Call It Sleep Reading Order

Call It Sleep (1934) by Henry Roth is one of the great American modernist novels — a work that was published to critical acclaim, fell out of print during the Depression, and was not rediscovered until its reissue in 1964, when it became a major literary event. The novel follows David Schearl from ages six to eight in the Lower East Side Jewish immigrant tenements of New York between 1907 and 1913 — his terror of his violent, paranoid father Albert; his sensuous closeness to his gentle mother Genya; his encounters with the street life of the Lower East Side (the gangs, the sex, the Yiddish and polyglot speech); and his climactic attempt to touch the electric third rail of the trolley line in a search for the divine fire described in the Book of Isaiah. Henry Roth's use of stream of consciousness — derived from Joyce, whose Ulysses he had read — is extraordinary: David's consciousness renders the Lower East Side world in prose that shifts between David's interior life (in lyrical, Joycean English) and the speech of the tenement world (in a remarkable transliteration of Yiddish-inflected English). The novel was recognized on rediscovery as one of the essential works of American immigrant fiction. Henry Roth published nothing for the next sixty years, living in isolation in Maine, before completing a four-volume autobiographical novel (Mercy of a Rude Stream) in his eighties.