SOURCE: "'Holistic Rendering of My Lamentable Past,'" in The New York Times Book Review, July 14, 1996, p. 6.

In the following review, Kermode states that Roth's From Bondage "does what has rarely been done before; it enhances its brilliant youthful original by casting upon it the calmer, contemplative light of old age."

There can be few readers of modern American fiction unfamiliar with the extraordinary career of Henry Roth. Born in Galicia in 1906, he arrived in New York with his Yiddish-speaking parents three years later, and lived first on the Lower East Side and then in Harlem. He did many menial jobs and was a not particularly bright student at City College; but in 1934, at the age of 28, he published Call It Sleep, a novel dedicated to Eda Lou Walton, who introduced him to the literary world, became his mistress and detected and fostered a talent hardly perceived by...