Linguistic Universes in Henry Roth's "Call It Sleep"
1986; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1208349
ISSN1548-9949
Autores Tópico(s)Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies
ResumoThe vast numbers of immigrants to the United States in the early part of the twentieth century had perhaps only one point in common: ignorance of the language of their new country. Henry Roth's novel Call It Sleep is firmly placed in this linguistic context. Language operates on the simplest level as a means of defining one's territory. Genya Schearl, David's mother, is absolutely helpless out of her limited territory, for her knowledge of English is so imperfect that no one can understand her outside the Brownsville ghetto, where she might just as well speak Yiddish. Genya's life in the Golden Land is just as limited as that of the shtetl she left, and her limits are dictated by lack of familiarity with language and therefore culture. Her Pale of Settlement is demarcated by a vegetable market, railroad tracks, and a child's scribblings on a shop window. If I ventured further I should be lost, she tells her husband. In fact, ... were they even to wash that window, I might never find my way home again.' Within the Lower East Side, and in Call It Sleep, too, Yiddish is the normative language. Roth writes it into expressive, malleable, and poetic English. By contrast, colloquial English, when it appears, is transcribed in a laborious dialect, often incomprehensible until read aloud.2 Perhaps because they have no knowledge of Eastern Europe, the children make the linguistic jump with the greatest ease, switch-
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