SOURCE: "Life in the Ghetto," in Saturday Review of Literature, Vol. II, No. 35, March 16, 1935, p. 552.

In the following review, Gollomb complains that in Call It Sleep, Roth magnifies the foulness of life on the east side of New York instead of accurately portraying it.

By this time it is probable that New York's great ghetto of decades ago has been written up as amply as any other equally small segment of the modern world; yet Call It Sleep shows once more how rich for the writer has been the yield on New York's lower east side. Here is a novel twice the average length, yet it records only two to three years of a small boy's life down there, and records it with what amounts to a congestion of material.

Part of this is due to the rich soil of the scene itself; it would seem that a...