Call It Sleep Introduction

by Henry Roth

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.

Call It Sleep Prologue

Call It Sleep BOOK I

Call It Sleep I

Call It Sleep II

Call It Sleep III

Call It Sleep IV

Call It Sleep V

Call It Sleep VI

Call It Sleep VII

Call It Sleep VIII

Call It Sleep IX

Call It Sleep X

Call It Sleep XI

Call It Sleep XII

Call It Sleep XIII

Call It Sleep XIV

Call It Sleep XV

Call It Sleep XVI

Call It Sleep BOOK II