SOURCE: "Henry Roth in Jerusalem: An Interview," in The Literary Review, Vol. 23, No. 1, Fall, 1979, pp. 5-23.

In the following interview, Roth discusses the mystical element in Call It Sleep, and describes his relationship to Israel.

Five years ago, when I first met Henry Roth, it was in the same but in a very different place. He had come to Israel, then as now, on a kind of pilgrimage, an artist's search for the history and possibilities of self, but he had taken a different route. Having turned down a variety of invitations and offers of special treatment in order, as he put it, to avoid commitment and obligation, Roth had attached himself to a charter flight hired for a Hadassah group tour and was staying, when he called me, in Haifa's distinctly second-best hotel. It was a flight from expectation, of self and by others, that in a...