Call It Sleep
First published in 1934, and immediately hailed as a masterpiece,
this is a novel of Jewish life full of the pain and honesty of
family relationships. It holds the distinction of being the first
paperback ever to receive a front-page review in The New York
Times Book Review, and it became a nationwide bestseller.
Now, for the first time, it is available in both cloth and paper.
From The Critics
AudioFile - Sheldon Kaye
The most challenging passage for the narrator of this acclaimed
novel occurs when ten-year-old David flees a family catastrophe.
Guidall’s empathetic handling of David’s disjointed thoughts,
and the meaning he brings to the fragments of harsh dialogue
David hears, helps the listener experience the character’s
profound turmoil. While the rest of the novel is less
impressionistic, Guidall delivers a virtuoso interpretation of
David’s family and friends, their New York accents and argot,
and their use of Yiddish and Hebrew. In this way, a difficult,
emotionally charged classic about a Jewish immigrant experience
is made more accessible. S.K. An AUDIOFILE Earphones
Award winner ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine
Aspiring Writers
A Mercy of a Rude Stream, Vol. 1
Completed in the last year of his life, From Bondage is
perhaps Roth's most profound work, for like Tolstoy in The
Death of Ivan Ilyich, Roth examines his own imminent passing
in the most plaintive of ways, telling the story of the old man,
Ira Stigman, who, in spite of his physical frailties, finds solace
in re-creating the lost love affair of his youth. Capturing the
bohemian downtown world of Manhattan in the 1920s, Roth
has set the stage for one of the most memorable of literary
romances. At its heart, From Bondage is the mesmerizing love
triangle involving young Ira, an impressionable neophyte from
Jewish Harlem, and Edith Welles, a sophisticated professor of
English, a muse to starving poets and lovelorn men, who
sweeps Ira into her world of soigne parties and literary
debaucheries. Edith, as the old man Ira relays the story, is still
physically involved with her former student Larry Gordon
when she finds herself attracted to Ira, who is Larry's best
friend. To complicate the matter even more, Edith is also
carrying on a simultaneous affair with Lewlyn, the separated
husband of the aspiring anthropologist Marcia Meede.
Fictionalizing the lives of the celebrities of the 1920s,
including such burgeoning literary figures as Hart Crane,
Louise Bogan, Leonie Adams, and Margaret Mead, Roth
creates an unforgettable portrait of New York where "the
lights of Manhattan twisted toward him across the rippling
water like a gimlet." Perhaps the last witness to this age, Roth
paints a gentile and genteel world that contrasts so vividly
with the seemingly coarse, abject slums of the Pushcart
District from which he had sprung. Ira, then a young man, is
the observant witness to the spectacle that unfolds, seeking
desperately to ingratiate himself into this world of
sophisticates, yet hopelessly tethered to the tenement roots
he cannot escape.
From The Critics
Publisher's Weekly
Henry Roth's literary reputation would be secure on the
strength of his remarkable first novel, Call It Sleep , published
in 1934 and but largely unknown until it appeared in
paperback in 1964 and became an instant classic. Roth's
silence in the intervening years has been broken only by a
collection of his shorter pieces, Shifting Landscape . This
novel, then, is a signal event, especially since its protagonist,
Ira Stigman, is clearly the same young boy who served as
Roth's fictional alter ego in the first book, and since it begins
roughly where the earlier novel ended--in the teeming
immigrant slums of New York City during the first decades of
the 20th century, a time and place that Roth captures with
pungent language and palpable immediacy. Roth's long struggle
with this material is reflected in first-person passages
interpolated into the narrative in which the now elderly Ira
addresses his word processor (called Ecclesias), ruminates
about the difficulties that stilled his pen, and makes references
to an earlier version of this work, which he is rewriting as he
goes along. He laments the crisis of identity, the ``loss of
affirmation'' and the self-loathing that crippled his imaginative
powers, events that he touches on in the third-person
narrative. Again we encounter the violent, penny-pinching
father, the supportive mother, the loutish relatives. Ira's
memories range over family strife, his school days, the dangers
of the street, the disruption of WW I, and they end--
somewhat abruptly--after the book's best extended scenes, set
in a fancy grocery store where the adolescent Ira works after
high school. This is the most forceful part of the book, a
sustained, controlled piece of writing that masterfully evokes
the temper of the times--the advent of Prohibition, the casual
bigotry and racism of blue-collar workers and veterans--in the
process of limning a group of memorable character portraits.
Since this is to be the first volume of six, the story ends
ambiguously, after repeatedly hinting at but never getting to
``the disastrous impairment of the psyche'' and ``the accident .
. . the terrible deformation that was its consequence.'' Thus it
is reasonable to think that this novel may be more satisfying
when read as part of the six-volume whole. BOMC and QPB
selections. (Jan.)
