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Available
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Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1992), Paperback
User reviews
LibraryThing member nbmars
Roth's great novel of 1934, inspired by James Joyce's Ulysses, depicts the immigrant experience in the Lower East Side of New York from a young boy's point of view, and is called by Alfred Kazin "the most profound novel of Jewish life that I have ever read by an American."
David Schearl is an only
Revealing the plot in more detail does not spoil the book, since its brilliance lies with its technique and execution, rather than the bare elements of the story. The latter is captured beautifully by Hana Wirth-Nesher, Professor of English at Tel Aviv University in the Fall, 1995 issue of Judaism Magazine in which she writes: "Narrated almost exclusively from [David's] perspective, ["Call it Sleep"] is an account of a child's gradual and dim awareness of his parents, ordeal as immigrants, and of the dark history which dogs their attempts to begin a new life in the Goldene Medina, the Golden Land of America. The reader knows that both parents have been guilty of sins that have made them pariahs in the old country: the father for having been complicitous in patricide and the mother for having consummated her love for a Gentile who abandoned her. By transgressing the authority of the Father and of the community, they have been thrust into their marriage as a form of penance. The shadow cast over this story is the father's suspicion that the child is not his, which motivates his callousness and the child's uncanny defense against an accusation of which he is ignorant: He fabricates an alternative past for himself, one in which his father is the Christian organist who signifies a romantic Gentile world that is both seductive and treacherous. Brutalized by his father and nurtured to the point of suffocation by his mother, David seeks a power greater than that of his parents for protection and solace. Inspired by the text of Isaiah read to him in his Cheder class and stunned by the sparks between the trolley car tracks, he thrusts his father's milk ladle into the cracks between the rails, nearly causing his own electrocution. He survives, buoyed up by the crowds of immigrants who witness his near death, to see his Thor-like father chastened and resigned to his paternity precisely when the child appears to have freed himself from its stranglehold. His biological paternity palls beside the suggestion that the young man has been reborn as an American who can assume an English voice and a Gentile past. This is the covenant of America. Or so it seems."
The stream of consciousness that captures the perspective of a young boy is brilliant. Like Joyce, Roth also fills his work with religious references and symbolism. Indeed, David himself is analogous to the Christ figure. The characterization of David's multilingual and multiethnic world is not flattering. No immigrant culture escapes the harsh pen of Roth, but in particular, the author does not paint a pretty picture of Jews; in fact, the more religious they are, the more they bring down the author's calumny. Apparently Roth was a devotee of Communism; presumably, adherence to what he considered to be atavistic ethnic practices was anathema to him. Roth lived a reclusive life, and never wrote another book until sixty years after this, his first.
(JAF)
David Schearl is an only
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child who, with his mother Genya, comes to Ellis Island in 1907 to meet his father Albert. Albert is full of rage, and clearly despises his son. Genya is gentle with, and protective of, both. David, terrified of his father, and going through a Freudian stage with his mother, is desperately trying to understand the nature of family, sex, and religion. The lyrical Yiddish spoken in David's home is contrasted with the harsh scatalogical broken English spoken in the street in a way designed to give the reader a sense of the alienation of the second language.Revealing the plot in more detail does not spoil the book, since its brilliance lies with its technique and execution, rather than the bare elements of the story. The latter is captured beautifully by Hana Wirth-Nesher, Professor of English at Tel Aviv University in the Fall, 1995 issue of Judaism Magazine in which she writes: "Narrated almost exclusively from [David's] perspective, ["Call it Sleep"] is an account of a child's gradual and dim awareness of his parents, ordeal as immigrants, and of the dark history which dogs their attempts to begin a new life in the Goldene Medina, the Golden Land of America. The reader knows that both parents have been guilty of sins that have made them pariahs in the old country: the father for having been complicitous in patricide and the mother for having consummated her love for a Gentile who abandoned her. By transgressing the authority of the Father and of the community, they have been thrust into their marriage as a form of penance. The shadow cast over this story is the father's suspicion that the child is not his, which motivates his callousness and the child's uncanny defense against an accusation of which he is ignorant: He fabricates an alternative past for himself, one in which his father is the Christian organist who signifies a romantic Gentile world that is both seductive and treacherous. Brutalized by his father and nurtured to the point of suffocation by his mother, David seeks a power greater than that of his parents for protection and solace. Inspired by the text of Isaiah read to him in his Cheder class and stunned by the sparks between the trolley car tracks, he thrusts his father's milk ladle into the cracks between the rails, nearly causing his own electrocution. He survives, buoyed up by the crowds of immigrants who witness his near death, to see his Thor-like father chastened and resigned to his paternity precisely when the child appears to have freed himself from its stranglehold. His biological paternity palls beside the suggestion that the young man has been reborn as an American who can assume an English voice and a Gentile past. This is the covenant of America. Or so it seems."
