

Astonished by her husband’s haggard appearance, Genya apologizes for not having known him instantly. With the gentleness that is sustained in all the many crises he creates, she says, “You must have suffered in this land.” Indeed he has, and will continue to suffer from himself in a way that turns his harshness into their immediate, their most perilous environment. Albert is his wife’s only New York. She never attempts to learn English, is content just to look after her family, is afraid to transgress beyond the immediate streets in the neighborhood. Her deepest feeling for Albert is not the passion that unsettles him but a concern that comes from a sense of duty. Anything else is unthinkable to her. Deprived of actual love, since Albert’s quarrelsomeness isolates her, she is free to give her entire soul to her little boy.

David observes, very early, that his mother is attractive to a landsman, a fellow “countryman,” of his father’s, Luter. Albert notices nothing, finds Luter one of the few people he can talk to, and insists on repeatedly inviting him to dinner. When Luter is alone for a moment and no longer has to keep up his pose of formal amiability, it is little David, studying his face, who realizes — without knowing the reason — that the man has been playing a part. “And the eyes themselves, which were always so round and soft, had narrowed now … the eyeballs looked charred, remote … It worried David. A faint thrill of disquiet ran through him. He suddenly felt an intense desire to have someone else present in his house. It didn’t have to be his mother.” His still-unconscious gift of observation will soon provide the way out of the dark cave in which his father has shut him up.

Call It Sleep is not a naturalistic novel, one in which character is shaped entirely by environment. Jews are generally so conscious of the pressure of history that it was a notable achievement for Henry Roth, coming out of the Lower East Side at a time when it was routine for people to dream of transforming “conditions,” to put character ahead of environment. As Lower New York in the teens of our century comes alive in David Schearl’s anxious but eager consciousness, Roth presents the city not as external documentary but as formed instant by instant out of David’s perceptions. David Schearl is the artist as a very small boy. With this novel we are in the city-world not of Sister Carrie but of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Here is little David groping his way into New York as winter comes. Notice that Roth spells “grey” in the British fashion, as did Joyce.

The silent white street waited for him, snow-drifts where the curb was. Footfalls silent. Before the houses, the newly swept areas of the sidewalks, black, were greying again. Flakes cold on cheek, quickening. Narrow-eyed, he peered up. Black overhead the flakes were, black till they sank below a housetop. Then suddenly white. Why? A flake settled on his eye-lash; he blinked, tearing with the wet chill, lowered his head. Snow trodden down by passing feet into crude, slippery scales. The railings before basements gliding back beside him, white pipes of snow upon them. He scooped one up as he went. Icy, setting the blood tingling, it gathered before the plow of his palm … Voices of children. School a little ways off, on the other side of the street … Must cross. Before him at the corner, children were crossing a beaten path in the snow. Beside him, the untrodden white of the gutter.

The succession of sweet melodious words recalls Joyce, that most musical of twentieth-century masters. Anyone who recognizes Joyce’s immense achievement in Ulysses will recognize his influence on Roth. In Ulysses, Dublin exists through the word-by-word progression of the subliminal consciousness. This is the mental world that is most ourselves, for nothing is so close to us as our inner thinking. The sources of this interior world remain mysterious as their effects are most inspiring.

Yet Roth never falls into lyrical expansiveness for its own sake, the usual style of romantic autobiographical novels (say Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel). Roth’s book is always firmly under control. Perhaps the novel is almost too tightly plotted when we come to the seemingly final explosion between the parents that leads David to run away and to seek a burst of light. This is meant to be his epiphany, the self-discovery leading to the artist he will become. Roth doesn’t let his material run away with him. He wishes to show character as fate, character as dominating the most intimate relationships within the family.

He also shows that Genya’s tenderness enveloping her little son is not just “Freudian,” theoretical, but a protectiveness that is incarnate in Jewish history. Its key is the Yiddish that mother and son speak together. It is made to sound effortlessly noble, beautifully expressive, almost liturgical by contrast with the guttural street English that surrounds David in the street. We are startled when he talks in the same horrible, mutilated tones away from Mama. Then he is with strangers. English is the stranger in this novel located in New York, English the adopted language, tough and brazen. It represents the alienation from the larger world of kids competing with each other in toughness. “Land where our fodders died!” becomes a parody of a national hymn that shows how derivative and meaningless the famous line can be when sung by immigrant sweet urchins.