Library Journal
After nearly six decades of silence, Roth, whose only previous
novel, Call It Sleep (1934), has been hailed as one of the
classics of 20th-century American literature, returns with
proof that his earlier effort was no fluke. In this first of a
projected six volumes to fall under the general rubric ``Mercy
of a Rude Stream,'' 87-year-old Roth juxtaposes two stories: A
young Ira Stigman grows up in Jewish Harlem during World
War I (and on to 1920, when Ira turns 14); and Roth struggles
to find his voice again. The theme that ultimately unites these
potentially discordant elements is deracination--Ira's internal
struggle to free himself from his ``Jewishness'' and Roth's
realization that his own attempt to do just that resulted in his
``creative inanition.'' Because it reflects so well the struggles
we all face in attempting to define who we are and where and
how we fit into the bigger picture, the novel transcends both
its vividly drawn, localized setting and the ethnicity of its
characters. And it leaves one eagerly anticipating the next
installment. Essential for academic collections and all but the
smallest of public collections. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ
9/15/93.-- David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St.
Petersburg, Fla.
Kirkus Reviews
The third volume in the late Roth's ongoing autobiographical
cycle, Mercy of a Rude Stream, is very much of a piece with
its predecessors—A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park (1994)
and A Diving Rock on the Hudson (1995).
It continues the story of Roth's alter ego, Ira Stigman, now
seen wrestling with his artistic and sexual demons as he
struggles toward manhood in 1920s Manhattan and also, some
60 years later, as the elderly Ira labors to make sense of
missed opportunities and flawed life choices, carrying on an
extended, fragmented "conversation" with his computer
("Ecclesias"). This latest novel fictionalizes Roth's longtime
affair with NYU teacher and poet Eda Lou Walton (here: Edith
Welles), and it's drenched in the kind of self-conscious literary
talk that most writers indulge in, then dispense with, in their
early work (though, to be fair, Roth does communicate
effectively the beady excitement felt by young intellectuals
sharing a contraband copy of Joyce's Ulysses, as well as the
hopeful Ira's discovery, through reading Joyce, "that it was
possible to commute the dross of the mundane and the sordid
into literary treasure"). There are too many lengthy
disquisitions on favored writers and writing, and—
conversely—a plodding recounting of Ira's peregrinations from
one unfulfilling day job to another. Still, Roth writes ferocious,
flinty dialogue (the scenes between Ira and his younger sister,
and former lover, Minnie are charged with an unforgettable
admixture of erotic heat and guilty hatred) and pulls off some
remarkable technical effects in balancing the young Ira's
dreams of literary accomplishment against his aged self's
resigned understanding that "performance with words was the
only option open to him, the only tramway out of himself."
It's odd, and sad, to realize that Roth, who died last October,
may eventually be better remembered for this deeply flawed
final work than for his one incontestable masterpiece: Call It
Sleep (1934), the book of his youth.
A Diving Rock on the Hudson
Completed in the last year of his life, From Bondage is
perhaps Roth's most profound work, for like Tolstoy in The
Death of Ivan Ilyich, Roth examines his own imminent
passing in the most plaintive of ways, telling the story of the
old man, Ira Stigman, who, in spite of his physical frailties,
finds solace in re-creating the lost love affair of his youth.
Capturing the bohemian downtown world of Manhattan in
the 1920s, Roth has set the stage for one of the most
memorable of literary romances. At its heart, From Bondage
is the mesmerizing love triangle involving young Ira, an
impressionable neophyte from Jewish Harlem, and Edith
Welles, a sophisticated professor of English, a muse to
starving poets and lovelorn men, who sweeps Ira into her
world of soigne parties and literary debaucheries. Edith, as
the old man Ira relays the story, is still physically involved
with her former student Larry Gordon when she finds herself
attracted to Ira, who is Larry's best friend. To complicate the
matter even more, Edith is also carrying on a simultaneous
affair with Lewlyn, the separated husband of the aspiring
anthropologist Marcia Meede. Fictionalizing the lives of the
celebrities of the 1920s, including such burgeoning literary
figures as Hart Crane, Louise Bogan, Leonie Adams, and
Margaret Mead, Roth creates an unforgettable portrait of
New York where "the lights of Manhattan twisted toward
him across the rippling water like a gimlet." Perhaps the last
witness to this age, Roth paints a gentile and genteel world
that contrasts so vividly with the seemingly coarse, abject
slums of the Pushcart District from which he had sprung. Ira,
then a young man, is the observant witness to the spectacle
that unfolds, seeking desperately to ingratiate himself into
this world of sophisticates, yet hopelessly tethered to the
tenement roots he cannot escape.