Henry Roth (1) (1906–1995)
Author of Call It Sleep
For other authors named Henry Roth, see the disambiguation page.
Series
Works by Henry Roth
Associated Works
Holding On: Dreamers, Visionaries, Eccentrics, and Other American Heroes (1996) — Foreword — 78 copies, 1 review
Who's Writing This? Notations on the Authorial I, with Self-Portraits {not Antæus} (1995) — Contributor — 76 copies
Years of Protest: A Collection of American Writings of the 1930's (1967) — Contributor — 44 copies, 1 review
The Ethnic Image in Modern American Literature, 1900-1950, Volumes 1-2 (1984) — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Other names
- Roth, Herschel
Рот, Генри
הנרי ,רות - Birthdate
- 1906-02-08
- Date of death
- 1995-10-13
- Gender
- male
- Education
- City College of New York
- Occupations
- teacher
novelist
short story writer
machinist - Awards and honors
- American Academy of Arts and Letters Academy Award (Literature, 1965)
- Short biography
- Henry Roth was born to a Jewish family in Tysmenitz, Galicia, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (present-day Ukraine). When he was a small child, he emigrated with his family to the USA, setting in New York City. In 1928, he graduated from City College of New York and moved in with Eda Lou Walton, a poet and English literature instructor at New York University. With her support and encouragement, he wrote his first novel, Call It Sleep. It was published in 1934 to mostly good reviews, but then forgotten; the book underwent a critical reappraisal 30 years later, after it was republished in paperback and became an instant bestseller. Call It Sleep is now considered a masterpiece and a classic Depression-era work. Roth began a second novel, but was afflicted by a deep writer's block that lasted for decades. In 1938, at the artists' colony Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, he met Muriel Parker, a pianist and composer; the couple married the following year and had two sons. The family moved several times as Roth took jobs as varied as machinist, woodsman, schoolteacher, psychiatric attendant in a state mental hospital, raising waterfowl, and Latin and math tutor. In 1968, he and his wife moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico. There Roth collaborated with his friend and Italian translator, Mario Materassi, on putting together a collection of short stories and essays, Shifting Landscape: A Composite, 1925–87, published in 1987. Eventually, Roth completed two of the next installments in the projected six-volume work he had been trying to write for 60 years. The first, Mercy of a Rude Stream, was published in 1994; A Diving Rock on the Hudson appeared in 1995, the year of his death. An American Type, based on an unpublished manuscript edited by Willing Davidson, appeared in print in 2010.
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Tysmenitz, Galicia, Austro-Hungary
- Places of residence
- New York, New York, USA
Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
Tysmenica, Galicia, Austria (birth | now Ukraine) - Place of death
- Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Reviews
I am always amazed at the bibliofates who direct me to books. No matter how randomly I choose the books I read, these fates always seem to bring a shape to the story of my reading. I’ve been reading through stacks of books that have lingered on my shelves for some time without attention, either because they were once recommended to me or because they hold a place on a ‘best’ list. The last few stacks I’ve chosen alphabetically, grabbing title off my shelves by the author’s last show more name, without any regard to their topic or style. Then, I chose at random between about 13 books in the stack. The last three I read are Henry Roth’s [Call It Sleep], a book about an Jewish immigrant boy in New York City; Yann Martel’s [Life of Pi], which recounts the story of a young Indian boy trapped on a life boat with a tiger; and Charles Portis’ [True Grit], the tale of a young girl avenging her father’s murder in the Old West territory of Arkansas and Oklahoma. The books were published in different decades, separated by at least a couple of decades, by authors from vastly different ethnic and social backgrounds. But I couldn’t have chosen three books that share more in common if I’d tried.