David, searching for experience beyond his immediate neighborhood, discovers that he is “losted” and tells the baffled cop who cannot make out where the boy lives, “On a hunnder ’n’ twenny six Boddeh Stritt.” Later in the novel David is enchanted by the Polish boy Leo flying a kite from the roof. Like Tom Sawyer before Huckleberry Finn, David is astounded by the boy’s freedom. Hoping to see this marvel again, David asks: “Yuh gonna comm up hea alluh time?” Leo carelessly explains: “Naw! I hangs out on wes’ elevent’. Dat’s w’ea we lived ’fore we moved.”

Maybe street kids once talked this way, maybe not. The point is that Roth cariacatures the terrible English of the street — a “foreign,” external, cold-hearted language — in order to bring out the necessary contrast with the Yiddish spoken at home. This is the language of the heart, of tradition, of deeply felt togetherness. Just as Roth perhaps overdoes the savage English spoken in the street, so he deliberately exalts the Yiddish that he translates at every point into splendid, almost too splendid, King James English. Even when Albert almost comes to blows with his vulgarly outspoken sister-in-law Bertha, he cries out: “I’m pleading with you as with Death!” Storming at his son, he menacingly demands, “Shudder when I speak to you.” The English doesn’t convey the routine, insignificant weight of the word for “shudder” in Yiddish. The people speaking Yiddish in this book are not cultivated, careful in choosing their words. They are hard-pressed, charged-up, deeply emotional. There is nothing about their lives in the “Golden Land” that is not arduous, strange, even threatening. So they talk, as extremely vulnerable Yiddish speakers from the immigrant working class have always done. It is a verbal style, even a routine, in which people respond to each other as if they were breaking all the windows in order to let a little air into the house.

In Roth’s meaningful translation, the Yiddish often sounds just “lovely,” the language of family love and respect for God. The reader from another culture should know that when Albert returns home and, not seeing his son, curtly asks his wife, “Where’s the prayer?”, he is referring to his son as his “kaddish,” the Hebrew prayer over the dead that it is the highest obligation of a son to say in memory of his father.

Yet Albert gives no evidence of being a believer. Genya faithfully lights the Sabbath candles Friday at sundown. But describing her own grandmother to her son, she admits: “But while my grandfather was very pious, she only pretended to be — just as I pretend, may God forgive us both.” That last phrase is entirely characteristic. You don’t have to be pious in order to be a faithful Jew — you just have to honor the tradition as Genya does, with her separate dishes for Passover and the lighting of the Friday-night candles for the coming of the Sabbath. The Yiddish of such poor immigrants as the Schearls was often quite homey and full of little mistakes. In Roth’s text they speak with grace, longing, nobility. Yiddish is their real home. Even when life is fiercest, their language conveys a seeking for a better world than this, for spiritual heights customary to people who regard themselves as living under the eye of God.

Yet Roth has no love for the rabbi (teacher) who for twenty-five cents a boy tries to drum the actual language of the Hebrew Bible into his cowed pupils. The “cheder,” the primitive Hebrew school in which the boys are pinched, driven, insulted so that they will at least pronounce Hebrew words without necessarily understanding them, is presented in absolutely realistic terms as a Dickens-like schoolroom of torture. The rabbi is the fattish, irascible, ill-smelling Yidel Pankower. Even his first name, meaning “Little Jew,” brings out Roth’s scorn for the place, the practice, the old routine. The rabbi despises his “American idiots.” Everything was better in the Old Country. Teacher and pupils talk Yiddish by contrast with the sacred Hebrew text. Everywhere throughout Call It Sleep, the sacred is shown side by side with the profane, as is usual among deeply observant old immigrant Jews. They ignore the actual sordidness of the life surrounding them in their adoration of the holy word itself.

