Astonished by her husband’s haggard appearance, Genya apologizes for not having known him instantly. With the gentleness that is sustained in all the many crises he creates, she says, “You must have suffered in this land.” Indeed he has, and will continue to suffer from himself in a way that turns his harshness into their immediate, their most perilous environment. Albert is his wife’s only New York. She never attempts to learn English, is content just to look after her family, is afraid to transgress beyond the immediate streets in the neighborhood. Her deepest feeling for Albert is not the passion that unsettles him but a concern that comes from a sense of duty. Anything else is unthinkable to her. Deprived of actual love, since Albert’s quarrelsomeness isolates her, she is free to give her entire soul to her little boy.
David observes, very early, that his mother is attractive to a landsman, a fellow “countryman,” of his father’s, Luter. Albert notices nothing, finds Luter one of the few people he can talk to, and insists on repeatedly inviting him to dinner. When Luter is alone for a moment and no longer has to keep up his pose of formal amiability, it is little David, studying his face, who realizes — without knowing the reason — that the man has been playing a part. “And the eyes themselves, which were always so round and soft, had narrowed now … the eyeballs looked charred, remote … It worried David. A faint thrill of disquiet ran through him. He suddenly felt an intense desire to have someone else present in his house. It didn’t have to be his mother.” His still-unconscious gift of observation will soon provide the way out of the dark cave in which his father has shut him up.
Call It Sleep is not a naturalistic novel, one in which character is shaped entirely by environment. Jews are generally so conscious of the pressure of history that it was a notable achievement for Henry Roth, coming out of the Lower East Side at a time when it was routine for people to dream of transforming “conditions,” to put character ahead of environment. As Lower New York in the teens of our century comes alive in David Schearl’s anxious but eager consciousness, Roth presents the city not as external documentary but as formed instant by instant out of David’s perceptions. David Schearl is the artist as a very small boy. With this novel we are in the city-world not of Sister Carrie but of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Here is little David groping his way into New York as winter comes. Notice that Roth spells “grey” in the British fashion, as did Joyce.
The silent white street waited for him, snow-drifts where the curb was. Footfalls silent. Before the houses, the newly swept areas of the sidewalks, black, were greying again. Flakes cold on cheek, quickening. Narrow-eyed, he peered up. Black overhead the flakes were, black till they sank below a housetop. Then suddenly white. Why? A flake settled on his eye-lash; he blinked, tearing with the wet chill, lowered his head. Snow trodden down by passing feet into crude, slippery scales. The railings before basements gliding back beside him, white pipes of snow upon them. He scooped one up as he went. Icy, setting the blood tingling, it gathered before the plow of his palm … Voices of children. School a little ways off, on the other side of the street … Must cross. Before him at the corner, children were crossing a beaten path in the snow. Beside him, the untrodden white of the gutter.
The succession of sweet melodious words recalls Joyce, that most musical of twentieth-century masters. Anyone who recognizes Joyce’s immense achievement in Ulysses will recognize his influence on Roth. In Ulysses, Dublin exists through the word-by-word progression of the subliminal consciousness. This is the mental world that is most ourselves, for nothing is so close to us as our inner thinking. The sources of this interior world remain mysterious as their effects are most inspiring.
Yet Roth never falls into lyrical expansiveness for its own sake, the usual style of romantic autobiographical novels (say Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel). Roth’s book is always firmly under control. Perhaps the novel is almost too tightly plotted when we come to the seemingly final explosion between the parents that leads David to run away and to seek a burst of light. This is meant to be his epiphany, the self-discovery leading to the artist he will become. Roth doesn’t let his material run away with him. He wishes to show character as fate, character as dominating the most intimate relationships within the family.
He also shows that Genya’s tenderness enveloping her little son is not just “Freudian,” theoretical, but a protectiveness that is incarnate in Jewish history. Its key is the Yiddish that mother and son speak together. It is made to sound effortlessly noble, beautifully expressive, almost liturgical by contrast with the guttural street English that surrounds David in the street. We are startled when he talks in the same horrible, mutilated tones away from Mama. Then he is with strangers. English is the stranger in this novel located in New York, English the adopted language, tough and brazen. It represents the alienation from the larger world of kids competing with each other in toughness. “Land where our fodders died!” becomes a parody of a national hymn that shows how derivative and meaningless the famous line can be when sung by immigrant sweet urchins.
David, searching for experience beyond his immediate neighborhood, discovers that he is “losted” and tells the baffled cop who cannot make out where the boy lives, “On a hunnder ’n’ twenny six Boddeh Stritt.” Later in the novel David is enchanted by the Polish boy Leo flying a kite from the roof. Like Tom Sawyer before Huckleberry Finn, David is astounded by the boy’s freedom. Hoping to see this marvel again, David asks: “Yuh gonna comm up hea alluh time?” Leo carelessly explains: “Naw! I hangs out on wes’ elevent’. Dat’s w’ea we lived ’fore we moved.”
Maybe street kids once talked this way, maybe not. The point is that Roth cariacatures the terrible English of the street — a “foreign,” external, cold-hearted language — in order to bring out the necessary contrast with the Yiddish spoken at home. This is the language of the heart, of tradition, of deeply felt togetherness. Just as Roth perhaps overdoes the savage English spoken in the street, so he deliberately exalts the Yiddish that he translates at every point into splendid, almost too splendid, King James English. Even when Albert almost comes to blows with his vulgarly outspoken sister-in-law Bertha, he cries out: “I’m pleading with you as with Death!” Storming at his son, he menacingly demands, “Shudder when I speak to you.” The English doesn’t convey the routine, insignificant weight of the word for “shudder” in Yiddish. The people speaking Yiddish in this book are not cultivated, careful in choosing their words. They are hard-pressed, charged-up, deeply emotional. There is nothing about their lives in the “Golden Land” that is not arduous, strange, even threatening. So they talk, as extremely vulnerable Yiddish speakers from the immigrant working class have always done. It is a verbal style, even a routine, in which people respond to each other as if they were breaking all the windows in order to let a little air into the house.