Call It Sleep is the kind of book one feels a bit reluctant to write about, at least to "criticize," in the icy sense of that term. To criticize, to analyze, is in a sense to freeze, and Henry Roth's great and only novel becomes too much a part of one's immediate and intimate experience for that. It is, of course, the very personal quality of the book that assured its consignment to obscurity during the golden age of the proletarian novel. Though Call It Sleep may be such a work in the sense that it deals with a working-class Jewish immigrant family in Brownsville (and the Lower East Side of New York) shortly after the turn of the century, it is a book about very particular and very painfully real people with very particular and real problems, fears and guilts. (p. 107)

This may mean that the novel...