“Did you ever have a mother? Did you?” is not a question that gets asked in any American literary text I know of, including the subject of this essay, Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep (1934). Rather, it’s a transposition of a question that was asked in 1929 in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury by Quentin Compson, where the form it takes is “Did you ever have a sister? Did you?”1 In Faulkner’s novel, structured as it is around the three brothers’ relation to their sister Caddy, Quentin’s imagined relation to Caddy—“I have committed incest, I said” (SF, 49)—turns her sexual relations with anyone outside the family (even her husband) into a kind of betrayal not just of him but of all the brothers; think, for example, of Benjy starting to cry when he sees Caddy with Charlie and stopping only when she assures him (falsely) that she “won’t anymore.” In Call It Sleep, there is no sister, but the affair David’s mother had with a church “organist” in the old country plus her attractiveness to his friends who happen to see her through an open window taking a bath (“Fat ass, we seen … Wudda kinerry! … And duh hull knish!” matched by his unspoken response: “She! Mine!”2) repeats, transposes, and, I’ll argue, transforms the meaning both of family and its betrayal. More generally, at least one way to think about the relations between some of the great texts of the twenties and the early thirties will have to do with rewriting imagined relations between brothers and sisters as imagined relations between parents and children.3

That some version of this rewriting takes place in Call It Sleep is particularly striking because, although the boy in the novel doesn’t have a sister, the author of the novel did, and as readers of his much later autobiographical novel know, he and she actually did commit incest. The first volume of Mercy of a Rude Stream promises the reader something “shameful” and “evil,” and the second volume delivers in its graphic account of the sexual relations between the 16-year-old Ira and his 14-year-old sister Minnie—graphic first in the imagination of their sexual pleasure—“Fuck me, fuck me good!” she says to him, and then, when “the dirty words suddenly stopped,” she (more disturbingly?) says, “Oooh, ooh, my dear brother, my dear brother!”4

Why is “my dear brother” disturbing? Because it takes the ordinary teenage sexuality that might motivate violating the taboo against sleeping with your sibling and turns the fact that it’s your sibling into at least part of the point, as if his being your brother is a feature, not a bug. And when the brother describes himself as having found “a little enclave in the family,” the point is made again (DR, 150). In Faulkner, Quentin calls his claim to have slept with Caddy an effort to “isolate her out of the loud world” and make that world “roar away” (SF, 107–8). In Roth, Ira’s attempt to establish a “little enclave in the family” seems also to imagine it as an escape from the outside. At the same time, however, Quentin’s “did you ever have a sister” is very different from Roth’s “yes, I did.” The incest fantasy in The Sound and the Fury and the versions of it in other nativist texts like Cather’s The Professor’s House and virtually everything Hemingway wrote in the twenties is (to adapt a description from yet another of those texts, The Great Gatsby) not “personal.” It has nothing to do with how you feel about your sister—it’s not “how I feel toward you and how you feel toward me,” Jason Compson tells his niece (SF, 146)—rather, it’s the nativist fantasy of a society organized by “peoples” and committed (in Cather, literally) to keeping your sister from sleeping with Jews. As Jason says, “blood is blood and you can’t get around it.” But if in the twenties, Roth’s incestuous relations with his sister (and then his cousin!) involved a very literal embrace of “blood is blood,” his goal in the thirties was precisely to get around it—not only to stop sleeping with Jews but to get out of the very idea of Jewishness—which meant separating himself both from his people and from the very idea of a people. By the 1970s, he would come to see this alienation from his Jewishness as a mistake, but in the thirties, refusing Jewishness was an ambition that found its most powerful expression in the almost simultaneous events of his joining the Communist Party and writing Call It Sleep.

But even if Call It Sleep is, as I will argue, a Communist novel, it wasn’t Communism that made it possible for Roth—a man in his twenties who had written almost nothing and read very little—to begin writing it. As he himself always said, it was his first encounter with Ulysses5 because Ulysses made him realize that to be a writer, you didn’t have to “go anywhere”; it was all “right here” (B, 76). As unappealing as he found it, New York’s Lower East Side could be for him what Dublin had been for Joyce. In one sense, of course, this turn to seeing his everyday life not as the enemy of art but as its material was the essential condition for producing what Alfred Kazin plausibly called “the most profound novel of Jewish life … by an American.”6 But it’s more importantly true that what Roth saw in Ulysses was the possibility of escape from that life. Joyce, to Roth, was the “supreme author” who “had renounced his people” (B, 68), and he understood himself to be following Joyce’s footsteps: “both sought escape from milieu, from environ of folk” (B, 70). On this reading, Call It Sleep’s way of being “the most profound novel of Jewish life … by an American” was by “sever[ing]” itself from Jewish life and its “people” (B, 68).

