SOURCE: "The Re-Awakening of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep," in Jewish Social Studies, Vol. XXVIII, No. 3, July, 1966, pp. 148-58.

In the following essay, Pinsker provides reasons that the themes contained in Roth's Call It Sleep were appropriate for rediscovery in the 1960s.

The events which lead to the re-discovery of a previously neglected novel are often as interesting as the conditions which precipitated its original obscurity. In a sense, the recent popularity of Call it Sleep is as much a tribute to critics like Alfred Kazin and Leslie Fiedler as it is a triumph for its author Henry Roth. To be sure, Call it Sleep is the same novel today that it was when it first appeared in 1934. What has changed, of course, is the way we tend to read the novel.

The history of Call it Sleep is not so much one of unconcern as it is...