Call It Sleep

David Schearl is a young boy growing up in the Jewish immigrant tenements of New York's Lower East Side in the early 1900s. He clings to his gentle mother Genya and fears his unstable, furious father Albert, and he moves through crowded streets, dim cellars, and the confusing rituals of school and religion trying to make sense of the world. Roth follows David's inner life in intense, poetic detail as the boy pieces together family secrets and searches for his own place. The novel builds toward a shattering encounter with the city itself, told through a child's overwhelmed and searching eyes.