Novel Review
Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep begins: Standing before the kitchen sink and regarding the bright brass faucets that gleamed so far away, each with a bead of water at its nose, slowly swelling, falling, David again become aware that this world had been created without thought of him. And for the next four hundred pages, Roth proves it true. I read Call It Sleep because it was a story about immigrants in the early 20th century, and it is that, but it’s also a novel that chronicles a year of the life of a boy who is six and puzzling how to get a cup of water without disturbing his mother. It is one of the best novels I have read, and it is the best novel I have read about childhood.
David, his mother, and his father lived in the Lower East Side of New York City, on 9th Street and Avenue D. His father worked as a printer, but not liking it, he later changed jobs to become a milkman. Aunt Bertha lived with them for a while, but she eventually married Nathan, a widower who had two daughters, and she bought and ran a candy store. For much of the novel, David’s life was episodic. David had a friend named Yussie, but one day, Yussie teased David about being a crybaby. David ran away from him and hid. In another episode, David got lost in the city, but the police helped him get home. Aunt Bertha took David to the Metropolitan Museum, but she became confused about a statue of a wolf nursing two human infants. She said, “No! It could not have been!” David couldn’t help her because he was as mystified as she.
We all heard about the unreliable narrator, but David’s narration was correct, but he didn’t know how to interpret the things he saw or experienced. Doors puzzled him. What happened behind closed doors? More often than not, the answer was sex. Anna, Yussie’s older sister, invited David behind the closet door to play a game that he didn’t understand or like. Later, he makes acquaintance with Leo, an older boy, who manipulated David into introducing him to David’s step-cousins. What happened behind the cellar door David didn’t understand, but he knew it was bad. He ran and hid.
Call It Sleep has the following characters: David, Genya (his mother), and Albert (his father). Though those characters make up the core of the novel, it also contains Aunt Bertha, Uncle Nathan, various kids from the neighborhood, and Reb Yidel Pankower, a rabbi. The novel is written in a third-person limited point-of-view, in David’s point-of-view, but in the later novel, the point-of-view shifts to other characters. This happens especially in the penultimate chapter. I won’t tell you what that chapter tells, but I will say that it first confused me, but then, as I figured out what was happening, appreciation replaced confusion. I saw it for what it is—beautiful.
The theme I pulled out of the novel is secrets. David never told his parents what happened in the closet with Anna. He held other secrets: his father’s violent nature; his mother’s affair with a goy, a non-Jewish person, prior to marrying Albert; whatever Leo did with Esther, David’s step-cousin, behind a closed door. The pressure of these secrets built-up and built-up until it was intolerable. In dealing with them, David told lies. Big lies! Easily verifiable lies! When the lies became exposed, David entered the novel’s climax.
I should talk about religion in the novel, especially the Jewish faith, but I am an atheist, and when I grew up, a Christian, so I don’t feel qualified to talk about religion in general and the Jewish faith in particular. It gave me my word of the novel, cheder. I misread the context of the word; I thought a cheder was a teacher responsible for teaching Jewish boys Hebrew, but it is not a person but a place. Cheder means a room, but the Jews use it to mean the religious school where boys studied Hebrew and Jewish sacred texts. The rabbi Reb Yidel Pankower was the teacher.
Henry Roth was born on February 8, 1906, in Tysmenitz, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His family came to the United States in 1908, when he was two years old. They settled first in Brooklyn and then Manhattan’s Lower East Side, so he was familiar with David’s world. After attending public school, he attended City College of New York, but he didn’t graduate. He had an affair with Eda Lou Walton, a poet and an instructor at New York University. I am not sure how long they were together, but as he wrote Call It Sleep, he was living with her. He published the novel at the age of 28.
Then he struggled with writer’s block for 60 years. During that time, Call It Sleep disappeared from the literary world, but it was rediscovered in the 1960s. In the meantime, he moved to Maine and married Muriel Parker. That was in 1939. They had two sons. She died in 1990. Roth began writing again, publishing a four-novel series in the 1990s called Mercy of a Rude Stream. Roth died in 1995.
I found Call It Sleep in a used bookstore. I rarely buy used books, and why I was there I can’t imagine, but the book was in good condition, so I bought it. Amazon sells the same edition for $14.29, but they have a Kindle version for $3.99.
I wanted a book about the lives of immigrants, but I also read a novel about a boy. A very special boy, filled with imagination and dread. Do yourself a favor and read Call It Sleep. You be glad you did.
