Henry roth biography
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In , I went to visit Henry Roth, a man as famous for his decades of silence as for the great novel he had published almost sixty years earlier, “Call It Sleep.” Roth was living in Albuquerque, in a converted begravning home (by then everything about him was symbolic), but his mind was bound by the geography of his childhood—Brownsville, the Lower East Side, Harlem. He was an eighty-seven-year-old man still fuelled by childhood dreams and traumas, powering around the house on a rolling walker, cursing and singing and explaining. At one point during my stay, Roth asked me to drive him to the doctor. “At least you’ll be making yourself useful,” he observed. He was in an expansive mood during the drive; when we stopped at a traffic light, he suddenly declaimed, “Keep up your bright swords for the dew will rust them.” His röst had the crooning humor of a highbrow vaudevillian. But then I missed an exit and Roth’s mood grew suddenly dark. “When you make one wrong turn,” he said ruefully, “t
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Channeling Henry Roth
AUTHORS NOTE: The factual details of Henry Roths life are taken from Steven Kellmans masterful biography of Roth (Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth; W.W. Norton & Co., New York: ) as well as the four volumes of Roths autobiographical novel Mercy of a Rude Stream and his posthumously published last such novel, Shifting Landscape. My debt to Professor Kellman is immeasurable. Certain occurrences and personages mentioned in Mercy of a Rude Stream are not corroborated in Kellmans work; I have nonetheless repeated them here as a certain kind of truth, (albeit they are sometimes confabulations in Roths aged memory). I consider Roths quasi-fictional self-narrative to have at least equal importance as the scholarly work about his life.
The italicized transliteration of Yiddish words herein is done according to the YIVO standard system published in the s, employing the Litvish pronunciation, albeit Roth heard both Li
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Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth | Jewish Book Council
This exemplary biography contains rich background material, which enhances understanding of its complex subject. It describes, for example, what New York was like for Jews in the early 20th century. Henry Roth ( – ), author of Call It Sleep () the famous experimental novel about an immigrant boy’s earliest American experiences, was victimized by traumatic conditions: fear of a cruel, brutal father; the family’s move from New York’s Lower East Side to a non-Jewish section of Harlem; contempt for and disavowal of Jewish identification because of innumerable insults and indignities suffered; a ten-year intermittent incestuous relationship with his younger sister (and shorter relationship with female cousin), causing his ongoing need for redemption; and depression over writer’s block after Call It Sleep. Kellman reveals Roth’s plagued life as a&