Call It Sleep by Henry Roth: A Leap out of Murderer’s Row

Synonyms

Benjamin; Childhood; Eliot; Family; Jewish writing; Joyce; Modernist; New York; Tenement

Introduction

Call It Sleep has usually been hailed since its rediscovery in the 1960s as a key text in the history of Jewish writing about New York. It is this, of course, but it can also be seen in the broader context of the modernist city novel, as part of a great tradition of experiment that begins with Bely’s Petersburg of 1913, undoubtedly climaxes with Joyce’s Ulysses of 1922, and lingers on for at least a decade or two after Joyce. 1925 saw the publication in America of Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer and in London of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and 1929 the appearance in Germany of Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and the writing in Australia of Seven Poor Men of Sydney by Christina Stead. This latter was not published until 1934, the same year as Call It Sleep, but even then, the tradition seems not to have played itself out, for Sartre’s Le Sursisof 1945 contains many echoes of it, in...