Customer Reviews

Call It Sleep (Penguin Modern Classics)

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This, for me, captures the pure terror that often attends childhood, and the process of dealing with things you can't understand. It's also a brilliant evocation of the alienation of the Jewish experience-- you can't really compare it, as one of my fellow reviewers did, to the experiences of other ethnic groups. The Scherls are a family profoundly alienated from everyone else-- which serves to heighten the terror. This book is written in a stream-of-consciousness style that is really brilliant in that it is completely convincing and totally natural on the part of the author-- it never seems forced-- and in that it beautifully evokes the thought process of childhood. I read this when I was very young and it has stuck with me ever since-- it helped me to understand the feelings of my own childhood.

My hope was to read a novel that gave an accurate and detailed account of the world my grandparents lived in and I was not disappointed. As with the best historical fiction, I was able to gain a sense of not just the environment and setting, but its effect on the main characters, especially David, the main protagonist.

While the prose is often challenging and innovative, the book is a surprisingly easy and quick read that I could not put down. While I was often frustrated by David's inner dialogue, the author must be commended for attempting to convey the inner workings of a child's mind, how his thought process often chaotically bounced around from one thought to another. The author also uses language in a very unique and interesting fashion, namely the contrast between early 20th century New York slang, composed of so many different ethnic groups, to the authors "translation" of Eastern European Yiddish.

For anyone currently reading the novel, who might feel frustrated at a seeming lack of direction in the plot, my advice is to keep reading, as its themes of alienation, growing self-awareness, family, sexual awakening and assimilation become more apparent as the story progresses. And for those who have yet to read the book, I strongly recommend not reading the introduction until after you've finished the book, as it pretty much gives away almost everything that happens in the story and really should have been the Afterword. Regardless, it happens to be a well-written analysis of the novel and can even help the reader in his or her own thoughts and opinions of what is most definitely a classic of 20th century literature.

I read this book many years ago, in college, and remember enjoying it thoroughy. I have recently heard it read (Recorded Books, Inc.) by the incomparable George Guidall, who seems to read books requiring Yiddish phrases/accents particularly well (try Stanley Elkin's "Mrs. Ted Bliss" for a hilarious and compassionate thrill).

I was not disappointed this second time around, having matured myself, both as a reader and a writer. One of the most striking aspects of the novel is Roth's obvious love of women; few novels by men present women in such a truly beloved light. David's aunt - something of a shrew, a harridan, and a slob - is nevertheless incredibly good-hearted - and alive! Now I want to know more about Henry Roth. Does anyone know if there is a biography of this great writer available? Also, I noticed that there is a book of essays about "Call It Sleep." I plan to get it.

This sad, wonderfully written book of tormented immigrants at he turn of the last century from the eyes of an 8 year old child, is vivid and painful. A portrayal of the growth of a youngster, and the gradual revelation of the source of his pain is not easy reading. Roth's power of description of people and scenes are like verbal photographs. This is a work of art.

Henry Roth wants to do two things well in this book: first, accurately describe the experience of being a child -- not a tough, bully-type child, but a shy kid with no friends. (I can relate.) Secondly, he wants to capture the language spoken by native New Yorkers and by immigrants to the city.

It might be best to explain the book's trick as "inside versus outside." Most of the time, we stand in a position of semi-omniscience, much like in Crime and Punishment: while the godlike narrator in Crime and Punishment could see inside Raskolnikov's head and no one else's, we are allowed into David Schearl's mind while he wanders terrified through the world. David understands perfectly well why he's so scared, and by the end so do we -- but we also understand why he can't explain his terror to anyone else. We are trapped in the child's head with him. It's been a very long time -- probably since I was David's age -- since I've remembered those feelings.

The language of New York's Jewish ghettoes in Call It Sleep also has an inside and an outside, and Roth's great trick is to pull us so deeply into that world that it's a slap on the face when we're back outside. The immigrants talk to one another in their native Yiddish, in which there's great poetry and biblical allusion (as well as more than a few "may your remaining days be dark"-type curses). We're steeped in that world. Only occasionally do the immigrants step outside and talk haltingly with, say, a local policeman. They are shy, awkward, and adrift. Roth is so ingenious in the delivery that we feel their shyness and awkwardness as though it were our own.

It's rare to find a book that is so committed to its characters. Roth has no ulterior motive. He just wants to introduce us to this little community and its little people. If we happen to see larger meanings or other people in those he depicts, it's accidental. That sort of devotion to character is extremely rare. I can only imagine how absorbed in the characters Roth must have been, if he drew his reader in that completely.

