Analysis of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on June 8, 2026

Henry Roth’s autobiographical first novel Call It Sleep (1934) has come to be recognized as one of the most poignant and honest depictions of immigrant, specifically Jewish immigrant, life in all of American literature. Its account of living conditions in poor neighborhoods, the pressures of assimilation, and the difficulties of working conditions and maintaining employment read at times like a work of ethnography. At the same time, the book offers a compelling and often disturbing psychological portrait of the traumas of childhood and the everyday tyrannies of family life. These experiences are heightened by their reflection in the eyes of a young boy, the protagonist David Schearl, who is caught in the interplay of cultures, none of which he really understands. From the perspective of this imaginative and perceptive young boy, Roth’s lyrical work evokes the struggles, including the inner ones, facing recent immigrants in America during the period of the country’s greatest influx of migrants.

Call It Sleep relates the experiences of David Schearl, a young child who, like Roth himself, was born in what was then territory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before emigrating with his mother to America to be reunited with his father. Starting in 1907, the novel follows, over several years, David’s activities and, more important, his feelings as he and his family grapple with the unfamiliar and often hostile realities of life in the poor and working-class immigrant neighborhoods of New York. Throughout, young David is caught painfully, not only between his family’s Jewish culture and the culture of mainstream America, but also between his love for his protective and sheltering mother and his hatred for his violent and overbearing father. To avoid the wrath of his father, as well as to discover his place in relation to the other immigrant children, David turns to the streets, where he encounters profanity, sexuality, neighborhood gangs, and anti-Semitism.

When the novel was first released in 1934, it received passing notice, elevated for a moment as part of the emerging genre of proletarian fiction that was garnering some attention as the deepening slump of the Great Depression gave rise to social movements giving voice to the concerns of working-class people and putting forward demands for socioeconomic reform. The depression, however, also claimed Roth’s work among its victims, and when his publisher went bankrupt, the book went out of print and was quickly forgotten.

Despite Roth’s committed membership in the Communist Party, which he joined in 1933, the novel was dismissed by the major leftist journal New Masses for its supposed dilution of working-class experience into introspection. Leftist critics condemned the book for a variety of perceived faults ranging from a supposed preoccupation with sexual neuroses to its unbridled impressionist flourishes. Roth’s emphasis on linguistic innovations and his concern with characters’ psychological development led leftist commentators at the time of the novel’s release to overlook its significant, if subtle, social criticism.

At the same time, Call It Sleep did find some significant supporters among the Left. The noted literary theorist Kenneth Burke argued in New Masses that communist critics should pay special attention to Roth’s book since it dealt with the psychological phenomena of orientation and rebirth that have been central to communist concerns with the development of new meanings and new consciousness among people. Burke also attempted to situate Call It Sleep as a fluent and sympathetic expression of the prepolitical thinking of childhood rather than a statement of a mature, class-conscious adult.

Indeed, as a work of proletarian fiction, Call It Sleep moves beyond the general considerations of the genre, adding unique concerns to the more recognizable focus on the sufferings and strivings of the working class. At the same time, it might be noted that Burke’s defense of Call It Sleep made no attempt to examine, or even to mention, the book’s grounding in Jewish immigrant experiences. This was, in fact, typical of most reviews at the time of the book’s release.

One must recall that Roth’s novel was written during a period when the combined effects of the Depression and rising anti-Semitism in the U.S. had severely impacted Jewish communities. Jewish immigrants were faced with employers who refused to hire them and landlords and landowners who refused to rent or sell housing. Roth was among the generation of American Jewish writers of the 1930s who, as active socialists, viewed their Jewishness through a secular lens. Socialism, not religion, offered the necessary response to the problems facing Jewish immigrants in capitalist America. Thus, Call It Sleep expresses a complex relationship between Jewish identity and traditions, identified especially through Davey’s mother and aunt, and Davey’s own rebellious imagination amid the material struggles of life in the Lower East Side. This is expressed most forcefully in Roth’s compelling shifts of language, contrasting the Yiddish spoken, and translated into a precise, even elegant, English, and the profane and fractured English spoken in the streets.

The failure to examine or even to acknowledge the contexts of Jewish heritage, either for the author or his novel’s protagonists, suggests the limits of leftist criticism and the limited framework within which proletarian literature was viewed. In Call It Sleep, Roth expanded the form of proletarian writing, situating working-class concerns within the specific cultural, religious, or ethnic experiences through which working people actually live, and contemplate, their lives. In doing so, the author slipped the bounds of economistic approaches to class or class consciousness that were predominant among much of leftist criticism of the 1930s.

In light of the Left’s generally unfavorable response to Call It Sleep, Roth attempted a second novel, another autobiographical work intended this time to please the Communist Party, to which he was deeply committed. Finding himself unable to write a more characteristic proletarian novel, he soon destroyed the work and, in the 1940s, burned his journals and manuscripts altogether.

Following the release of Call It Sleep, Roth suffered one of the most prolonged periods of writer’s block experienced by any first-rate author. Almost 60 years passed before his second novel, A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park, the first volume of his Mercy of a Rude Stream quartet of novels, was published in the 1990s.

In the intervening period, Roth’s first novel experienced a remarkable rebirth. In 1956, The American Scholar listed Call It Sleep among “The Most Neglected Books of the Past 25 Years.” In 1960, the book was republished in hardcover, and by 1964, a paperback edition was finally released. The paperback edition became the first paperback to be reviewed on the front page of the New York Review of Books. Nearly 30 years after the release of Call It Sleep, both the book and its author enjoyed a positive reappraisal in the literary world. With the novel’s re-release in the 1960s, at a time when many critics were becoming more interested in examining and expressing ethnic experiences and identities, Call It Sleep came to be regarded as a significant expression of Jewish-American literature.

Since then, it has taken a key place among courses on American Jewish literature. More recently, leftist critics have also come to recognize Call It Sleep as among the finest and most enduring examples of the proletarian novel. Roth’s novel had long been forgotten or dismissed along with other works of so-called proletarian fiction from the 1930s. In recent years, however, the literature of the thirties has been subjected to a critical revaluation that has revived interest in a number of long-overlooked 1930s writers.

Call It Sleep is a late-regarded literary classic. A complex work, it has found favor among a diverse readership including, but by no means limited to, students of working-class fiction and Jewish-American literature. Yet it is a rich and challenging work that overflows any easy categorization. It is a work that, through an innovative use of language and psychological insights, examines the intricacies of ethnicity and class, reminding us that these are always interconnected.

SOURCE

Roth, Henry. Call It Sleep. New York: Ballou, 1934.