David Bronsen
A CONVERSATION WITH HENRY ROTH
I visited> Henry Roth on his Farm near Augusta, Maine, and
we began to talk. At one point I remarked that he had never lost his
command of language. He replied:
"That comes from having talked
with myself for twenty-five years."
It's too bad I was not older when I was brought to America,
so that I could recall the Old World and the original home of my
mother and father. I was born in Tysmenitsa, near Lemberg, Galicia,
in 1906, and was only eighteen months old when my mother brought
me to this country.
My father had gone to New York and saved up enough money to
bring my mother and me over in steerage. This is the material I used
in the prologue of
Call It Sleep.
Since there was no birth certificate,
there was some doubt about my age. My father said I was two and
a half years old when I came, but my mother maintained I was a year
younger. As proof she used to point out that my sister, who was con–
ceived in America, was two years younger than I am, so I imagine that
her version of my age is correct.
My parents settled down in Brownsville at first, which corresponds
to certain passages of the novel. Two years later we moved to Ninth
Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. When we lived there in
the years 1910 to 1914, the East Side represented a very secure enclave.
Everyone in our building was Jewish, as were the neighbors to either
side of us and the people across the street. Had I thought of it in those
terms back them, I would have said that I was surrounded by a homo–
geneous environment and that I completely identified with it. In that
atmosphere of devoutness and orthodoxy it would not have occurred
to
anyone to question the dietary regulations or the observance of
