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 American
author, whose best-known work CALL IT SLEEP (1934), is considered
a classic of Jewish-American literature. Critical reaction to the
novel was positive, but as a result of the Depression, Roth's publisher
went bankrupt and the book disappeared from view. In 1960 it was
reissued and recognized as an important novel of the 1930s.
"... no one has ever distilled such poetry and wit from the
counterpoint between maimed English and the subtle Yiddish of
the immigrant. No one has reproduced so sensitively the terror
of family life in the imagination of a child caught between two
cultures."
(Leslie A. Fiedler)
Henry Roth was born in Tysmenica, Galicia, Austria-Hungary. His
father was a waiter. Roth moved with his mother to New York in 1907,
where his father was already living. From 1908 to 1910 the family
lived in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. In 1910 they moved
to the Lower East Side, and four years later to Harlem. Roth graduated
from the City College of New York. During his college years he started
to write. Eda Lou Walton a poet and professor of English literature,
with whom he lived in her Greenwich Village house, encouraged Roth.
There he met such writers as Hart Crane and Margaret Mead.
Call It Sleep received moderate critical success but soon
went out of print and was forgotten. The story records six years
in the life of a Jewish immigrant boy, David Schearl, in a New York
ghetto just prior to World War I. David is shielded by his loving
mother, but his life turns in a nightmare when his paranoid father
is unable to hold a job. David's father is tormented by his lack
of success and he becomes increasingly hostile towards his son,
finally convincing himself that David is not his son. After he has
survived a deathly initiation game, David closes his eyes, with
his mother beside him, and "one might as well call it sleep."
Call It Sleep was among one of the first novels to introduce
the interior monologue into American literature. The reader learns
about the world of the immigrants' Lower East Side from the boy's
vantage point - David's Oedipal conflicts and his encounters with
anti-Semitism on the streets, neighbourhood gangs of non-Jewish
youths, and an early introduction to sex, which terrifies David.
Roth uses dialect, broken, misspelled English, the mispronounced
words of the street boys, the dialects of Irish policeman and Italian
street sweeper, and the language of David's mind.
 The
novel was dismissed by the leftist New Masses as 'introspective
and febrile.' Roth had joined the Communist Party in 1933, but found
that he could not write in the true spirit of class struggle. As
a consequence, Call It Sleep was not praised for its social
criticism. Roth was more concerned with the psychological development
of his characters, Freud's ideas, and linguistic considerations.
However, the novel has been hailed by some critics as one of the
finest examples of the proletarian novel, although Roth did not
particularly focus on the sufferings of the working class.
Roth later stated in interviews that he suffered from both the
political pressures on his writing and from his life with Walton,
who was much older, and gave him literary and financial support
during the Depression. Roth believed that because of this experience
he never gained independence and could never get beyond the level
of the talented protégé in his writing.
After his first novel Roth started his second, an autobiographical
work, but quickly destroyed it. He published no more novels until
1994, going through a very long writer's block. During this period
Roth worked in numerous professions including precision metal grinding,
psychiatric nursing, poultry farming, and teaching. Roth married
Muriel Parker in 1939. From 1946 he has lived in Maine and New Mexico.
In the late 1960s Roth once again began writing and received a grant
from the American Academy. He held the D.H. Lawrence Fellowship
at the University of New Mexico, living on the Frieda Lawrence ranch
in Taos during his tenure.
In 1987 Roth published a collection of short stories. The first
volume of his second novel, MERCY OF A RUDE STREAM, appeared in
1994. Written over many years and fusing disparate material, this
multi volume work was received with mixed reviews. In DRIVING ROCK
ON THE HUDSON (1995) Roth used observations from his own life and
continued the story of the tortured hero Ira Stigman. Roth died
on October 1995, and the third volume of the intended six-volume
series, less autobiographical FROM BONFDAGE, was published posthumously
in 1996.
For further reading: 'The Most Undeservedly Neglected
Books of the Past Twenty-five Years' by L. Fiedler and A. Kazin,
in American Scholar, 25 (1956); 'Henry Roth's Neglected Masterpiece'
by L. Fiedler, in Commentary (1960); Henry Roth by Bonnie Lyons
(1976); Studies in American Jewish Literature 5 (1979, special
issue on Henry Roth); New Essays on Call It Sleep, ed by Hana
Wirth-Nesher (1996) - Other forgotten writers from the 1930s
who have been found again later: Nathanael West, Daniel Fuchs,
Edward Dahlberg, John Peale Bishop, Jack Conroy, Tess Slesinger,
Nelson Algren, Meyer Levin, Albert Halper.
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