Call It Sleep Read Free

have always done. It is a verbal style, even a routine, in which people respond to each other as if they were breaking all the windows in order to let a little air into the house.
    In Roth’s meaningful translation, the Yiddish often sounds just “lovely,” the language of family love and respect for God. The reader from another culture should know that when Albert returns home and, not seeing his son, curtly asks his wife, “Where’s the prayer?”, he is referring to his son as his “kaddish,” the Hebrew prayer over the dead that it is the highest obligation of a son to say in memory of his father.
    Yet Albert gives no evidence of being a believer. Genya faithfully lights the Sabbath candles Friday at sundown. But describing her own grandmother to her son, she admits: “But while my grandfather was very pious, she only pretended to be – just as I pretend, may God forgive us both.” That last phrase is entirely characteristic. You don’t have to be pious in order to be a faithful Jew – you just have to honor the tradition as Genya does, with her separate dishes for Passover and the lighting of the Friday-night candles for the coming of the Sabbath. The Yiddish of such poor immigrants as the Schearls was often quite homey and full of little mistakes. In Roth’s text they speak with grace, longing, nobility. Yiddish is their real home. Even when life is fiercest, their language conveys a seeking for a better world than this, for spiritual heights customary to people who regard themselves as living under the eye of God.
    Yet Roth has no love for the rabbi (teacher) who for twenty-five cents a boy tries to drum the actual language of the Hebrew Bible into his cowed pupils. The “cheder,” the primitive Hebrew school in which the boys are pinched, driven, insulted so that they will at least pronounce Hebrew words without necessarily understanding them, is presented in absolutely realistic terms as a Dickens-like schoolroom of torture. The rabbi is the fattish, irascible, ill-smelling Yidel Pankower. Even his first name, meaning “Little Jew,” brings out Roth’s scorn for the place, the practice, the old routine. The rabbi despises his “American idiots.” Everything was better in the Old Country. Teacher and pupils talk Yiddish by contrast with the sacred Hebrew text. Everywhere throughout Call It Sleep, the sacred is shown side by side with the profane, as is usual among deeply observant old immigrant Jews. They ignore the actual sordidness of the life surrounding them in their adoration of the holy word itself.
    Awful as Reb Yidel Pankower is, he discerns David’s abilities. He benevolently brings in an old, kindly sage to hear David recite his lessons. Think of it, a kid brought up in New York’s heathen atmosphere who can come so close to the ancient text! David has his first moment of spiritual illumination (he will seek it at its fieriest in coming so perilously close to the third rail) when he hears Reb Yidel pronounce the following over another boy:
    â€œNow I’ll tell you a little of what you read, then what it means. Listen to me well that you may remember it. Beshnas mos hamelech.” The two nails of his thumb and forefinger met. “In the year that King Uzziah died, Isaiah saw God. And God was sitting on his throne, high in heaven and in his temple – Understand?” He pointed upward …
    â€œNow!” resumed the rabbi. “Around Him stood the angels, God’s blessed angels. How beautiful they were you yourself may imagine. And they cried: Kadosh! Kadosh! Kadosh! – Holy! Holy! Holy! And the temple rang and quivered with the sound of their voices. So!” He paused, peering into Mendel’s face. “Understand?”
    David is stimulated but does not find holiness in the Hebrew letters. He is startled by the reluctance of other boys to use the strips of Yiddish newspaper in the