In other words, what Roth understood himself to have learned from Joyce was that “language … could magically transmogrify the baseness” of life at the corner of 9^th and Avenue C “into precious literature” (B, 75). The magic is that the language alters what it represents so that writing about the Jews could function as a way of separating yourself from them or even betraying them (like David pimping his cousin to the Catholic Leo). This betrayal would be at work even when Call It Sleep’s language was most faithful to its subjects, as when, for example, it depicts their own language. That such a depiction will be fraught is suggested right from the start when the prologue’s first spoken words—“And this is the Golden Land,” David’s mother says to his father when they meet at the dock—are followed by the narrator’s qualification, “She spoke in Yiddish” (CIS, 11). The form transmogrification takes here is disjunction between what was actually said and what is written, a disjunction that’s both emphasized and overcome by the Prologue’s last spoken words: “‘Gehen vir voinen du? In Nev York?’ ‘Nein. Bronzeville. Ich hud dir schoin geschriben’” (CIS, 16). First, we’re made to understand that the first representation of what his mother said actually distances the text from her—since it’s not what she said (she spoke in Yiddish). And the second (accurate) representation of what she said will begin to do the same thing but from the other side since what she actually says is mainly incomprehensible to the English-speaking reader.

A more structurally central version of this movement is repeated in the first chapter, where a conversation between David and his mother is represented in standard English but takes place in Yiddish, a fact that’s emphasized when David goes downstairs to play and we’re told that “In the street,” he “spoke English” (CIS, 21) but, as we’re immediately shown, not the standard English that represents Yiddish: looking at the inner workings of an alarm clock that another kid is playing with, David asks “So wot makes id?” and Yussie replies, “Kentcha see? Id’s coz id’s a machine … It wakes op mine fodder in de mawning.” The fact that this is the way David actually speaks—in dialect—turns all the non-dialect conversations between him and his mother into a version of “transmogrification,” marked as a literary language because it’s neither Yiddish nor Lower East Side English. It’s not how David or anyone in the novel speaks, so the narrator’s ability to produce it marks his escape from the world it represents.

But there is, of course, a lot of dialect in the novel, which there isn’t in Ulysses and which there hadn’t been in aesthetically ambitious writing for some time. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), borrowing from and adapting Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories, Mark Twain had made the written representation of speech central and, a year after the publication of Call It Sleep, Hemingway would claim that modern American literature came from Huck Finn. But dialect was not his way of following Twain and, indeed, by the time Roth began to write, it had been largely returned to the minstrelsy of texts like Roark Bradford’s Ol’ King David and the Philistine Boys (1930), in which figures from the Old Testament were trotted out in blackface, or it had been relocated to works with greater social than aesthetic pretensions.7 So, for example, in the other great ethno-realist text of the period, James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy, it’s more or less explicitly abjured. Farrell was also influenced by Joyce and, like Roth, identified Joyce’s project with a desire to escape the world he wrote about,8 but plausibly enough, Stephen Dedalus’s need to free himself from Catholicism seemed to him closer to Joyce’s legacy than the representation of street dialect. He does introduce a character who pronounces “his ths as ds” but only and ostentatiously to refuse the “ds.”9 That is, almost every time Slug Mason opens his mouth, we’re reminded of the way he talks—“Slug Mason grabbed his arm, and said, with his familiar mispronunciations …”—but we’re never shown the mispronunciations we’re reminded of: “Studs, you crazy bastard! Here we all hears that you was in bed with the flu, and what does I do but find you trying to take a nose dive in the gutter.”10 The grammar is colloquial, but the pronunciation is reported rather than represented.

