278
DAVID BRONSEN
When my older boy got a scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy
and, a couple of years later, the other one went away to finish high
school, my wife and I found ourselves alone.
It
became necessary to
find something less taxing than raising waterfowl by myself, so I took
to tutoring Latin and math.
In
the summer of 1959 Harold Ribalow, a critic of American-Jew.
ish literature, came out here to talk with me about
Call It Sleep
and
its possible republication. That was the first time it occurred to me
that anyone might be interested in bringing out the book. I felt that
from a business standpoint it would be a foolish venture and would not
do any better than it had the first time. I was gratified, however, and
hoped that it would result in some needed income. Ribalow pointed
out that my copyright was approaching the expiration date, after which
the book would become public domain. My obliviousness to that fact
shows how divorced I was from literature and writing. As a result of
Ribalow's interest the book was brought out by Cooper Square Pub·
lishers in 1960, and then in 1964, thirty years after the first publication,
it came out as a paperback with Avon Books. After all those years of
being out of print the book had become accessible again.
What I had perhaps overlooked is that one grows old and that a
book like
Call It Sleep
can gain a certain value as an antiquity. At
least I was still alive to see the revival of interest in the novel. I am
sure that moving to Maine with its much slower pace of life, giving
up the consuming attempt to keep writing at all costs, and the devotion
of a steady and sensible wife account for my being alive today. Other.
wise the republication of the book would have been a posthumous
event. But as far as literature is concerned, I am in reality no longer
alive. The renewed interest in
Call It Sleep
is being witnessed by a
dead author who still happens to be ambulatory.
But strangely enough, this dead author may be going through a
resurrection. I started writing again in the summer of 1967, simultane·
ously with the outbreak and conclusion of the Israeli-Arab war. I was
in Guadalajara, Mexico, at the time, where I had gone with my wife
on the royalties of
Call It Sleep,
and where I followed the daily events
of the war in the local newspapers with great avidity. I found myself
identifying intensely with the Israelis in their military feats, which
repudiated all the anti-Jewish accusations we had been living with in the
Diaspora, and I was glorying in their establishment of themselves as a
state through their own application and resources. An intellectual ex·
citement seized hold of me that forced me to set down what was going
through my mind, to record my thoughts about Israel and my new