Awful as Reb Yidel Pankower is, he discerns David’s abilities. He benevolently brings in an old, kindly sage to hear David recite his lessons. Think of it, a kid brought up in New York’s heathen atmosphere who can come so close to the ancient text! David has his first moment of spiritual illumination (he will seek it at its fieriest in coming so perilously close to the third rail) when he hears Reb Yidel pronounce the following over another boy:

“Now I’ll tell you a little of what you read, then what it means. Listen to me well that you may remember it. Beshnas mos hamelech.” The two nails of his thumb and forefinger met. “In the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah saw God. And God was sitting on his throne, high in heaven and in his temple — Understand?” He pointed upward …

“Now!” resumed the rabbi. “Around Him stood the angels, God’s blessed angels. How beautiful they were you yourself may imagine. And they cried: Kadosh! Kadosh! Kadosh! — Holy! Holy! Holy! And the temple rang and quivered with the sound of their voices. So!” He paused, peering into Mendel’s face. “Understand?”

David is stimulated but does not find holiness in the Hebrew letters. He is startled by the reluctance of other boys to use the strips of Yiddish newspaper in the communal toilet — Yiddish is written in the Hebrew alphabet. What is sacred for him is mother love. Eventually, we can guess, the radiance of this primal event in his life is what he will seek by bending the recalcitrant world into words. “Outside,” in the cellar especially, is the world of fear he must learn to master. The whole first section of the book is named “The Cellar” because it deals with the underground side of life — physical, aggressive, sexual. A crippled neighborhood girl wants him to play “bad” with her. She explains that babies come from “de knish.”

— Knish?

“Between de legs. Who puts id in is de poppa. De poppa’s god de petzel. Yaw de poppa.” She giggled stealthily and took his hand. He could feel her guiding it under her dress, then through a pocket-like flap. Her skin under his palm. Revolted, he drew back.

“Yuh must!” she insisted, tugging his hand. “Yuh ast me!”

“No!”

“Put yuh han’ in my knish,” she coaxed. “Jus’ once.”

“No!”

“I’ll hol’ yuh petzel.” She reached down.

She tells David that they have been playing “bad.” “By the emphasis of her words, David knew he had crossed some awful threshold. ‘Will yuh tell?’ ‘No,’ he answered weakly.” When his mother gets him home, “she didn’t know as he knew how the whole world could break into a thousand little pieces, all buzzing, all whining, and no one hearing them and no one seeing them except himself.”

David is now a fallen creature, out of Eden, who must confront the terrible but fascinating city by himself. What had occurred to him in earliest childhood is now dead certainty: “This world had been created without thought of him.” By the same token, he is free. The joy of being a boy in the city, that endless spectacle, is that the findings are everywhere. In a box kept in the pantry he collects “whatever striking odds and ends he found in the street. His mother called them his gems and often asked him why he liked things that were worn and old. It would have been hard to tell her. But there was something about the way in which the link of a chain was worn or the thread on a bolt or a castor-wheel that gave him a vague feeling of pain when he ran his fingers over them.… You never saw them wear, you only knew they were worn, obscurely aching.”

This concern with materials marks the novelist-to-be. From this point on, the city becomes the web of life in which, even when he is “lostest,” David senses his destiny. It is the writer’s city of instant and continuing perception, the Joyce-inspired city of wonders as they come to us through the sensations of a very young being:

When he had come almost to the end of the dock, he sat down, and with his feet hanging over the water leaned against the horned and bulbous stanchion to which boats were moored. Out here the wind was fresher. The uncommon quiet excited him. Beneath and under his palms, the dry, splintering timbers radiated warmth. And beneath them, secret, unseen, and always faintly sinister, the tireless lipping of water among the piles. Before him, the river and to the right, the long, grey bridges spanning it –

A bridge makes David think of the sword with the “big middle” that used to appear on the Mecca cigarette composed of Turkish tobacco, of the bridge clipping the plumes of a long ship steaming beneath it, of gulls whose faces are as ugly as their flight is graceful, as they wheel through the wide air on wings that cut like a sickle. A tug on the other side of the river pecks at a barge, stolid in the water. “Yoked at length to its sluggish mate,” it gives the barge the look of a mustache! The water is sunlit rhythmic spray sprouting up before the blunt bow of the barge. The spray hangs “whitely” before it falls. Now David associates the blunt heaviness of the barge with a whole house of bricks as “a cloud sheared the sunlight from the wharf.” His back feels cooler in the sharpening wind, smokestacks on the other bank darken slowly, “fluting filmy distance with iron-grey shadow.”