By contrast, Roth remained committed to dialect but in a context where, as we have begun to see, the representation of the real was deployed as an escape from the real. So, it functions not just in the service of a more realistic representation of what is being said but as a means of putting pressure on that realism, even of turning the representation into a negation of what it represents. Thus, sentences like “How does a prindin’ press look wot hoitshuh fodder” require almost as much translation as Yiddish to be understood, as do exclamations like “No akey! No akey!” and “Buzjwa!” (CIS, 269, 272). And when Roth, like Farrell, introduces a minor character notable only for his speech impediment (a “lateral emission” [CIS, 459]), the impediment is the whole point of the character’s existence just because it gives Roth a chance to write things which are almost totally incomprehensible—e.g., “‘Lyea. Dlyon’ flygedl, I’m fylyoist t’stlmook” (CIS, 361). Instead of looking like the phonetic transcription of the words someone actually uttered, those marks don’t look like words at all. But if the difficulty of reading this inhibits the reader’s entry into the world they represent, it both pulls David in and provides him a way out. It pulls him in because he has to “concentrate” so hard “to divine Benny’s meaning”; it offers a way out because the concentration is so intense that he can “forget all else,” which makes him, Roth says, “glad” (CIS, 360).

And the same chapter doubles down on the lure of the incomprehensible by following the transcription of Benny’s speech with long stretches of David himself producing sounds that are not just difficult for him to understand but impossible—his own recitation in Hebrew of verses from the Torah. Of course, the fact that David recites these verses without being able to understand them belongs in an unremarkable way to the story’s realist mode. That’s how Hebrew was taught; what the sounds mean comes later, and in fact, Roth would always compare his own “praiseworthy” performance producing “the sound of the language” to his abysmal one producing its meaning (SS, 160). But what’s striking in Call It Sleep is Roth’s reproducing these sounds spoken by someone who can’t understand them and written by someone who can’t understand them for readers who also can’t understand them, while at the same time making the meaning of what we can’t understand central to the novel’s action.

In Mercy of a Rude Stream, this identification of what happens in the novel with the experience of reading in a language you couldn’t speak would be explicitly identified with Roth’s own understanding of himself as a writer, his ability to “feel the way the story had to go, without knowing just why, the way you learned to read Hebrew over and over again in cheder … without knowing just what you read.”11 And Hebrew is identified structurally with Joyce and T.S. Eliot—the young Roth is happy to admit he “didn’t understand half” of Ulysses or The Waste Land but says he got “a state of mind … out of them” (B, 162–63). In Call It Sleep, the text he doesn’t understand is not The Waste Land but Isaiah, and since Roth needs for him both not to know the meaning of the works and for them to fill “his heart with limitless meaning,” he arranges for the rabbi already to have told the students the story the passage from Isaiah tells (CIS, 255).

“In the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah saw God,” which terrifies him, the Rabbi says, because he’s “unclean,” and his “lips are unclean” (CIS, 227). “But just when Isaiah let out this cry,” an angel flies to the altar, takes a “fiery coal” from it and touches Isaiah’s lips, saying, “You are clean!” For Jews, this passage is central to the weekly reading of the Torah portion containing the ten commandments, and that’s surely its significance to the rabbi. But remembering, say, the King James translation, when the seraph flies with a “glowing coal” which he touches to Isaiah’s mouth, saying, “this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away and thy sin purged,” we remember also that it has another significance. As Hana Wirth-Nesher has pointed out, in Christian typology it functions as a figure for the coming of Christ12 and also (although Wirth-Nesher doesn’t go in this direction) for the Eucharist, as when St. John Chrysostom prays for sanctification through “the fiery coal of Thy most pure Body,” and then, in his Liturgy, the priest says “this hath touched my lips” and will take away my “iniquities.”13 And if Roth as a Jew (albeit a spectacularly self-hating one) could hardly be imagined to have a particularly intense relation to the Eucharist, Roth as a recent and passionate convert not to Christ but to Joyce would have been confronted with it (and even with St. John Chrysostom) on the very first page of Ulysses, where the first spoken words are Buck Mulligan’s “Introibo ad altare Dei,” after which he describes his bowl of shaving lather as “the genuine Christine: body and soul and blood and ouns.”14 And, of course, the Eucharist (on the orthodox Catholic view where the wafer and wine are not signs of Jesus’s body but the actual substance of it) is more or less the poster child for a transforming experience that is experienced rather than understood. Taking communion is not a matter of interpreting the meaning of the wine and the wafer. David reads Isaiah so beautifully—in a “cadence like a flock of pigeons, vast, heaven-filling”—that the rabbi says it’s “as though, he knew what he read” (CIS, 367). But he doesn’t. David hasn’t yet advanced to “chumish” (translation), and as we’ve noted, Roth never really would. It was “the sound of the language” that he was good at (SS, 160).