I discovered Henry Roth serendipidiously--by purchasing a used copy of "Call It Sleep" from a street merchant on West 4th Street in New York while I was a student at NYU. His writing completely and utterly captivated me--the beautiful (yet simple) lyricism of his prose, and his ability to capture and preserve an era gone by..."Call It Sleep" is truly one of the great American novels of all time--brilliant in every respect, it deserves its rightful place in the Western Canon as one of the greatest 20th century literary works. I continually re-read "Call it Sleep"--as well as his recent "Mercy of A Rude Stream" cycle of works. Roth's passing in 1995 was a truly sad time for me and for contemporary American literature.

I read this book several years ago as an American Studies major at Penn State University. At first I began to read it only because it was a requirement of my major, but this quickly became one of my favorite books I've read in my studies. The story is of a young jewish boy, being brought up in a ethnically diverse New York City. It is about his grappling with his spirituality, and his perceptions of the world. One thing I learned about the Jewish culture is of its strong patriarchy, and this book shows conflicts that arise between father and son, and how a son can almost never live up to his father's expectations. The story is haunting, and the landscapes are vivid and picturesque. I also recommend a similar book, "Bread Givers", by Anzia Yezierska.

According to Amazon, I bought this novel four years ago and for the life of me I actually don't remember what made me buy it.

I do that a lot, I have a very long queue of things to read and so it's not uncommon for me to buy something and then file it away for several years until I finally get a chance to get around to it. So who knows what prompted me to purchase it, as I don't really fall into what one might consider a person who this book would resonate the most with. As you can tell by my last name, I'm not Jewish and I didn't grow up anywhere near the 1930s. Yet this book captures the feel of being alive in all its glory and terror (mostly terror) than anything I've read in a while. It's a vibrant work that seethes with the pulse of a city and a child, sometimes the two of them acting in concert and sometimes the two of them opposed.

It tells the story of a Jewish family, the Schaerls, who have come over to make lives in New York City. David is a young child, his mother a gentle woman and his father a rather . . . intense man, let's just say. The plot isn't so much a plot as a coming of age tale, as David experiences life and starts to explore the world outside their apartment, the dirty city streets, the collision of people and language, the terror of separation and attempting to find his place in a world that he doesn't fit into very well.

If nothing else, this novel manages to simultaneously capture not only the experience of Jewish immigrants but the feel of growing up. David's father Albert seems like a man who is aware that culturally he's a Star of David shaped peg trying to fit into a round hole, and the constant tension that results from that causes him to constantly rage at a world that isn't necessarily fair to begin with and seems doubly unfair to him. His effect on David is tremendous and balanced out by the sheer gentleness of his mother, who adores him.

But if the story was just about growing up and being Jewish it wouldn't be that remarkable. What is remarkable is how Roth literally puts us into the perspective of this family and filters the world to us through them. The language churns and leaps and shouts, shifting unexpectedly into a stream of consciousness, as David's thoughts whisk back and forth, rarely focusing and coming at us in cascades of short sentences. Even more interesting, he chooses to render all the dialogue that would be Yiddish in plain English while rendering the English and other languages into a phonetic form, meaning that to us our own language becomes something alien, where we really get a feel for how the Schearls experience the world, where even the words have to be puzzled over for their meaning. It's amazing, not only in how vividly it conveys this world, but how easy it is to read once one gets the hang of it. It makes some sections difficult, especially when all the children are talking but it also comes closer to giving us these people's lives than anything else.

Through it all, David tries to learn what it means to be Jewish, tries to learn what his family is about, tries to learn how to live in a world that shifts just out of reach as soon as he starts to adapt to it. His world seems both small and expansive, with the city streets of New York becoming the size of fields, where two avenues over can take you to another planet entirely.

It all comes together in a chapter that seems to be a complete mess at first and then suddenly all the various shards fuse into something brilliant, all the voices of the city mingling, thoughts mingling, symbolism mingling, in one virtuoso effect that makes you sad that Roth only seemed to write one proper novel, as nothing else he's ever done really seems to approach the scope and intimacy of this. It leaps into voices and minds and into gutters and cellars and rooftops. It takes the world that we know and first turns it into something alien and new, and then manages over the course of the book to turn it into something familiar. I'll never know what it's really like to grow up Jewish, the traditions, the pressures, the sense of being an outsider, the twin tensions of wanting to maintain your culture and become part of this new world. I'll never know these things, as a third generation American citizen. But thanks to a book written when my grandparents were children, I have some idea on how to start understanding it.

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 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.

Mandatory reading for anyone who can read. Roth belongs alongside Faulkner, Dos Passos, and Joyce. Call it Sleep is the most beautifully written book I have ever read. Tight, turbulent, and heartbreakingly gorgeous. The author squeezes poetry from the tiniest, grittiest of experiences; the reader is allowed so far inside the head of David Shearl it is almost as if he or she travels the same intimate, painful path to awakening-an awakening at once political, sexual, and religious.