SOURCE: "Confession, Terminable and Interminable," The New York Times Book Review, February 26, 1995, p. 5.

In the following review, Gordon discusses Roth's complicated relationship with his Jewishness as expressed in his A Diving Rock on the Hudson.

The circumstances that surround the writing of Henry Roth's novel A Diving Rock on the Hudson are so special that it is impossible to expect a reading untouched by them. At the time of publication of this novel/memoir/journal—a work deliberately hybrid and unfixed—its author is 89 years old. It is the second volume of a series that broke the 60-year silence following the publication of Call It Sleep, a masterpiece that told the dark side of the immigrant journey, reminding Americans that their streets were not aved with gold but strewn with victims.

Critics have often marked Joyce's important influence on Call It Sleep. But Henry Roth insists, both in...