HENRY ROTH
267
ences of Harlem. But she did not seem to care if I became a Goy or
not, and damn it, I became a Goy!
My father was also not particularly orthodox, he merely went
through the motions. He did not fail to celebrate Seder and observe
Yom Kippur, but at the core true devoutness no longer existed. My
father had a pat phrase that he appended to every reference to God,
which he continues to use till this day:
reap si doh a Gatt"
-
"if there
is a God."
Looking at it in another way, I suppose my parents went through
some of the same dislocation by corning to America that I experienced
by moving to Harlem. That kind of change is much more of a trauma
for the Eastern Jew than for the Westerner. The Jew corning out of
his little Eastern European hamlet, with its insularity and stagnation,
is likely to undergo a radical transformation when he gets caught up
in the tumult and perpetual change of American life.
In any case, the move in 1914, the Goyish environment and the
negative example of my parents threw me into a state of turmoil. I
had gone to Harlem with a pronounced Jewish bent and proceeded
to take on the conflicting characteristics of my new surroundings. It
was as if two valences of the same element were at odds with one
another; at the time, of course, I could not intellectualize about the
contradictions involved, but I did feel them emotionally, and my re–
sponse took the form of rebelling against Judaism. I fought as hard
as I could against going through with the Bar Mitzvah, even though
my parents insisted on it and finally had their way. But only a year
later, when I was fourteen, I firmly announced that I was an atheist.
Call It Sleep
is set in the East Side, but it violates the truth about
what the East Side was like back then. Nint..h Street was only a frag–
mentary model for what I was doing. In reality, I took the violent en–
vironment of Harlem - where we lived from 1914 to 1928 - and pro–
jected it back onto the East Side.
It
became a montage of milieus, in
which I was taking elements of one neighborhood and grafting them
onto another. This technique must have grown out of the rage I had
been living with all those fourteen years. I was alienated - to use that
old hack of a word - and my novel became a picture in metaphors of
what had happened to me.
All the rancorous anti-Semitism which Hitler was beginning to
epitomize was not limited to Germany alone. To a lesser degree it was
being felt everywhere. It may be difficult to explain how such social
forces affect the individual psyche, but it is clear that they have power–
ful
behavioral effects. My own experience of being thrown into a neigh–
borhood where anti-Semitism was growing provides an example, and
