New Essays on Call It Sleep

Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep, praised when it first appeared in the 1930s, neglected for decades and reissued to wide acclaim in the 1960s, has been hailed, finally, as the finest Jewish-American novel of the first half of the century and one of the richest modernist novels to appear in America. The introduction by Hana Wirth-Nesher locates the novel in its cultural context and in terms of contemporary debates about ethnic literature, minority writing, and the problem of representativeness. Thus, the volume sets out to consider Roth’s hybrid status - as an American writer, a Jewish writer, and a European modernist.