The stream of consciousness that captures the perspective of a young boy is brilliant. Like Joyce, Roth also fills his work with religious references and symbolism. Indeed, David himself is analogous to the Christ figure. The characterization of David's multilingual and multiethnic world is not flattering. No immigrant culture escapes the harsh pen of Roth, but in particular, the author does not paint a pretty picture of Jews; in fact, the more religious they are, the more they bring down the author's calumny. Apparently Roth was a devotee of Communism; presumably, adherence to what he considered to be atavistic ethnic practices was anathema to him. Roth lived a reclusive life, and never wrote another book until sixty years after this, his first.
(JAF)
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LibraryThing member messpots
This is a magnificent book, and to describe it as a portrait of 'the immigrant experience' or 'Jewish life' not only misses the mark but will make a reader impatient for impossible details. Everything we're given is conveyed through the pinhole of a child's mind. And the child, on the whole, sees
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'friction' and little else: friction in languages, races, generations, neighbours. It's not wholly clear to me whether the child is looking to reconcile or reduce or transcend the friction, but it's clear he's striving do something about it, and he proceeds in a thoughtful and intelligent way. That striving makes up the entirety of the book's structure. Show Less
LibraryThing member rickumali
A fascinating novel from the point of view of a young Jewish boy. I loved it!
LibraryThing member eysman
a harsh, gritty, looming novel. the first sentence is so perfect . One of the great New York novels. it has such overwhelming life to it. Roth had such a profound writer's block,only decades later did he write the sequels. He stayed alive by brute force so he could finish the last novel. Roth told
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his stories from the inside out, the child eyes saw the ragged roughness, the rape, the just surviving. i loved his nightmarish climax, like the whole world was falling to pieces. A brutal, deeply sad novel. Pulsating writing. you go to it when your heart, not solely your head, tho there is much for both. Show Less
LibraryThing member kylekatz
The story of David, a seven year-old Jewish boy in Brownsville and the Lower East Side. His abusive father causes him to live in constant fear. He seeks for anything that will give him security. He gets a rosary from a Catholic friend as a talisman. In the end he intentionally shocks himself on the
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rail of the streetcar while seeking to come in contact with the light of God, and hence safety. A remarkably well-written book. Lyrical. Excellent character development, psychology. Set about 1913, written in 1934. Much awesome colorful Yiddish and the mangled English of immigrants from different countries Show Less
LibraryThing member bloom
Henry Roth was a truly talented writer and I feel frustrated as a reader that there are only a few books of his to read. However, "Call it Sleep," is a wonderfully full and vibrant novel about a poor Eastern European Jewish family that settles in the Lower East Side slums of New York. David is the
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protagonist, a small, fearful, and imaginative boy who must contend with the fast moving intensity and danger as a foreigner in New York. He is surrounded by moving characters, such as his brutish and impatient father, who struggles to support his family or Aunt Bertha, the sanguine flirt who represents the peace and comfort of the old world. I don't ordinarily enjoy these kinds of sociological novels, but Roth is able to conjure up breathtaking images, and he paints his canvas with fascinating dialects with encompass the multi-culturism of American life. "Call it Sleep," is truly a neglected piece of depression-era literature. Show Less
LibraryThing member ffortsa
This is a classic story of immigrants, people who take the chance of not only a new country but a new way of life. Albert has come to New York City from rural eastern Europe, and when the book opens he has been in the city for over a year, and meets his wife and toddler son David on the ship that
After this first meeting, we see the story through David's childish viewpoint: his reactions to his hostile father and loving mother, his fear of dark places like the cellar, the normal cruelty of children, the terror of being lost, of not being understood, of not understanding what goes on around him. Some of this is just being a child, some the hostility that surrounds him, only alleviated by his doting mother.