So, this reciting of a Hebrew you can’t understand is a way of insisting on the substance instead of the sign, a way that’s reproduced and intensified in the Eucharist itself where, just as language transmogrifies the Lower East Side, the Holy Spirit transubstantiates the bread. And we can begin to feel the full force of Catholicism’s contribution to Roth’s sense of his text by noting that its terms of praise for David’s reciting (like the “flock of heaven filling” “pigeons”) already evoke a Joycean imagination of the Holy Spirit, deployed three times in Ulysses in Mary’s answer to Joseph’s question: “Qui vous a mis dans cette fichue position? — C’est le pigeon, Joseph.”15 And the story of a Jewish wife impregnated by someone who is not her Jewish husband is repeated in the story David will tell the rabbi, that his real father is not exactly a “sacré pigeon” but, close enough for jazz, the church “organist” with whom his mother had an affair back in Galicia.16

The last chapter of The Sound and the Fury features a black preacher proclaiming, in what Faulkner describes as “the voice of a white man,” “Brethren and sisteren … I got the recollection and the blood of the Lamb,” and then, as his sermon proceeds and, Faulkner says, his “intonation” becomes “negroid,” “Breddren en sistuhn … I got de ricklickshun en de blood of de Lamb.” To which the congregation replies, repeating “Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm” (S, 76). The climax of Call It Sleep is also ushered in by the recollection of the blood of the lamb and by a representation of speech as sounds that mean both nothing and everything (“limitless”) to the speaker but that go beyond dialect and, more importantly, beyond brothers and sisters too.

Dialect in Faulkner racializes speech, repeating the valorization of family invoked in Jason’s “blood is blood.” Insofar as America is a family matter, in the texts of nativist modernism, as in the Immigration Act of 1924 (frequently understood at the time as an effort above all to keep out the Jews17), the family models the race. But in Roth, dialect leads us to language turned into nothing but sound and to the recollection of the blood of the lamb not as the lament that your sister has abandoned the family or your niece has gone off with a Jew but as the boast that your mother went off with a “goy” and that you are yourself a “goy’s get” (CIS, 401). If, in other words, the emergence of “negroid” “pronunciation” in Faulkner insists that one’s brothers and sisters are one’s racial brothers and sisters, the pronunciation of a Hebrew you can’t understand in Roth functions as a refusal of race (starting with one’s own) and as a way to begin imagining a whole new set of brothers and sisters and a new politics as well.

Rightly distinguishing Roth’s modernism from the nativist modernism of Cather, Hemingway, et al., Sean McCann makes a version of this point by reading the end of the book—when, touching the live rail, David is shocked and then revived—as a repudiation of ethnic difference (the Irish and the Poles who terrorize him run to his aid) and as a turn to New Deal statism, emblemized by the benign representative of that state, the cop who takes him to safety and returns him to his chastened family. But McCann’s description of what he calls “Roth’s embrace of the law as a tacit endorsement of … the New Deal project of asserting national authority over regional and ethnic traditions”18 is complicated by the fact that while Call It Sleep was still in press, it was the Communist Party that Roth joined, not the Democratic party.19 And it’s not just complicated but also contradicted by what we have begun to set out as the logic of the novel itself—that is, the Joycean commitment to art for art’s sake as a radical negation of the conditions that produced it, a negation that would entail a vision of the state not as the New Deal mediator between capital and labor but as the dictatorship of the proletariat, a dictatorship which would involve not embrace of the law but (in Lenin’s words as quoted by Stalin) a rule “unrestricted by law and based on the force of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie.”20

We’ve already seen how the incomprehensible Hebrew of Isaiah is identified with the release from Jewish law (as the Catholic boy to whom David pimps his cousin says, “We c’n eat anyt’ing we wants” [CIS, 320]) and also with art itself—with Roth’s sense that “story” has “to go a certain way” (not the way of “history” or of “current events”) and “he could feel the way” it “had to go without knowing just why, the way you learned to read Hebrew … without knowing just what you read.” And this not knowing follows the logic of the Eucharist which bypasses the very idea of knowing: the bread is not a sign of Christ’s body, and you don’t understand it; you eat it. Davy experiences the electric shock on the same model—as “Power! Power like a paw, titanic power … incredible barbaric power!” (CIS, 419). It’s in that shock that you feel what Stalin called the “force” of the proletariat, a shock that Roth—introducing “Power” under the heading “Liberty! Revolt! Redeem!”—interlaces with references to the revolutions of 1789, 1848, 1871, and 1905 (CIS, 417) and a sexualized Marxist and Christian messianism (as when someone named Mary says to someone named Pete, “How many times’ll your red cock crow, Pete, befaw y’ gives up? T’ree?” [CIS, 418]).

