Modernism/modernity

“It was May of the year 1907, the year that was destined to bring the greatest number of immigrants to the shores of the United States.” ¹Thus begins Henry Roth’s remarkable novel Call It Sleep,in which we learn of an eight-year-old Jewish boy from Austria, David Schearl, attempting to find happiness in a land unfamiliar and often frightening to him. But if this moment early in the novel suggests that David’s difficulties will derive chiefly from his encounter with an America hostile to him as an immigrant and a Jew, the rest of the novel often complicates that idea. Moments after David’s story is provisionally situated within the narrative of early-twentieth-century American immigration, we are told that when compared with other immigrant families, there was “something quite untypical” about the Schearls (CS,11). We soon learn that their singularity consists in the tension that divides the family: seeing each other for the first time in years, David’s parents “stood silent, apart; the man staring with aloof, offended eyes grimly down at the water. . . . And his wife beside him regarding him uneasily, appealingly. And the child against her breast looking from one to the other with watchful, frightened eyes” (CS,11). Here as elsewhere in the novel, the idea that David’s problems will spring from his experience with a hostile nation is confused by the degree to which the problems appear instead to emanate from his experience with his family.

The very suggestion that David’s unhappiness might stem from something other than a clash between two cultures distinguishes [End Page 51] Call It Sleepfrom the genre of ethnic novel out of which it grows. Roth began writing his novel in 1930, just weeks after the immense success of Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money.And as Marcus Klein has pointed out, the success of Gold’s memoir of Jewish life on the Lower East Side of New York appears to have been crucial to Roth’s decision to make his own immigrant experience central to his literary efforts. ²Yet the characters that appear in Jews Without Moneyare routinely understood to suffer because the land to which they have come has deprived them of their cultural or ethnic heritage. Mikey Gold, the young boy at the center of Gold’s narrative, is pointedly made to suffer the humiliation of his American schoolteachers calling him “Little Kike,” and he finds himself happy only when enveloped by a Lower East Side that he calls “this remarkable dream of a million Jews.” ³Giving the young boy the advice that the novel often offers its imagined audience, Rabbi Samuel tells Mikey that in the future, he must be mindful of his “tradition,” and that he must “be true to it” (JM,192). And though the reflective narrator claims to have found the advice “weird” at the time, he insists that nevertheless “something deep inside of me responded to it” (JM,194).

Jews Without Moneyultimately develops a more complicated account of its characters’ sufferings than this description suggests, and I will eventually return to the nature of those complications. But it is of more immediate importance to note that in its assertion of a cultural identity distinguished from that associated with America, Gold’s novel follows the lead of the Jewish novel of cultural conflict as established most clearly by Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers(1925). In Yezierska’s novel the central conflict is between Sara Smolinsky, a young Jew whose desire to become one of the “real Americans” is so intense that successful Americanization seems to her the equivalent of being “changed into a person,” and her father, whose embodiment of Jewishness is so absolute that to his family he seems “an ancient prophet that had just stepped out of the Bible.” ⁴In the course of the novel, Sara’s desire to become an American leads her, against her father’s wishes, to refuse an arranged marriage and to pursue her goal of becoming a public schoolteacher. But instead of making...