And through him, we see the strains on the adults in his life: his father's uncontrollable temper and paranoia drives him from one printing house to another until he gives up the trade altogether, preferring to work alone. His view of his mother is colored by men's reactions to her (written in the thirties, the book blatantly exhales the Freudian atmosphere of the time) and his need for her. Roth uses a sort of stream of consciousness to portray David's confusion, questioning, pain and fear. Plenty of all of that.
Language plays a huge role in the story. David's parents speak Yiddish, the street kids a mix of Yiddish and English, the non-Jews in the story the dialects of English of the Polish and Irish immigrants around him. Lack of English limits his mother's domain, limits his understanding of the world beyond his few blocks of home. (One of my fellow book club readers had listened to it and found the dialects much easier to understand when spoken than when transliterated, and I'm sure that would have helped.)
David is seeking something in the light, some sort of freedom and redemption that he doesn't understand but yearns for. The ending is explosive.
So it is a deep, non-trivial story. I had expected to like it more. The middle somehow wore me out, with its stereotypical psychology, then the end, with its flashes of almost inappropriate comedy and desperate fury, flew by. Some of the descriptive writing was gorgeous, some of the dialog too beautiful to be quite believable.
I found myself wishing my father were still alive to read it with me. He was a Brownsville boy himself, although of a slightly later era, and I would have learned more about him if we could have shared this story.
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has brought them after him.After this first meeting, we see the story through David's childish viewpoint: his reactions to his hostile father and loving mother, his fear of dark places like the cellar, the normal cruelty of children, the terror of being lost, of not being understood, of not understanding what goes on around him. Some of this is just being a child, some the hostility that surrounds him, only alleviated by his doting mother.
And through him, we see the strains on the adults in his life: his father's uncontrollable temper and paranoia drives him from one printing house to another until he gives up the trade altogether, preferring to work alone. His view of his mother is colored by men's reactions to her (written in the thirties, the book blatantly exhales the Freudian atmosphere of the time) and his need for her. Roth uses a sort of stream of consciousness to portray David's confusion, questioning, pain and fear. Plenty of all of that.
Language plays a huge role in the story. David's parents speak Yiddish, the street kids a mix of Yiddish and English, the non-Jews in the story the dialects of English of the Polish and Irish immigrants around him. Lack of English limits his mother's domain, limits his understanding of the world beyond his few blocks of home. (One of my fellow book club readers had listened to it and found the dialects much easier to understand when spoken than when transliterated, and I'm sure that would have helped.)
David is seeking something in the light, some sort of freedom and redemption that he doesn't understand but yearns for. The ending is explosive.
So it is a deep, non-trivial story. I had expected to like it more. The middle somehow wore me out, with its stereotypical psychology, then the end, with its flashes of almost inappropriate comedy and desperate fury, flew by. Some of the descriptive writing was gorgeous, some of the dialog too beautiful to be quite believable.
I found myself wishing my father were still alive to read it with me. He was a Brownsville boy himself, although of a slightly later era, and I would have learned more about him if we could have shared this story.
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LibraryThing member dbsovereign
A haunting story of childhood trauma and depression. Roth succeeds in recreating what it's like growing up and not always understanding everything we witness. Also vividly portrays life in New York as an immigrant.
LibraryThing member JVioland
Growing up in an immigrant family in New York. A very good read which leads to an understanding of how our ancestors lived in an alien culture and became assimilated into the fabric of America.
LibraryThing member VictoriaNH
Interesting novel about the immigrant experience in 1900s NY. However, it was hard to read a mix of Yiddish, Hebrew and street english. Overly long and I started skipping towards the end as nothing much happens.
LibraryThing member tzelman
I tried hard to get through this "classic" but no success in working my way through David Schearl and his neuroses and his brutal father.
