The parental strife affected all the family relationships: Leah Roth drew her son ever closer to her, while Herman favored their daughter Rose, who was born in America two years after Henry's birth. In addition to the emotional strain of this Oedipal situation, the Roths suffered the more general immigrant problem of adaptation to the New World. For Eastern European Jews like Roth's parents, the move to New York meant a move in time as well as place: they left a secure, if stagnant, pastoral village for the chaos and anonymity of a modern city. Unlike Albert Schearl in the novel, Herman Roth was a diminutive man in physical stature, but in his son's eyes, he exuded the ever-impending rage and barely suppressed violence of the fictional figure. Just as Roth increased his father's physical dimensions in Call It Sleep to emphasize the child's fear of his parent's unpredictability and power, he depicted his mother in an artful and not simply biographical way. In the novel, Genya, the mother, is aloof, contemplative, almost regal, while her sister Bertha is talkative, vulgar, and extroverted.
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