Call It Sleep

Call It Sleep ( 1934),
novel by Henry Roth. The book is largely the lyrical stream of consciousness of David Schearl as he lives from his sixth to his ninth year. The setting is the teeming, vibrant Jewish community on the Lower East Side of New York just before World War I. David competes with his father, a peasant immigrant from Austria who earns a catch-as-catch-can living, for the total affection of the mother. He provokes his father to violence, leaving the mother no other option but to embrace her son at the price of alienating her husband. The novel evokes the true terror of childhood, as well as being a kind of rhapsody on Jewish ethnic solidarity.