Call It Sleep

Call It Sleep
Author: Henry Roth 441 pp
My rating: 5*
Started July 12 2009, Finished July 19 2009.


  This depiction of an early 20th century, underclass, ethnic childhood rivals Angela’s Ashes, particularly in its fly-in-the-head conveyance of a child’s view of the world, thought process and inner voice. Though Sleep is fiction, it was largely based on Roth’s childhood which while materially far better off than Frank McCourt’s -- the protagonist, David Schearl, does not want for food -- was characterized by psychic trauma that makes McCourt’s harrowing upbringing seem a model of well being. Though unlike McCourt’s father, David’s is a steady breadwinner, his constant simmering rage makes him the focal point of David’s chronic state of fear. David’s mother is the counterpoint to his father and the only dependable positive and island of security in David’s life. In the dog eat dog milieu of the Brownsville and lower east side neighborhoods of New York city, most of David’s interactions with other children, whether his fellow Jews or goyim, increase his wariness as there is very little sense of the protected childhood that we have come to expect for children in America: other boys are often feral predators indifferent to exposing each other to physical hazard and even ten year old girls can be precociously sexual, experimenting with David in ways he finds repulsive and terrifying.
  The book’s two salient stylistic characteristics (and triumphs) are its child’s eye point of view and its phonetically rendered English speech. The narrative point of view is David’s and the author succeeds completely in rendering David’s impressions and thought process -- his continual attempts to make sense of the world he inhabits where everything except his mother’s company represents peril. Virtually all the characters in the book are recent immigrants whose spoken English is often unrecognizably accented, making most such speech seem that of simpletons. Roth conveys that this impression of ostensible stupidity is highly misleading by transcribing the Yiddish that the Jews speak among themselves in a formal English which projects learning and rationality.
  I found the book’s ending a bit of a letdown. David’s terror and his father’s anger both seem headed toward catastrophic crescendos which somehow don’t come to pass; the mechanism for the dispelling of the father’s murderous rage is not even shown or described so that particular plot twist -- at the moment of greatest provocation, he somehow gains control of himself, something that he had never previously shown any capacity for, struck me as a highly implausible conclusion unbefitting a great work of literature. Nonetheless, I found the book’s strengths so compelling and engrossing that despite this lapse, I still give Call It Sleep my highest rating.

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David really didn’t care what she thought of him just as long as she sat there. Besides, he did have something to ask her, only he couldn’t make up his mind to venture it. It might be too unpleasant. Still no matter what her answer would be, no matter what he found out, he was always safe near her. (65)

“You were good enough, the gentlest of us all. But you weren’t truly Jewish. You were strange. You didn’t have a Jew’s nature.”
“And what kind of a nature is that?”
“Ach!” Aunt Bertha said impatiently. “You see? You smile! You’re too calm, too generous.” (165)

“Leo, Did he say he wuz Leo?”
“Leo, yea; futt flaw, sebm futty fi.’ He’s a goy.” (317) [Fourth floor, seven forty five]