Recommendations
Books Like Call It Sleep by Henry Roth
American immigrant fiction, Jewish Lower East Side novels, and modernist stream of consciousness
If Call It Sleep drew you into David Schearl's consciousness in the Lower East Side tenements — the fear of his father, his closeness to his mother, and the noise and vitality of the immigrant street — these eight works share its modernist ambition, its sympathy for the immigrant child's double world, and its sense of the city as both terrifying and miraculous.
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Buy on AmazonThe Rise of David Levinsky
by Abraham Cahan
The great predecessor novel of Jewish immigrant ambition — David Levinsky's rise from shtetl poverty to millionaire garment manufacturer; the social and economic context for the world of Call It Sleep, told from the first generation's perspective.
- 2
Buy on AmazonUlysses
by James Joyce
The modernist masterpiece Henry Roth read before writing Call It Sleep — Leopold Bloom's Dublin is David Schearl's Lower East Side, the immigrant's consciousness given the full weight of literary technique.
- 3
Buy on AmazonThe Jungle
by Upton Sinclair
Sinclair's muckraking novel of Lithuanian immigrants in Chicago's meatpacking industry — the documentary counterpart to Call It Sleep's lyrical portrait of immigrant life; the same world rendered from outside the child's consciousness.
- 4Buy on Amazon
Parable of the Sower
by Octavia Butler
Butler's novel of survival in a collapsed America — the same sense of a child's consciousness trying to make sense of a world that is simultaneously familiar and threatening; immigrant vulnerability transposed to near-future America.
- 5
Buy on AmazonA Tree Grows in Brooklyn
by Betty Smith
Smith's Brooklyn novel of an Irish immigrant family — Francie Nolan's childhood in Williamsburg; the same generational ambition and the same sharp attention to immigrant poverty that organizes Call It Sleep.
- 6
Buy on AmazonHerzog
by Saul Bellow
Bellow's masterpiece — Moses Herzog is the adult version of David Schearl, the Jewish immigrant child grown up and educated; reading Call It Sleep and Herzog together gives the arc of the American Jewish literary experience.
- 7
Buy on AmazonGoodbye, Columbus
by Philip Roth
Roth's debut — the next generation's version of what Call It Sleep depicts; the Patimkins have escaped the tenements, and Goodbye, Columbus explores the contradiction of that escape.
- 8
Buy on AmazonHunger
by Knut Hamsun
Hamsun's 1890 Norwegian novel of a starving young writer — the consciousness of poverty and hunger rendered from inside; the European modernist precedent for Call It Sleep's method of making a city terrifying and alive through one consciousness.
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