Call It Sleep

Summary

Lauded as the most profound novel of Jewish life ever written by an American, Call It Sleep seamlessly weaves together the searing pains and the subtle joys of immigrant life in New York’s Lower East Side.

To the throngs of anxious immigrants crowding Ellis Island in 1907, the not-so-distant landscape of New York City appears as a golden land of freedom and release. But for one imaginative little boy and one timid young mother who have just made an exhausting passage from Eastern Europe, it offers no refuge from the harshness of life with the sullen, bitter man waiting for them on the pier. He is the boy’s father, and will lead his wife and son to a new home in the city’s teeming tenements where, shock by shock, they will be exposed to the blows—and occasional pleasures—of life in the Golden City.

It is Henry Roth’s gift for transforming the gutter realities of the East Side—the maimed English, the littered streets, the fierce bonds between families and neighbors—into graceful, lyric prose that has made this novel a worldwide favorite.