SOURCE: "An American Messiah: Myth in Henry Roth's Call It Sleep," in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 35, No. 4, Winter, 1989, pp. 673-87.

In the following essay, Altenbernd asserts that David in Roth's Call It Sleep is a messiah figure.

Henry Roth's Call It Sleep has moved and delighted—and puzzled—two generations of readers. Sometimes regarded as the best of American proletarian novels or as the best novel growing out of the Great Depression, it is in fact neither proletarian in any strict sense nor directly concerned with the economic depression of the 1930s. Since its publication in 1934 and particularly since its reissue in 1960, a succession of commentators have produced something approaching a consensus that the novel is at its core the record of a religious experience and that the novel is a distinctly Jewish work.

I would suggest that the religious theme developed in Call It Sleep depicts the...