LibraryThing member whitewavedarling
This was an entertaining read at first, but I have to say that the farther I got into it, the less I cared about finishing it. Simply, I just wasn't particularly interested or engaged, and the central character isn't particularly sympathetic or engaging. In the end, I read it, and I appreciated the
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language and writing, but I was never really touched by the book or fully engaged. I'd recommend it as a fairly good execution of a child's point of view and journey into adolescence, better than plenty of contemporary works I've read in this respect, but I can't say that it struck me on any level beyond this. Show Less
LibraryThing member TheAmpersand
Okay, I'll admit it: when I picked this up at Borders, I thought I was buying a Phillip Roth novel. After finishing "Call it Sleep," I rather wish that I had. I guess it pays to read the cover carefully. "Call it Sleep" is a rather obvious American Jewish gloss on Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as
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a Young Man" with some of D.H. Lawrence's mommy issues thrown in for good measure. It features lots of stream-of-consciousness interior monologues, piles of exacting description, numerous high-Modernist epiphanies and obvious, ever-present Freudian symbolism. Roth even goes all Circe chapter on us in the book's final section. His Lower East Side is as dear and as dirty as Joyce's Dublin, but since Roth lacks Joyce's humor and his sense of linguistic playfulness, the prose in "Call it Sleep" is, like its main character, rather introverted and neurotic and it seldom sparkles like Joyce's best stuff does. While much can be made of the polyglot, multiethnic community that Roth describes, his decision to render their speech phonetically strikes this reader modern as something close to minstrelsy. I couldn't help but think that later Jewish writers, like Bellow and the other Roth, were able to capture the particularly musical argot of the New York streets without forsaking recognizable spellings. Roth's characters, though carefully drawn, present another problem for the reader. Those of us who found Stephen Daedalus to be something of a wet blanket are unlikely to be charmed by Roth's protagonist, David Schearl, who comes off as the wimpiest, whiniest kid in his tenement. David's mother is more sympathetic, but his brutal, angry father is perhaps one of the most unpleasant characters I've encountered in all of my reading, which might be considered an achievement of sorts. I found myself slogging through this one before it was half over, but, to Roth's credit, it is written with a sort of dogged care. Even if I didn't find it particularly involving, one gets a sense that Roth himself really valued these characters and was determined to preserve the world of his childhood. He succeeded, I suppose, but I'm not likely to revisit it. Show Less
LibraryThing member cherish
As a general fan of turn-of-the-century stuff, I really wanted to like this book. It would have been much better if Roth had cut out about half of the length of the book. On the other hand, it wasn't so bad that I literally could not finish it, so that's a plus. It's just that none of the
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characters really seemed all that dynamic, especially not the protagonist. Nobody changed or grew at all. David was still a terrified little boy who hated everything, his father was still a crazy, unlikeable man, his mother was still doting, his aunt was still overbearing, etc. If nothing else, I suppose it's pretty realistic, but it makes for a rather boring story... Show Less
LibraryThing member Citizenjoyce
Such a fascinating study of Jewish immigrants to the US in the early 1900's. What a shame it was marred with an obsession with sex. There's a reason I stopped watching Woody Allen movies after he screwed his step daughter. There's more to life than sex and compliant women placating their violent
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men. Show Less
LibraryThing member lxydis
more like "go to sleep"
LibraryThing member SeriousGrace
Told from the perspective of six year old David Schearl, Call It Sleep relates the hardships of immigrant life in turn of the century gritty New York City. In the prologue, David and his mother arrive from Austria to join her abusive and angry husband. This is the of the few times the narrative is
As an aside, in the beginning I questioned why David's father would abhor David to the point of criminal abuse. It took awhile to figure out why.
But, back to little David. His young life is filled with fear. He is overwhelmed by language differences between Yiddish and English, overly sensitive to the actions of his peers, clings to his mother with Freudian zeal. I found him to be a really hopeless child and my heart bled for him. While most of the story is bleak, there is the tiniest ray of hope at the end. The pessimists in the crowd might have a negative explanation for what David's father does, but I saw it as a small gesture of asking for forgiveness.
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outside little six year old David's head. The majority of the story is a stream of consciousness, skillfully painting a portrait of inner city life from a child's point of view.As an aside, in the beginning I questioned why David's father would abhor David to the point of criminal abuse. It took awhile to figure out why.
But, back to little David. His young life is filled with fear. He is overwhelmed by language differences between Yiddish and English, overly sensitive to the actions of his peers, clings to his mother with Freudian zeal. I found him to be a really hopeless child and my heart bled for him. While most of the story is bleak, there is the tiniest ray of hope at the end. The pessimists in the crowd might have a negative explanation for what David's father does, but I saw it as a small gesture of asking for forgiveness.
