Roth, Henry
ROTH, HENRY
ROTH, HENRY (1906–1995), U.S. novelist. Roth was born in Austria-Hungary. When he was 18 months old, his mother brought him to New York, where his father had been working to save money for their passage. In New York, young Roth was close to his mother and alienated from his father. At first the family lived on New York's Lower East Side, where Roth felt a sense of belonging in the Jewish community of the neighborhood that he did not receive at home. Later, the family moved to Harlem, a diverse community with a large Irish population. There Roth suffered considerably because of his Jewish heritage, and began to adapt to his gentile neighborhood. In the mid-1920s, he studied biology at the City College of New York and developed an interest in writing. During this period, Roth also met Ida Lou Walton, a New York University professor, and the two began living together. By 1930, Roth began writing his first novel. Three and a half years later the novel, Call It Sleep, was completed. Walton left Roth and eventually married David Mandel, a partner in the Robert O. Ballou publishing company. In early 1935, Ballou published Call It Sleep, on Walton's recommendation. This autobiographical work describes a young Jewish immigrant boy's search for belonging in New York City, from age six to nine, in the 1930s. The protagonist, David Schearl, is disturbed by his father's doubts of his paternity, his gentile neighborhood, and the Jewish religion he does not understand. David feels close only to his mother and this Oedipal aspect causes David to pull away from her throughout the novel. Symbolism in the work points to the main theme – redemption. Roth's dialect and ethnic speech patterns reveal the extent of David's isolation. Finally, turning to myth and the Isaiah story for his transfiguration at the end of the novel, David touches a milk ladle to the third rail of the trolley tracks in an attempt at symbolic purification through electrocution. David's survival softens his father's feelings toward him, and there is hope that he will transcend his inner conflict.
The critical reception of Roth's Call It Sleep in 1935 was predominantly favorable. Fred T. Marsh believed the novel "… to be the most compelling and moving, the most accurate and profound study of an American slum childhood that has yet appeared in this day…" The reviewer reminds his readers "… that this novel would never have been published if Ulysses had not won the decision in our courts. And the law has enlightened public opinion." Roth's language in the novel is seen as "… nothing short of the highest talent. It moves from a kind of transmutation of picturesque, warm, emotional and gentle Yiddish, to the literal English argot of the Ghetto, an ugly, fascinating, and expressive speech." Undoubtedly, any first-novel author would be flattered by Marsh's final judgment: "To discerning readers, I believe, for its profound intensity, its rare virtuosity, its sensitive realism, its sheer weight, its power, circumference and depth, this first novel of this Mr. Roth will be remembered for some time to come. I should like to see Call It Sleep win the Pulitzer Prize – which it never will."
Joseph Gollomb, in contrast to Marsh, thought Roth magnified the foulness of life on the Lower East Side instead of accurately portraying it. Although initially praising Roth's "sensitive ear for speech," Gollomb passes final judgment on Roth's literary truthfulness: "… still let me repeat the book in part and as a whole does violence to the truth. Someone once wished that novels of the east side life did not have to be so 'excremental.' Call It Sleep is by far the foulest picture of the east side that has yet appeared, in conception and in language. Certainly there was and is foulness down there as in other places. But Mr. Roth treats it not with the discriminating eye of the artist but with a magnifying glass, and if not with a relish, certainly with an effort to see what Emerson saw, with 'even in the mud and scum of things, there always, always something sings.' Whoever omits that something in his picture of east side life omits the very things which kept that life so long a fertile field for the creative writer."
Call It Sleep was republished in the early 1960s. Thus, almost 30 years after its initial publication, Roth's novel was "rediscovered" by Harold Ribalow, who wrote: "It is no wonder, then, that the best novel ever written in the United States should have been 'rediscovered' in 1960. It is Call It Sleep, by Henry Roth." Leslie Fiedler and Alfred Kazin both called attention to Roth's novel in articles and lectures. Although the novel may have remained a fond memory in the minds of a few enthusiastic readers, Henry Roth disappeared from the literary scene. Ribalow's correspondence with Roth in 1959 was the beginning of the novel's comeback. Ribalow's view of Roth's work after the correspondence is summed up in this quote: "If most of us, passing through only once, can leave behind us a work of art comparable to Call It Sleep, we would have every reason to be proud of ourselves."
It is crucial to mention here Roth's debt to the early modernists, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. In one of his last novels, From Bondage (1996), Roth reveals this influence: "Ulysses … showed … how to address whole slagheaps of squalor, and make them available for … art … the sorcery of language … to fluoresce, to electrify the mood … the Chicago packing houses … used every part of the pig except the squeal. Joyce elucidated ways to use even the squeal."
The republication of Call It Sleep resulted in a financial windfall for Roth (the paperback edition in 1964 sold more than one million copies), and rejuvenated his artistic talent in the late 1970s. He began work on a four-volume novel entitled Mercy of a Rude Stream in 1979, picking up on the story of David Schearl, renamed Ira Stigman. This last literary project consisted of A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park (1994), where Ira encounters antisemitism; A Diving Rock on the Hudson (1995), which reveals tantalizing glimpses of the wholesome, idealized American boyhood of Ira's non-Jewish friends; and the posthumous volumes From Bondage (1996) and Requiem for Harlem (1998), where Ira's growing intimacy with Edith (Walton) helps him escape from domestic and sexual tensions.
Sexuality in Roth's fiction is discussed in detail in Redemption, Henry Roth's biography by Steven G. Kellman, and a New Yorker article by Jonathan Rosen. Both delve into Roth's psyche, revealing the sexual frustrations of Roth's protagonist and of Roth himself. According to Rosen, "Roth's characterization of his Harlem exile as a kind of hell makes more sense when considered alongside the revelation that it was there that he began an incestuous relationship with his sister, Rose." According to Kellman, Roth had been "groping his sister since he was 12 and she was 10; by the time Roth was 16 he was having intercourse with her. When he was 18, he also seduced his 14-year-old first cousin Sylvia, leading her into the basement at a bris." Rosen interprets Kellman's Redemption in regard to David Schearl's incest as a "dramatic magnification of immigrant insecurity, the newcomer's inability to invest their emotions in anything beyond the reassuring confines of the clan." As a matter of fact, Rosen feels that "… the guilt that Roth felt hung over him like a kind of Biblical curse."
bibliography:
"Henry Roth (1906–1995)," in: Contemporary Literary Criticism, vol. 104 (1998), 236–332; F.T. Marsh, in: New York Herald Tribune Books, 2:24 (Feb. 17, 1935), 6; J. Gollomb, in: Saturday Review of Literature, 2:35 (March 16, 1935), 552; H. Ribalow, in: Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 3:3 (Fall 1962), 5–14; F. Bloch, in: Jewish Writers of the Twentieth Century (2003), 468–70; S.G. Kellman, Redemption (2005); J. Rosen, in: The New Yorker (Aug. 1, 2005), 74–79.
[Mark Padnos (2nd ed.)]