explanation for why Genya, disgraced after being jilted by a Gentile, married Albert. When Leo, an older Polish boy, persuades David to introduce him to his cousin, Esther, David is overwhelmed by incredulity and guilt over the sexual liberties that Leo takes. Fleeing his brutal father, David is shocked into unconsciouness after touching the live rail of a street car. Faced, like the reader, with sensory overload, David might as well call it sleep, embracing temporary oblivion as restoration after a long, disorienting day.

To explore the tensions among Albert, Genya, and David, a clanging family triangle rife with resentments and recriminations, Roth appropriates the theories of Freud, particularly in describing the powerful Oedipal bond between mother and son as well as the almost patricidal strife between Albert and David. The authority of James Joyce asserts itself, not only in the fact that Roth’s account of David Schearl, a surrogate for the author himself, is in effect another portrait of the artist as a young man but also in his lavish use of stream of consciousness and his meticulous deployment of recurrent imagery.

During the two decades surrounding the beginning of the twentieth century, massive, unprecedented migration from eastern and southern Europe was radically reshaping American society; more effectively than any other novel, Call It Sleep records the traumas experienced when the Old World met the New World. Many of Roth’s immigrants are inspired by the American Dream of enlarged opportunity, while others are repulsed by an urban nightmare. Call it, too, sleep.

Though the Schearls are Polish Jews, the eclectic slum in which they live also serves as home to immigrants and natives from many other backgrounds. Not the least of Roth’s accomplishments is his success at rendering the diversity of David’s environs. Yiddish is the first language of the Schearls, but English, German, Hebrew, Italian, and Polish are also spoken, in varying registers, by characters in the story. In a novel designed for an Anglo reader, it would be misleading and demeaning to put fractured English into the mouths or minds of fluent Yiddish speakers when they are assumed to be using their native language. Instead, Roth fashions English prose supple enough to represent the varying speech and thoughts of those who speak and think in other tongues.

Call It Sleep is significant for reflecting a momentous phenomenon that transformed the United States but was ignored by many of Roth’s literary contemporaries. In its vivid rendition of a child’s-eye view, its dramatic exposure of family tensions, and its creation of a rich linguistic texture, Roth’s first novel is an artistic triumph.

Mercy of a Rude Stream

Though they were published separately and can be read independently and autonomously, the four novels that constitute Mercy of a Rude Stream are best understood together, as a single narrative sequence. The entire tetralogy follows the coming-of-age of Ira Stigman, a Jewish emigrant to New York, from 1914, when he is eight years old, until 1927, when he is twenty-one and a senior at City College. Despite the change in names and the addition of a younger sister, Minnie, Ira seems largely an extension of David Schearl from Call It Sleep. He is also a thinly disguised version of Roth himself. The autobiographical basis of the books is made even more apparent by interpolated sections in which an older Ira, an ailing octogenarian author living in Albuquerque, addresses his word processor, calling it Ecclesias. He comments on his own renewed, belated efforts at writing fiction. Ira as author poses the question that most readers will raise about Roth himself—Why, approaching death, does he struggle to record such lacerating memories?

In narrating his story, Ira forces himself to revisit an unhappy childhood and adolescence, in which he and his mother, Leah, are terrorized by his psychotic father, Chaim. When the family moves from the lower East Side to a largely Irish neighborhood in East Harlem, Ira feels rudely wrenched out of an organic, nurturing Jewish community. He recalls the painful details of broken friendships and of his public disgrace when he was expelled from high school for stealing fountain pens. The most agonizing recollections—and the element that has drawn the most attention to Roth’s final books—concern Ira’s sexual transgressions. The second volume, A Diving Rock on the Hudson, offers the startling revelation that, beginning when he was sixteen years old and she was fourteen years old, Ira regularly, furtively committed incest with his sister, Minnie. He also maintained covert sexual relations with his younger cousin, Stella. Recollections of incest continue through volumes 3 and 4 and fuel the author’s suicidal self-loathing. The older Ira longs to die but feels compelled to tell his story first, as though narration might bring purgation and even redemption.

Unlike the bravura Call It Sleep, much of Mercy of a Rude Stream is written in undistinguished prose that is at most serviceable in evoking working-class, urban life during and after World War I. Ira offers details of jobs he held, including stock boy in an upscale food store, soda peddler at Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds, and salesman in a candy shop. His sentimental education is very much connected to his intellectual one, and, though his grades are mediocre, Ira thrives in college. Publication of a short story in the student magazine awakens literary ambitions; his friendship with affluent Larry Gordon enlarges Ira’s life beyond his own squalid situation. He begins to acquire social graces and to strike on ideas. Ira becomes inebriated with reading, particularly after Edith Welles, the professor who was Larry’s lover, becomes Ira’s mentor and lover. Edith, who is modeled on Roth’s own Eda Lou Walton, introduces Ira to the most influential books and people of New York’s bohemian culture.

In the final pages of the cycle’s final book, Requiem for Harlem, Ira bids farewell to his dysfunctional, debilitating family and his loathsome sexual compulsions by moving down to Greenwich Village to live with Edith. The apprentice artist is finally ready to write a novel very much like Call It Sleep. Finally, after disburdening himself of excruciating secrets, the eighty-nine-year-old Roth finished writing and prepared at last to call it sleep.