“Questing for Silence: Immigration, Linguistic Dissonance, and Assimilation in Henry Roth's Call it Sleep”

Kachuck, Aaron [UCL]

Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep is a meditation on the linguistic and cultural hardships of immigration, and of the struggle of a young boy, recently relocated to America, to achieve a salvific unification of his many clashing cultural contexts. David Schearl seeks to quiet the cacophonous and self-violent multi-lingual din, and to make space, in this silencing movement, for the emergence of an innovative “still small voice” which can express the variegated, macaronic, and syncretic voices of immigrant culture into a true American, and therefore culturally universal, synthesis. One of the unique hurdles with which immigrant literature must grapple is the challenge of representing the speech of one or more languages foreign to the language of the new host country in the context of a book in the language of that host country. Henry Roth did not exist in a vacuum of Jewish American writing, and the stylistic questions and problems he faced were common to other writers in this context. Jewish American immigrant literature written in English had to find and contrive ways to represent the various languages spoken by the Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, and the various “Englishes” utilized by different segments of the native and immigrant population. This literature, therefore, was inescapably an experiment in cross-lingual fusions. A sustained analysis of Roth’s narrative in Call it Sleep shows this work directly addressing these multilingual challenges and the important social and personal risks and benefits which inhere in various solutions to the immigrant’s “quandary” of linguistic and cultural din.