Roth Henry. Call It Sleep

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.