This redemption explicitly repeats his experience of Isaiah, from the “softly glowing tongs” and the “coal” to the “golden cloud of birds” who recall both the rabbi’s description of his recitation and the “kinerry” the boys were chasing when they saw his mother in the bath: “Wadda kinerry!” And when, half unconscious from the electric shock, he also sees his father redescribed as one of the birds, soaring “with a feathery ease,” it’s as if the Jew really has been replaced, if not exactly by the church organist, then almost completely exactly by the pigeon. The nativist goal of keeping your sister in the family has become the universalist ambition to turn your mother out; nativist particularism has been turned into Christian universalism where the content of that Christianity is nothing but its universality and its promise of redemption, the new covenant that replaces the old.

In the nativist modernism of the twenties, the Jew could take two forms. What the best-known Klansman of the period, Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans, liked about Jews was what he thought of as their clannishness: the Jew is “inflexibly segregative,” he is “by deliberate election … unassimilable,” and he “reject[s] intermarriage.”21 What the nativist modernists of the twenties didn’t like about Jews was that they were desperate to assimilate and wanted nothing more than intermarriage. That’s at the heart of The Professor’s House, where the professor’s daughter can’t marry Tom Outland, who was like an “older brother”22 to her but was killed in the War, and instead marries the Jew Louie Marsellus. And it’s right next to the heart of The Sun Also Rises, where Jake Barnes will never be able to sleep with Brett but Robert Cohen (“That kike”23) does, with disastrous results.24 And, of course, the efforts to imagine couples as brother and sister is, as we’ve already noted, literalized in The Sound and the Fury, where Quentin’s own answer to his question, “Did you ever have a sister,” is yes, and where if the sister doesn’t quite go off with a Jew, the worry about her going off with any men (“Land of the Kike Home of the Wop”) is expressed in nativist terms.25

But Call It Sleep’s Jew has zero interest in holding on to his Jewishness, either in the way the Imperial Wizard imagined he would or in the more anodyne form envisioned by pluralists like Horace Kallen, who didn’t think immigrants in general were much interested in intermarriage and who thought that Jews in particular, escaping the anti-Semitism of Eastern Europe, became in the U.S. more Jewish: “the cultural unity of his race, history and background is only continued by the new life under the new conditions.”26 But neither sleeping with your (racial) sister nor celebrating your culture holds any attraction in Call It Sleep, and it’s not because what the novel really wants is for the Jew to become an American. In the Communist reading, part of what was wrong with the New Deal was its “intensified national chauvinism.”27 The “new life” the Party promised was not for new Jews or new Negroes or any new nationality, not even new Americans but “a new social being,” molded, Earl Browder wrote in What is Communism? (1936), “in the heat of socialist labor.”28 And what Roth would later say he had found “irresistible” was precisely that promise: “of a changed human being, a new man, a new socialist man.”29 Treating the Declaration of Independence almost as if it were the Old Testament, the “Manifesto” (1934) of the American Party described the “new government” the Declaration “mention[ed]” as finding fulfillment in “the dictatorship of the proletariat, the new form is the form of the workers and farmers councils—the Soviet power.”30

For a long time, there was a myth that, when first published, Call It Sleep was received either with indifference or, by the literary left, with hostility, and it’s true that the first anonymous “brief review” was bad, complaining especially that “the spelling of the dialects is vile” and concluding that it’s “a pity that so many young writers drawn from the proletariat can make no better use of their working class experience than as material for introspective and febrile novels.”31 Nonetheless, as Steven Kellman has shown, the book was widely noticed, and many other reviews were favorable. Indeed, starting in the very next week’s issue, New Masses itself published a series of letters praising it (in the words of the first correspondent) as a novel “about the working-class bottom, written by one of its own naturals who … while he wrote it was engaged, as he has never ceased to be, in the one struggle that counts” (he meant the class struggle).32 But Roth himself, as Kellman remarks, “got stuck on the first New Masses review.”33 Even in the face of Edwin Seaver’s insistence that Call It Sleep belonged to “a genuine proletarian literature,”34 Roth would describe himself as having succumbed to “the appeal of art for art’s sake.”35 He was “a good Communist” trying to do “the right thing for the Party and the Revolution,” but he thought the critics were right and that Call It Sleep really didn’t deal with the working class, wasn’t really a proletarian novel.