How do we see ourselves and the events of our lives? How do they shape us into the people we are? How do the people we already are affect how we react to watershed moments? All of these books deal with such questions – reading [Call It Slepp] first, helped to focus my own thoughts on the topic. Though not told in his personal voice, [Call It Sleep] centers on David Schearl, adolescent Jewish boy growing up on New York’s Lower East Side. David is a recent immigrant, having traveled over with his doting mother, Genya, to join his father, Albert. David has to learn to navigate life in America on the lower reaches of the economic spectrum and as member of a reviled minority. Added to this, he has to deal with an explosively abusive father. There are episodes common to any young man’s life, building self-esteem and making friends. But it is the unique quality of his life, as reflected in the trials of his families struggle to make ends meet and to assimilate into such a foreign culture, that resonate more powerfully. David’s character is constructed by Roth to be such an outsider, looking in from the outside of poverty and race, that his story helps us to understand our own internal feelings of isolation and universal yearnings to belong.
Roth’s genius is present nowhere more powerfully than in David’s battle to make sense of the swirling religious powers influences around him. His father is Jewish by birth primarily but not in so much in practice and his mother is the product of very strict religious family, though she herself has lost her faith. They enlist David with a local Rabbi to develop a sense of history and solidarity with his ethnicity. While David shows a knack for learning Hebrew text, he befriends a young Catholic boy who begins to educate him on the death of Christ. David fights to make sense of the conflicting deities of Judaism and Christianity, deeply hoping to connect a unifying and guiding force that he feels without being able to understand.
Roth’s novel is deeply affecting. The streets of his New York boil with the smells and the feel of a different time and place. You can feel the diverse cultures of the Lower East Side roiling into something new and different with each day that passes on the page.
Ultimately, even though David’s voice is not the narrative force, it is his perspective that drives the story, and everything that he faces is viewed through his eyes. His choices make sense only through the filter how he battles his fears, of his father and of the foreign city around him. When he makes a stand against these forces, you see how he is baptized in his own courage to become something new, something that is related to what he was before but also related to the new things around him.
Bottom Line: Vibrant immigrant life, told through the eyes of a young Jewish boy becoming something new on the grimy streets of a New York City neighborhood.
4 ½ bones!!!!! show less
How do we see ourselves and the events of our lives? How do they shape us into the people we are? How do the people we already are affect how we react to watershed moments? All of these books deal with such questions – reading [Call It Slepp] first, helped to focus my own thoughts on the topic. Though not told in his personal voice, [Call It Sleep] centers on David Schearl, adolescent Jewish boy growing up on New York’s Lower East Side. David is a recent immigrant, having traveled over with his doting mother, Genya, to join his father, Albert. David has to learn to navigate life in America on the lower reaches of the economic spectrum and as member of a reviled minority. Added to this, he has to deal with an explosively abusive father. There are episodes common to any young man’s life, building self-esteem and making friends. But it is the unique quality of his life, as reflected in the trials of his families struggle to make ends meet and to assimilate into such a foreign culture, that resonate more powerfully. David’s character is constructed by Roth to be such an outsider, looking in from the outside of poverty and race, that his story helps us to understand our own internal feelings of isolation and universal yearnings to belong.
Roth’s genius is present nowhere more powerfully than in David’s battle to make sense of the swirling religious powers influences around him. His father is Jewish by birth primarily but not in so much in practice and his mother is the product of very strict religious family, though she herself has lost her faith. They enlist David with a local Rabbi to develop a sense of history and solidarity with his ethnicity. While David shows a knack for learning Hebrew text, he befriends a young Catholic boy who begins to educate him on the death of Christ. David fights to make sense of the conflicting deities of Judaism and Christianity, deeply hoping to connect a unifying and guiding force that he feels without being able to understand.
Roth’s novel is deeply affecting. The streets of his New York boil with the smells and the feel of a different time and place. You can feel the diverse cultures of the Lower East Side roiling into something new and different with each day that passes on the page.
Ultimately, even though David’s voice is not the narrative force, it is his perspective that drives the story, and everything that he faces is viewed through his eyes. His choices make sense only through the filter how he battles his fears, of his father and of the foreign city around him. When he makes a stand against these forces, you see how he is baptized in his own courage to become something new, something that is related to what he was before but also related to the new things around him.
Bottom Line: Vibrant immigrant life, told through the eyes of a young Jewish boy becoming something new on the grimy streets of a New York City neighborhood.
