Henry Roth's literary reputation rests entirely and securely upon Call It Sleep (1934). The single novel is so emotionally moving and so artistically elegant that it has made Roth an important literary figure, even though he has never completed another novel.

There is considerable interest in Roth's biography both because of the desire to know how such an artful novel could be a writer's first and last and because the novel has biographical links with the author's own youth. Henry Roth was born in Tysmenitsa, near Lemberg, Galicia (then an Austrian Crownland), to Herman and Leah Roth. Eighteen months later his mother brought him to New York. Roth's life is clearly reflected in the opening section of the novel: Roth's father like Albert Schearl had come to America before his wife and child and earned money for their passage to New York. As in the novel, before the mother...