Which in a way, as we have already seen, it isn’t. If we understand the commitment to representing life at “the bottom” (Seaver) as a way of “transmogrifying” its “baseness” (Roth) and if we understand the commitment to representing Jewish life (Isaiah’s coal) as a way of transcending Jewishness (the Eucharist), we should also understand Roth’s representation of the working-class boy as a step in the effort to replace him with the new socialist man. Trotsky, the most influential Marxist writer on literature in the twenties, had already criticized the idea that only art “which speaks of the worker” could be regarded as “new and revolutionary,” arguing that the “new man” could not, for example, “be formed without a new lyric poetry.”36 But he also made the more fundamental point that, since “the proletariat acquires power for the purpose of doing away forever with class culture,” there was an important sense in which a truly Communist art would not in the end be a working-class art.37 In other words, the point of the revolution Roth understood himself to be committed to work for was not to celebrate David and his family as workers any more than it was to celebrate them as Jews. The Joycean “art for art’s sake” that made Call it Sleep possible and that came to seem to him a betrayal of his politics was in fact the instrument of negation that made his politics, as the politics of an artist, possible.

Of course, I don’t mean to suggest that Roth was influenced by Trotsky. In fact, he almost certainly wasn’t. By the time he started work on Call It Sleep, Trotsky had already been expelled from the Party, and the only thing Roth ever wrote about him was a brief 1937 piece called “Where My Sympathy Lies” about the “libel suit contemplated by the [John Dewey-led] Committee for the Defense of Trotsky against certain Communist leaders and publication in this country.”38 The article began with Roth observing that (probably “in common with a good many writers”) his “political development has not reached as high a level as it might” and that many of his “beliefs seem the product more of intuition than of analysis.”39 But what his intuition was telling him was that a suit “against working-class leaders and working-class publications in a bourgeois court” was a bad idea and that, “as a writer,” he saw “Trotskyism” as “one way sure to paralyze” the efforts to fight fascism.40 Where his sympathy lay was with the Party.

Thirty years later, he regretted this. Thirty years later, he had also come to regret his rejection of the Jews and would in fact begin writing again out of his feelings of “identifying intensely with the Israelis” in the 1967 war.41 And a little more than thirty years later, he would characterize his new writing project (Mercy of a Rude Stream, which would occupy him for the rest of his life) as a repudiation of Joyce: “Bloom had become a Zionist, Stephen ambushed Albion’s Black and Tan” (DR, 118). Needless to say, the question of Roth’s political judgment is not the subject of this essay, and the question of how to read his final four-volume novel isn’t either. But one way to think of it and its frequent recourse both to Joyce and to Israel (to the writer who abandoned his “folk” and to Roth’s desire to return to his) is as a systematic inversion of both his aesthetic and his politics, a repudiation of “art for art’s sake” and of Communism.

The point of putting it this way is just to emphasize that the opposition between art for art and Communism—an opposition that Roth accepted and that dominated every discussion of proletarian literature—was a false one. In this respect, Roth’s intuition was indeed more advanced than his analysis. Or maybe we could say that his hatred of class society and his love of art were more powerful than his understanding of what a Communist novel ought to be. Or, to qualify it a little further, that his hatred of class society and his love of a certain moment in high Modernism (of texts he felt he couldn’t entirely understand but which he “need[ed]” if he was “to do any writing” [B, 162–63]) made it possible for him to write not on behalf of but against the working class to which he nonetheless understood he completely belonged. The older Roth required a “rupture” with Joyce so he could “come to grips” with his “new reality of belonging, of identifying and reuniting with his people, Israel” (DR, 115). That Roth could tell “tales of the East Side” (DR, 198), of “an urchin on 9^th street skipping down the tenement stairs to the untidy grocery across the street to buy five cents’ worth of crystallized honey for Mom” (H, 69). There aren’t a lot of urchins skipping across the street in Call It Sleep. But the point is precisely not that Call It Sleep is more realistic. It’s in Mercy, not Call It Sleep, that the question “did you ever have a sister” gets answered, and the truth gets told. The question “did you ever have a mother” has finally nothing to do with Roth’s relation to his mother.42 That relation functions instead as a crucial link in the chain: the kinerry, the organist, the pigeon, the language that’s meaningful precisely because it’s not understood, and because that meaning promises to turn what is into something new. And because the new thing that it promised could only come into being through a violent disidentification with his people. That new thing wasn’t an American instead of a Jew, and it wasn’t even a worker instead of an American. It was an artist or a Communist.