Call It Sleep - Henry Roth

Aug 27, 2026

Call It Sleep explores the inner and outer world of a very young Jewish boy growing up in immigrant East Side life before World War I, where hostility begins with his own father. Through modernist artistry, it weaves together taboo themes—gutter, cellar, sexual and religious prohibitions—alongside the overwhelming love between mother and son. First published in 1934, it is presented as a lasting work whose moral and political dimensions illuminate an era of economic catastrophe and cultural fear.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryStory & Novel

FormatPDF

Pages461

Reading Time11 h 50 min

AccessFree to download

PRAISE FOR

Call It Sleep

A splendid book, one of the few genuinely distinguished novels written by a 20th-century American. -IRVING HOWE

front page, The New York Times Book Review

Surely the most lyrically authentic novel in American literature about a young boy’s coming to consciousness . . .

Roth’s writing -not unlike Colette’s, where politics has been rendered irrelevant by an almost transcendent physicality - is rebellious, wayward, and sensually attuned to the tumultuous depths of a child’s world. -LIS

HARRIS

The New Yorker

For sheer virtuosity, Call It Sleep is hard to beat; no one has ever distilled such poetry and wit from the counterpoint between the maimed English and the subtle Yiddish of the immigrant. No one has reproduced so sensitively the terror of family life in the imagination of a child caught between two cultures.

- LESLIE A. FIEDLER author of Life and Death in the American Novel

Roth has done for the East Side Jew what James T. Farrell is doing for the Chicago Irish in the Studs Lonigan trilogy . . . When his characters are speaking pure Yiddish, Roth translates it into great beauty . . . The final chapters in the book have been compared to the Nighttown episodes of Joyce’s Ulysses; the comparison isapt. - JOHN CHAMBERLAIN

The New York Times

There has appeared in America no novel to rival the veracity of this childhood. It is as honest as Dreiser ’s Dawn, but far more sensitive and ably written. It is as brilliant as Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, but with a wider scope, a richer emotion, a deeper realism. -ALFRED HAYES

Call It Sleep is a truly brilliant performance . . . The language represents the same unity of opposites; it moves back and forth effortlessly from a precisely heard and rendered everyday speech, complete with oath and obscenity, to give the apocalyptic imagery of David’s own thoughts. The result is to give the reader the sense of himself experiencing all the levels of a child’s inner and outer world and of himself coming to accept the repulsive, the ugly, the horrifying along with the clean, the beautiful, the loving, as necessary parts of life’s self-contradictory wholeness.

-WALTER RIDEOUT author of The Radical Novel in America

Call It Sleep

CALL IT SLEEP

HENRY ROTH

With an introduction by ALFRED KAZIN and an afterword by HANA WIRTH-NESHER

FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX NEW YORK

Introduction copyright © 1991 by Alfred Kazin Afterword copyright © 1990 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Copyright 1934 by Henry Roth Copyright renewed © 1962 by Henry Roth Ail rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published in Canada by HarperCollmsCaiada Lid This edition first published in 1991 by The Noonday Press

Fourteenth printing, 1999

The introduction by Alfred Kazin Ant appeared in The New York Review of Books. The afterword by Hana Wirth-Nesher first appeared in Prooftexts 10 (1990): 297-312, reprinted by permission of the author and The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Introduction

Call It Sleep is the most profound novel of Jewish life that I have ever read by an American. It is a work of high art, written out of the full resources of modernism. It subtly interweaves gutter, cellar, sexual and religious taboos with the overwhelming love between a mother and son. It brings together the darkness and light of Jewish immigrant life before the First World War as experienced by a very young boy, really a child, who depends on his imagination alone to fend off a world so hostile that it begins with his own father.

It was first published in that most unpromising year at the bottom of the Great Depression-1934! Looking at that date and marveling at this novel, which took in so much of Henry Roth’s central experience that he never published another, people must rub their eyes. Surely the depressed 1930s produced nothing but “proletarian literature” and other instances of leftwing propaganda? A fashionable critic in the opulent years after 1945

Aug 27, 2026

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