JEWISH IMMIGRANT LIFE IN NEW YORK
ROTH, Henry.
Call it Sleep.
London, Michael Joseph, 1963.
8vo, pp. 446; original black cloth, stamped in gilt on spine; inevitable uniform browning to cheap paper, otherwise a fine copy in an remarkably bright black and purple unclipped jacket, showing only a hint of wear to spine ends.
First UK edition of Roth’s precocious masterpiece, generally regarded as the finest novel of Jewish immigration to America before and after the turn of the century.
Henry Roth (1906–1995) immigrated from present-day Ukraine to New York (via Ellis Island) as a child. Call it Sleep is set in the slums of the Lower East Side, where Roth lived in his youth before moving to Harlem and subsequently moving in with the poet Eda Lou Walton in Greenwich Village. He began Call it Sleep at the age of twenty-four, with Walton’s support, and completed it four years later (the first edition published by Robert O. Ballou in New York in 1934), falling thereafter into over half a century of writer’s block. Although Call it Sleep quickly fell into obscurity in the 1930s, it was reprinted thirty years later to rapturous critical and popular reception; in 1964 it was published in paperback by Avon Books and sold over one million copies.
The present edition features an introduction by English literary critic and novelist Watler Allen (1911–1995), a member of the Birmingham Group, editor of the works of George Gissing, and a friend of Louis MacNeice.
