In Roth’s meaningful translation, the Yiddish often sounds just “lovely,” the language of family love and respect for God. The reader from another culture should know that when Albert returns home and, not seeing his son, curtly asks his wife, “Where’s the prayer?”, he is referring to his son as his “kaddish,” the Hebrew prayer over the dead that it is the highest obligation of a son to say in memory of his father.
Yet Albert gives no evidence of being a believer. Genya faithfully lights the Sabbath candles Friday at sundown. But describing her own grandmother to her son, she admits: “But while my grandfather was very pious, she only pretended to be — just as I pretend, may God forgive us both.” That last phrase is entirely characteristic. You don’t have to be pious in order to be a faithful Jew — you just have to honor the tradition as Genya does, with her separate dishes for Passover and the lighting of the Friday-night candles for the coming of the Sabbath. The Yiddish of such poor immigrants as the Schearls was often quite homey and full of little mistakes. In Roth’s text they speak with grace, longing, nobility. Yiddish is their real home. Even when life is fiercest, their language conveys a seeking for a better world than this, for spiritual heights customary to people who regard themselves as living under the eye of God.
Yet Roth has no love for the rabbi (teacher) who for twenty-five cents a boy tries to drum the actual language of the Hebrew Bible into his cowed pupils. The “cheder,” the primitive Hebrew school in which the boys are pinched, driven, insulted so that they will at least pronounce Hebrew words without necessarily understanding them, is presented in absolutely realistic terms as a Dickens-like schoolroom of torture. The rabbi is the fattish, irascible, ill-smelling Yidel Pankower. Even his first name, meaning “Little Jew,” brings out Roth’s scorn for the place, the practice, the old routine. The rabbi despises his “American idiots.” Everything was better in the Old Country. Teacher and pupils talk Yiddish by contrast with the sacred Hebrew text. Everywhere throughout Call It Sleep, the sacred is shown side by side with the profane, as is usual among deeply observant old immigrant Jews. They ignore the actual sordidness of the life surrounding them in their adoration of the holy word itself.
Awful as Reb Yidel Pankower is, he discerns David’s abilities. He benevolently brings in an old, kindly sage to hear David recite his lessons. Think of it, a kid brought up in New York’s heathen atmosphere who can come so close to the ancient text! David has his first moment of spiritual illumination (he will seek it at its fieriest in coming so perilously close to the third rail) when he hears Reb Yidel pronounce the following over another boy:
“Now I’ll tell you a little of what you read, then what it means. Listen to me well that you may remember it. Beshnas mos hamelech.” The two nails of his thumb and forefinger met. “In the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah saw God. And God was sitting on his throne, high in heaven and in his temple — Understand?” He pointed upward …
“Now!” resumed the rabbi. “Around Him stood the angels, God’s blessed angels. How beautiful they were you yourself may imagine. And they cried: Kadosh! Kadosh! Kadosh! — Holy! Holy! Holy! And the temple rang and quivered with the sound of their voices. So!” He paused, peering into Mendel’s face. “Understand?”
David is stimulated but does not find holiness in the Hebrew letters. He is startled by the reluctance of other boys to use the strips of Yiddish newspaper in the communal toilet — Yiddish is written in the Hebrew alphabet. What is sacred for him is mother love. Eventually, we can guess, the radiance of this primal event in his life is what he will seek by bending the recalcitrant world into words. “Outside,” in the cellar especially, is the world of fear he must learn to master. The whole first section of the book is named “The Cellar” because it deals with the underground side of life — physical, aggressive, sexual. A crippled neighborhood girl wants him to play “bad” with her. She explains that babies come from “de knish.”
— Knish?
“Between de legs. Who puts id in is de poppa. De poppa’s god de petzel. Yaw de poppa.” She giggled stealthily and took his hand. He could feel her guiding it under her dress, then through a pocket-like flap. Her skin under his palm. Revolted, he drew back.
“Yuh must!” she insisted, tugging his hand. “Yuh ast me!”
“No!”
“Put yuh han’ in my knish,” she coaxed. “Jus’ once.”
“No!”
“I’ll hol’ yuh petzel.” She reached down.
She tells David that they have been playing “bad.” “By the emphasis of her words, David knew he had crossed some awful threshold. ‘Will yuh tell?’ ‘No,’ he answered weakly.” When his mother gets him home, “she didn’t know as he knew how the whole world could break into a thousand little pieces, all buzzing, all whining, and no one hearing them and no one seeing them except himself.”
David is now a fallen creature, out of Eden, who must confront the terrible but fascinating city by himself. What had occurred to him in earliest childhood is now dead certainty: “This world had been created without thought of him.” By the same token, he is free. The joy of being a boy in the city, that endless spectacle, is that the findings are everywhere. In a box kept in the pantry he collects “whatever striking odds and ends he found in the street. His mother called them his gems and often asked him why he liked things that were worn and old. It would have been hard to tell her. But there was something about the way in which the link of a chain was worn or the thread on a bolt or a castor-wheel that gave him a vague feeling of pain when he ran his fingers over them.… You never saw them wear, you only knew they were worn, obscurely aching.”
This concern with materials marks the novelist-to-be. From this point on, the city becomes the web of life in which, even when he is “lostest,” David senses his destiny. It is the writer’s city of instant and continuing perception, the Joyce-inspired city of wonders as they come to us through the sensations of a very young being:
When he had come almost to the end of the dock, he sat down, and with his feet hanging over the water leaned against the horned and bulbous stanchion to which boats were moored. Out here the wind was fresher. The uncommon quiet excited him. Beneath and under his palms, the dry, splintering timbers radiated warmth. And beneath them, secret, unseen, and always faintly sinister, the tireless lipping of water among the piles. Before him, the river and to the right, the long, grey bridges spanning it –
A bridge makes David think of the sword with the “big middle” that used to appear on the Mecca cigarette composed of Turkish tobacco, of the bridge clipping the plumes of a long ship steaming beneath it, of gulls whose faces are as ugly as their flight is graceful, as they wheel through the wide air on wings that cut like a sickle. A tug on the other side of the river pecks at a barge, stolid in the water. “Yoked at length to its sluggish mate,” it gives the barge the look of a mustache! The water is sunlit rhythmic spray sprouting up before the blunt bow of the barge. The spray hangs “whitely” before it falls. Now David associates the blunt heaviness of the barge with a whole house of bricks as “a cloud sheared the sunlight from the wharf.” His back feels cooler in the sharpening wind, smokestacks on the other bank darken slowly, “fluting filmy distance with iron-grey shadow.”
The Polish boy Leo, whom David admires beyond words for his defiant show of independence, shows him a rosary. The black beads become “lucky beads” to David. In his Jewish innocence the links of the rosary drive him wild with envy. He is the perpetual outsider. The sight of a boy on the block grabbing a girl makes him feel all the more isolated in his cruelly won sexual “knowledge.” “I know … I know … I know,” he repeats to himself. In one of Roth’s most telling images, David in sluggish thought resembles “a heavy stone pried half out of its clinging socket of earth.” Leo’s rosary must belong to him, because the beads give out a light like the marbles which other boys roll along the curb.