4 ½ bones!!!!! show less
Memo to Saul Bellow THIS is how you write an American Jewish novel. Joking aside, and with little in the way of preamble, please allow me to say that this truly is an opus of the rarest kind. Akin to Melville's Moby Dick and Jones' From Here to Eternity, this work is the result of a soul laid bare and detailed with the heaviest, the most austere, but in the end, most telling kind of language. Though some of the dialogue (better parsed as dialect) is hard to read (probably more so for those show more without at least a cursory knowledge of Hebrew and Yiddish) this partial opacity is a necessary sacrifice at the altar of verisimilitude. And authentic it reads as, through the eyes of main character David Schearl, we see the dank squalor and raw feeling of his existence. Interspersed between the bouts of brutality (namely by way of David's viciously complex father Albert and the bullies of the story's later turns) there are moments of description in the text that bespeak a gorgeous sense of the beauty inhering in the urban and the squalid. I could write volumes more in laudatory verbiage but just, please, read this book if ever you've wondered about the truth of the immigrant experience in general, and the Jewish Ashkenaic American Exile in particular, it brings tears of alternating despair and joy, like the average life, I guess. show less
Told from the perspective of six year old David Schearl, Call It Sleep relates the hardships of immigrant life in turn of the century gritty New York City. In the prologue, David and his mother arrive from Austria to join her abusive and angry husband. This is the of the few times the narrative is outside little six year old David's head. The majority of the story is a stream of consciousness, skillfully painting a portrait of inner city life from a child's point of view.
As an aside, in the show more beginning I questioned why David's father would abhor David to the point of criminal abuse. It took awhile to figure out why.
But, back to little David. His young life is filled with fear. He is overwhelmed by language differences between Yiddish and English, overly sensitive to the actions of his peers, clings to his mother with Freudian zeal. I found him to be a really hopeless child and my heart bled for him. While most of the story is bleak, there is the tiniest ray of hope at the end. The pessimists in the crowd might have a negative explanation for what David's father does, but I saw it as a small gesture of asking for forgiveness. show less
As an aside, in the show more beginning I questioned why David's father would abhor David to the point of criminal abuse. It took awhile to figure out why.
But, back to little David. His young life is filled with fear. He is overwhelmed by language differences between Yiddish and English, overly sensitive to the actions of his peers, clings to his mother with Freudian zeal. I found him to be a really hopeless child and my heart bled for him. While most of the story is bleak, there is the tiniest ray of hope at the end. The pessimists in the crowd might have a negative explanation for what David's father does, but I saw it as a small gesture of asking for forgiveness. show less
Ira Stigman is near the end of his life. His wife has recently died. Naturally, he finds himself in a mood to reflect on the past, particularly the time when he met his wife-- “M”--and was trying to “find himself” on a tiresome, navel-gazing cross-country quest. That time was during the Great Depression and the beginning of the Nazi era in Germany. Ira was a Jew who did not practice his religion, a Communist who seemed to lack any commitment to the cause, a writer who didn’t write. show more In fact, he seemed to have no passion for anything, including the women in his life, who could steer him around, but never really led him anywhere. There is little to like about this character and not much to capture this reader’s interest in his tale. Perhaps a familiarity with other Roth novels would have helped. Perhaps if Roth had lived to finalize this story himself, rather than leaving it to a posthumous editor to turn “batch 2” of an enormous manuscript into a novel, there might have been more zest to it. The essence of my reaction to Ira and to An American Type was well-expressed by the author himself, in the form of a letter to Ira from his lover/benefactress Edith after he left her in New York to drive to California with a comrade: “You are first and foremost a completely self-engrossed individualist, to whom communism, the proletariat, or your friends and intimates have meant nothing, except what you could feed on. You have no emotional imagination about anyone on earth but yourself…I’m very tired of your rationalizations based on society, or your own pain, or your need to grow to maturity.” Atta girl, Edith. But I wouldn’t have enclosed that check. show less
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.Lists
Jewish Books (1)
1930s (1)
Awards
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Statistics
- Works
- 10
- Also by
- 8
- Members
- 3,379
- Popularity
- #7,540
- Rating
- 3.8
- Reviews
- 67
- ISBNs
- 122
- Languages
- 10
- Favorited
- 9