The Polish boy Leo, whom David admires beyond words for his defiant show of independence, shows him a rosary. The black beads become “lucky beads” to David. In his Jewish innocence the links of the rosary drive him wild with envy. He is the perpetual outsider. The sight of a boy on the block grabbing a girl makes him feel all the more isolated in his cruelly won sexual “knowledge.” “I know … I know … I know,” he repeats to himself. In one of Roth’s most telling images, David in sluggish thought resembles “a heavy stone pried half out of its clinging socket of earth.” Leo’s rosary must belong to him, because the beads give out a light like the marbles which other boys roll along the curb.

As a Jew, David is transgressing, and there may be no safe place at home in which to hide a rosary. In marvelous counterpoint to Leo playing “bad” with David’s own cousin Esther, David watches Esther, who is afraid of being detected, hears her squeals at being handled by Leo. Leo insists that David “lay chickee” for him and Esther (be a lookout). Leo pays him off with the rosary David so much desires. The crucifix attached to the rosary quite frightens David; he recognizes something that may be hostile to him as a Jew. The cellar where all this is happening is dark; the gold figure on the crucifix swings slowly. David lets the glistening beads fall, one by one, in order to see how they light up the murk. Suddenly Esther’s sister Polly appears and accuses Esther: “Yuh wuz wit’ him in dere!” David slinks away. In the now violent dispute between Polly and Leo, the Catholic cries: “Yuh stinkin’ sheeny!” and the Jew is outraged that her sister not only has been petting, but petting with a Christian! “Her voice trailed off into horrified comprehension. “Oooh, w’en I tell — He’s a goy too! Yuh doity Crischin, ged oud f’om my cella’ — faw I call my modder. Ged oud!”

David flees the cellar, flees the frightening transposition of sexual taboo into religious taboo. In the streets he just wants to get back to his own familiar world. He reaches the cheder, performs brilliantly in his Hebrew reading for the visiting rabbi, then in an excited leap of fantasy, based on his fascination with the rosary, tells Yidel Pankower that his mother is dead and that he is really half Christian, the son of a European organist who played in church. The rabbi, all alarmed and curious, intrusively carries the strange story to David’s home. There is a violent altercation with his father, who is all too willing to believe that David is someone else’s son, and beats him. The scene is mixed with violent humor because it is the same moment Genya’s sister Bertha and her husband have chosen to come in to ask for a loan. To cap everything, David, as he is shaken by his father, drops the rosary. Totally beyond himself now, Albert hysterically takes this as proof of David’s supposed Gentile parentage. “God’s own hand! A sign! A witness! A proof of my word!.. Another’s! A goy’s! A cross! A sign of filth!”

David runs away in earnest this time, ends up at the car barns, where at the foot of Tenth Street “a quaking splendor dissolved the cobbles, the grimy structures, bleary stables, the dump-heap, river and sky into a single cymbal-clash of light.” David has inserted the metal dipper of a milk can “between the livid jaws of the rail, the dipper twisted and bounced, consumed in roaring radiance, candescent.” As a long burst of flame spurts from underground, growling “as if the veil of earth were splitting,” David is knocked out, looks dead to the hysterical crowd that froths around his body. Only his ankle is partly burnt, and in a rousing conclusion to the book he is brought back to his home. The near-tragedy somehow brings Albert to his senses. As his mother weepingly puts David to bed, David finally has some slight sense of triumph, for he is at last at peace with himself.

It was only toward sleep that every wink of the eyelids could strike a spark into the cloudy tinder of the dark, kindle out of shadowy corners of the bedroom such myriad and such vivid jets of images — of the glint on tilted beards, of the uneven shine on roller skates, of the dry light on grey stone stoops, of the tapering glitter of rails, of the oily sheen on the night-smooth rivers, of the glow on thin blonde hair, red faces, of the glow on the outstretched, open palms of legions upon legions of hands hurtling toward him. He might as well call it sleep.

The light he made for himself in the darkness of the cellar was real. David has won the essential first victory. He is on his way to becoming the artist who will write this book.

Alfred Kazin