4 - The Classic of Disinheritance

Summary

By the time Henry Roth began to write his novel Call It Sleep, the American immigrant story was already commonplace. The ominous Prologue in which Father, after a separation of two years, comes to pick up his wife and the child he has never seen from Ellis Island, compresses into a few brief pages the by-then-standard opening scenes of arrival in the new land, relying on our familiarity with the setting to realize that something new is being done with the theme. We are told that “there was something quite untypical” about the scene we are witnessing, and being in the position of the old peddler woman and the overalled men in the stern of the steamer Peter Stuyvesant who have seen enough immigrant reunions to know how such people conventionally behave, we realize along with them that this is a very curious meeting. Its oddity awakens our sense of mystery: How is this family different from other families that arrived in America? Or, how will this story of immigrants differ from those we have already heard? The story is different because the protagonist arriving from Europe with his mother is entering a much more dangerous new land than America. The little boy in the old-fashioned hat is beginning a new life in the hitherto unconstituted family of his mother and father, and as the fate of his hat gives warning, he will have to muster more than the usual capacities of mind and spirit if he is to survive.