6 - Roth's Call It Sleep: Modernism on the Lower East Side

Summary

It seemed to me obvious that everywhere, even in Hitler Germany, to be outside of society and to be Jewish was to be at the heart of things. History was preparing, in its Jewish victims and through them, some tremendous deliverance and revelation. I hugged my aloneness, our apartness, my parents' poverty, as a sign of our call to create the future. … At the same time I had a sense of unreality, of doubleness, almost of duplicity, about the daily contrast of my personal life, my friends, my life in Brownsville, with those literary personages in mid-Manhattan who were so exciting and unreal to me …

Alfred Kazin, Starting Out in the Thirties, 47–48

In describing his own experiences starting out in the thirties, Kazin captures something of the ambivalences and attachments hauntingly represented in Roth's Call It Sleep, a novel whose revival in the sixties owes much to Kazin and Leslie Fiedler. In his book, which begins in 1934, the year Call It Sleep was published, Kazin documents the literary milieu of New York in the thirties – conversations with John Chamberlain (daily book critic at the Times) and Malcolm Cowley and Otis Ferguson at The New Republic, a heady mixture of the literature and leftist politics that so preoccupied New York intellectuals. He was awed by these men, and acutely aware of his difference from them, particularly in terms of their sense of privilege; they were “so plainly with the haves, with the people who so mysteriously sat in positions of power” (48).