Call It Sleep
First edition
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| Author | Henry Roth |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Robert O. Ballou |
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Publication date
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1934 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback) |
Call It Sleep is a 1934 novel by Henry Roth. The book is about a young boy growing up in the Jewish immigrant ghetto of New York's Lower East Side in the early twentieth century.
Though it earned acclaim, the book sold poorly and went out of print for close to 30 years. It received a second life when it was reviewed by literary critic Irving Howe on the front page of The New York Times Book Review on October 25, 1964. Its paperback edition, published by Avon, sold over a million copies. The novel was included on TIME magazine's 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923.
Call It Sleep is the story of a Galician Jewish immigrant family in New York in the early part of the twentieth century. Six-year-old David Schearl has a close and loving relationship with his mother Genya but his father Albert is aloof, resentful and angry toward his wife and son. David's development takes place between fear of his father's potential violence and the degradation of life in the streets of the tenement slums. After the family has begun settling into their life in New York, Genya's sister Bertha arrives from Austrian Galicia (today Western Ukraine) to stay with them. Bertha's coarse and uninhibited nature offends Albert and her presence in the home renews and exacerbates the tension in the family.
Listening to conversations between Genya and Bertha, David begins to pick up hints that his mother may have had an affair with a non-Jewish man in Galicia before marrying Albert. David imagines the romantic setting "in the corn fields" where the pair would secretly meet. Bertha leaves the Schearl household when she marries Nathan, a man she met at the dentist's office. She and Nathan open a candy store where they live with Nathan's two daughters, Polly and Esther.
David begins his religious education and is quickly identified by his rabbi teacher, Reb Yidel, as an exceptional student of Hebrew. David becomes fascinated with the story of Isaiah 6 after he hears the rabbi translate the passage for an older student; specifically, the image of an angel holding a hot coal to Isaiah's lips and cleansing his sin.
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Wikipedia