Call it Sleep
by Roth, Henry
- Used
- Signed
- Condition
- Pictorial wrappers, light edgewear with a few creases, cover starting along top crease, preserved in mylar
- Seller
-
New York, New York, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
"Henry recalled Herman as 'a timid, frightened, frustrated little guy, and that's the best I could say about him.' His prose would say much worse." (Kellman, p. 29)
Roth's great autobiographical novel about New York City ghetto life was widely praised upon its release in 1934, but sold only 4000 copies and faded into obscurity. In 1964 it was republished as a paperback by Avon books and reviewed by Irving Howe as the first paperback book ever reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Books section; it sold quickly through 250,000 copies. Howe called it "one of those novels - there are not very many - which patiently enter and then wholly exhaust an experience. Taking fierce imaginative possession of its subject, the novel scrutinizes it with an almost unnerving intensity, yet also manages to preserve a sense of distance and dispassion. ...Through the transfiguring imagination of [the hero, it] also achieves an obbligato of lyricism such as few American novels can match."
The novel is frequently compared to the work of James Joyce, and Roth read Ulysses in 1925, when the book was still little more than a rumor in the American mind, after his girlfriend Eda Lou Walton - later the dedicatee of Call it Sleep - lent him the copy of the banned book she smuggled into the country from Paris. Inspired by the way that Joyce turned workaday Dublin into the stuff of high art, he began to take some of the pieces of his New York City ghetto experience and put them together into a novel. Like Joyce's father, who is transformed through the smithy of art into Simon Daedalus, Roth's father Herman becomes Albert Schearl, the villain of the novel. In order to augment paternal menace, Roth transformed the short and scrawny Herman Roth into the hulking bully Albert Schearl: 'I had to increase his magnitude and dimension. I had to fictionalize a character not based on the petty, little man my real father was" (Kellman, 108).
Roth's mother, Leah, had fallen in love with a Gentile in Tysmenitz, Galicia, and to avoid shame, her parents quickly and quietly married her off to Herman Roth, "himself a problem to his parents, and conveniently available" (Kellman, p. 24). In 1906, after losing all of his money in a horse-trading venture, Herman sailed for Ellis Island, and his wife and son followed during the summer of 1907, to a cold reunion. They lived in Brownsville, Brooklyn, then the Lower East Side, filled with recent Jewish immigrants, before settling in an Irish-American section of Harlem, where Herman worked a variety of jobs from press feeder at a printshop to milkman to waiter. He disdained his son's well-praised intellectual precociousness, and the son resented him his brutishness and stinginess and they remained distant for the entirety of Herman's life. He died in 1971, and left one dollar to his son, Henry, and one dollar each to his son's children, leaving the remainder to his daughter, Rose, Henry's sister, who turned over half of the sum to her brother.
"This was a relationship that could not be resolved-and will not be resolved in my lifetime... The only consolation I derive from my detestation of him is that practically all who had anything to do with him came to more or less the same conclusion I did." (Kellman, p. 260-1). Kellman, Steven, Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth, New York: Norton, 2005
Synopsis
Call It Sleep is a 1934 novel by Henry Roth. Time magazine described it as "The story of three years in the life of a sensitive Jewish slum-child, told with painstaking and pain-giving fidelity," in the February 25, 1935 edition. While the book sold poorly upon its initial publication, the book received a second life when it was reviewed by literary critic Irving Howe on the front page of The New York Times Book Review on October 25, 1964, and has since sold over a million copies.
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Details
- Bookseller
- James Cummins Bookseller (US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 352735
- Title
- Call it Sleep
- Author
- Roth, Henry
- Format/Binding
- Small 8vo
- Book Condition
- Used - Pictorial wrappers, light edgewear with a few creases, cover starting along top crease, preserved in mylar
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Edition
- First mass-market paperback edition
- Publisher
- Avon
- Place of Publication
- New York
- Date Published
- 1964
- Keywords
- American | Henry Roth
- Bookseller catalogs
- Literature;
Terms of Sale
James Cummins Bookseller
All items, as usual, are guaranteed as described and are returnable within 30 days if not as described. Within the United States, all books are shipped UPS unless otherwise requested (please provide a street address). Overseas orders should specify shipping preference. All postage is extra. New clients are requested to send remittance with your orders. Libraries may apply for deferred billing. All New York and New Jersey residents must add the appropriate sales tax. We accept American Express, Master Card, and Visa. All items are subject to prior sale; prices are subject to change.
About the Seller
James Cummins Bookseller
About James Cummins Bookseller
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Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:
- Remainder
- Book(s) which are sold at a very deep discount to alleviate publisher overstock. Often, though not always, they have a remainder...
- Verso
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- Inscribed
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