Mercy of a Rude Stream

Henry Roth, who was born in the Galicia region of Austria-Hungary, immigrated to the United States as an infant. A novelist and memoirist, he described the experiences and captured the dialect of Jewish immigrants in New York. He graduated from the City College of New York in 1928. He lived with and was supported by an English professor, Eda Lou Walton, a Protestant, for ten years while he wrote his most successful piece, the novel Call It Sleep. Although it was well received at the time, the novel and the author were soon forgotten. It was rediscovered in the 1960s and widely recognized as a modernist masterpiece. Both a distinguished proletarian novel and a powerful portrait of the terror of family life from the perspective of a child, the novel is notable for its sensitivity to the bilingualism of immigrant Jews. Roth settled in New Mexico and published additional volumes later in life. He received a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Townsend Harris Medal, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.