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LibraryThing member keylawk
The novel tells the story of a child arrived in the slums of New York in 1907, raised by immigrant Polish Jews. Through David's eyes, his father becomes suspicious of him. His warm-hearted mother is also isolated, by language. The boy scuttles through the streets like a frightened animal.
LibraryThing member selfcallednowhere
It took me awhile to get into this book, but I think that was mostly because I was having a very hard time concentrating on it at first. Once I did I got *very* into it--I read the whole last 300 pages in just two days. It pulled me in very much and I just *had* to know what was going to happen
Turn-of-the-century immigrant life is, I'll admit, something I know very little about, so it was interesting to get a very clear peek into that world. The characters were all well-developed and felt like real people. Doing it through the eyes of such a young child is something I don't think most writers could manage well, but Roth really pulled it off.
The use of dialect for most of the dialogue was slightly hard to get through--I can understand that as a style choice, but it just made some more work required to figure those parts out. But it wasn't too big a deal.
The ending was phenomenal and one that really left you thinking. But everything was not entirely neatly resolved so I very much wanted to know what happened next! But I think leaving it kind of open-ended actually did work.
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next.Turn-of-the-century immigrant life is, I'll admit, something I know very little about, so it was interesting to get a very clear peek into that world. The characters were all well-developed and felt like real people. Doing it through the eyes of such a young child is something I don't think most writers could manage well, but Roth really pulled it off.
The use of dialect for most of the dialogue was slightly hard to get through--I can understand that as a style choice, but it just made some more work required to figure those parts out. But it wasn't too big a deal.
The ending was phenomenal and one that really left you thinking. But everything was not entirely neatly resolved so I very much wanted to know what happened next! But I think leaving it kind of open-ended actually did work.
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LibraryThing member pnorman4345
The central character in this novel is David the son of a couple that has immigrated to the US from Austria in the early part of the 20th century. They first live in Brownsville and then moved to the Lower East Side. The story is told from the point of view of the 7, 8, 9 year old child and is
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It is intense, moving, even scary. And wonderful.
more
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a tale of growing up and the fears of a child, the judgement of a child, the toll of family history than it is of immigration and Jewishness. It is intense, moving, even scary. And wonderful.
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LibraryThing member quondame
Not a fun read, an American Jewish novel of young fearful 7-8 year old boy in a relentlessly misogynistic environment, only the mother is good, though her past is shaded, all other encounters with women are horror filled, although to be fair there aren’t many positive encounters with men or boys
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either - the policemen coming off the best. Show Less
LibraryThing member DanielSTJ
This was an intriguing and interesting novel. It's a shame that it's the author's only novel, as I feel that he had much to offer the literary world. Some parts of it are extremely well-written and speak wonders and volume. The story itself meanders and diverges a lot, but overall-- it is still a
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highly readable and palatable book. Show Less
LibraryThing member Gittel
I love reading about early 20th Century New York and this book recreates it in minute detail. Parts of it were hard to get through and I had trouble following the narrative in some sections. But this is a book that should be taught in schools and read by everyone. How was this never made into a
The more I ponder this book, and reread sections, the more it takes my breath away with its complex structure and breathtaking ambition. What a fabulous novel. Not an easy read, but I think this will stay with me for a long, long time.
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movie??The more I ponder this book, and reread sections, the more it takes my breath away with its complex structure and breathtaking ambition. What a fabulous novel. Not an easy read, but I think this will stay with me for a long, long time.
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LibraryThing member bederson
too violent
LibraryThing member Ranjr
I enjoyed this book though I did feel the length somewhere around past page 200. I picked this one up and read it because Fran Lebowitz recommended it on that Scorsese HBO documentary. Besides the fact that I frankly hate her writing, I do like hearing her talk, so I decided to check out the
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recommendation. I was not disappointed the book did hook me immediately. However, the street pidgin started to wear on me somewhere around after page number two hundred as well. Other than that, I liked it and am glad I read it. I would recommend this to a reader who's looking for something substantial to read, this is not light reading. Show Less
Subjects
Awards
Language
Original publication date
1934
Physical description
462 p.; 8.1 inches
ISBN
0374522928 / 9780374522926