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INTRODUCTION Attempting to understand Henry Roth’s monumental literary shifts over the long arc of his career might confound even the most dedicated student of his craft. From Communism to Zionism, from lyrical high modernism to unadorned realism, from Shakespearean influenced Yiddish translations in Call It Sleep to the redolent, biblical inflections of Mercy of a Rude Stream, Roth’s literary life and art present a seemingly insoluble conundrum. When Roth published Call It Sleep in 1934 as a young man of twenty-eight, the immigrant world he so memorably conjured was still bloomingly alive both in the downtown tenements of the Lower East Side and upon the tough uptown streets of Jewish and Irish Harlem. Many of Roth’s relatives, those who still awaited passage to the Goldena Medina, were living in the shtetlach of the Austro-Hungarian Empire or huddled (for the most part) in the pale of settlement across Europe and Russia. By the late 1970s, when Roth finally begins his second novel, those relatives are all gone. Roth’s relatives not lucky enough to immigrate to America had already been murdered in the Holocaust decades before he began working on Mercy. Thus Roth’s monumental paradigmatic shift between his two novels might be seen as not only an aesthetic decision but a moral one as well; Roth’s inelegant style in Mercy of a Rude Stream might be attributable to a eulogistic pose for a lost world, an attempt to recreate that lost world of the beis hamidrash (study house) viewed only in sepia photographs and an old (exiled in New Mexico) man’s faulting memory, and not the result of failing artistry as is often assumed. Or as David Roskies suggests in his essay “Jazz and Jewspeech,” in Mercy of a Rude Stream Roth “is telling us that after he goes, there will be no one left to conjure this immigrant experience from within” (144). 149 CHAPTER 6 Henry Roth’s Second Novel: Mercy for a Rude Youth Roth’s career brackets all the major turning points of Jewish history in the twentieth century: the mass immigration and acculturation into American mores for the daughters and sons of the greenhorn immigrant generation; the almost complete annihilation of the European remnants of that immigrant culture in the European shtetlach; and the birth of the state of Israel fourteen years after Call It Sleep was published . This last event would eventually signal Roth’s turn away from both Communism and Modernism, as he embraced Zionism and autobiographical memoir writing in repudiation of the Joycean lyricism that marked his first novel. Cynthia Ozick has said that Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep is surely “about discontinuity and rupture” (Kauver 385). Indeed modernist writers made rupture the very rubric of their distinct contribution to American culture. However, if many critics consider Call It Sleep to be the greatest Jewish American novel ever written, we must begin to ask in what way is Call It Sleep a Jewish novel? I would argue that Call It Sleep, far from being the quintessential Jewish American novel, as critics like Irving Howe and Leslie Fiedler maintained, Roth’s first novel may be the prototypical anti-Jewish American novel; in fact, leaving the field of aesthetics for a moment, it might even be construed a downright anti-Semitic portrayal of Judaism. To those who are shocked by this suggestion I would ask whether there would even be a question of the obvious and blatant anti-Semitism in Call It Sleep had the novel been written by a non-Jew. Roth did in fact write the quintessential Jewish American novel, but that was only after sixty long years of writer’s block and the debilitating effects of both incest and rheumatoid arthritis. The resulting novel, Mercy of a Rude Stream, is Roth’s attempt to finally write that long-awaited Jewish American novel, and although he was eighty-nine years old and near death when he finally got around to finishing it, in a limited way, he succeeded. Before addressing Mercy of a Rude Stream more explicitly in this chapter, let us take a look at Call It Sleep and why it has been called the archetypal Jewish American novel of the first half of the twentiethcentury , and see what this teaches us about what critics, until now, have generally regarded as Jewish. Roth himself gives us an idea of what an earlier generation of critics meant by Judaism: Being a Jew in the Diaspora...

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