
Call It Sleep
1934 · 480 pages
Roth put the immigrant Lower East Side inside a child's skull. David Schearl is six, terrified of his father, safe only in his mother's kitchen, and the street reaches him as raw sensation.
★ 6.6

Roth put the immigrant Lower East Side inside a child's skull. David Schearl is six, terrified of his father, safe only in his mother's kitchen, and the street reaches him as raw sensation.

Riding with Bolshevik Cossacks through Poland in 1920, a Jewish intellectual watches them sack towns and kill prisoners. Babel writes the atrocity in sentences so beautiful that the effect is obscene.