and therein lies a difference that Western readers (especially Canadian readers) have found significant: for the doom that hangs over Judith Gare is not that of an imperfect Emersonian autonomy (as it is with Sara Smolinsky) but that of being torn from the farm and displaced to an urban modernity, civilization at the cost of primal woman- earth ties to the land.
Like the popular autobiographies of the teens and twenties, the major novels of Cahan, Yezierska, Rölvaag, and Ostenso all examined 'making it' in America. With the onset of the Great Depression, the Levinskys and Per Hansas as well as the Gatsbys and Buchanans receded from sight, and the nation at large renewed its interest in economic and social marginality: the naturalist novel came back in ethnic and proletarian form as an interrogation into the forces behind mass poverty, and the local color novel came back in ethnic and urban form as a testament to the power of folkways in America's economic backwaters. For ethnic writers — who had made their own personal journeys out of wage labor and the poverty of the uneducated — the marketplace premium shifted from the middle-class dilemmas immediately bearing down upon them to the ghetto environs of those they had left behind. The shift of emphasis energized writers whose imaginations, for all their social and cultural dislocation, remained steeped in circumscribed childhoods, be they haunting -392- or nostalgic; and it placed in especially high demand the depiction of those groups that had, in fact and in the popular imagination, come to represent either the near-hopeless underclasses or the honest laboring classes now tragically frustrated.
During the 1930s, Jewish Americans published a number of novels offering insightful, good-humored reconstructions of immigrant experience in an anthropological vein: among them, Daniel Fuchs's Williamsburg trilogy (1934-37), which has a mélange of characters; Vera Caspary's Thicker Than Water (1932), portraying a Portuguese Jewish family in Chicago; Meyer Levin's The Old Bunch (1937), about a cohort of Chicagoans coming of age; and Sidney Meller's portrait of a saintly California rabbi, Roots in the Sky (1939). Yet even these novels, for all their remembrance of transplanted folkways, placed Jews squarely on the rise, assimilating. Marcus Klein, Morris Dickstein, and other recent critics have shown that the more representative of the Jewish writers of the 1930s were those identified with the proletarian literature movement: Tillie Olsen, whose Yonnondio: From the Thirties was not published (except for one chapter) until 1974 and, more to the point, does not focus on Jews; and Michael Gold and Henry Roth, whose novels, despite the proletarian tag, spoke more strongly, then as now, as novels of ethnic cultural mediation.
The leading spokesman for Communist aesthetics in the United States, Mike Gold (né Itzok Granich), began his call for a proletarian art in the February 1921Liberator, but the novel that embodied his praxis, Jews Without Money, did not appear until 1930. With great expectations, Horace Liveright published the novel in a handsome first edition, with woodcut illustrations, and its sales met those expectations, earning Liveright and Gold fair sums. Carroll and Graf republished it in 1984. Less a novel than a set of dark vignettes, Jews Without Money revealed poverty and lives of desperation among East Side Jews, foregrounding the social types once favored by the yellow journalists and the naturalists: pimps and prostitutes, boy gangs and thieves, bloodsucking landlords and bereft tenants predominating. Given the stereotype of the rich Americanized Jew that had been generated throughout the preceding decade, the novel set forth even more starkly than had Yezierska the underside of the Jewish American success story. Yet Gold's hyperrealism was undercut by an -393- equally hyperbolic romanticism — part Socialist, part Russian-Polish, and part Gold — in which the goodly innocent of the shtetl-based Old World are understood to have fallen into the clutches of urban modernity, vague in detail but Satanic and fatal.
Under the tutelage of N.Y.U. professor Eda Lou Walton, Henry Roth found in the work of the three giants of Anglo-American modernism — Joyce, Eliot, and O'Neill — courage to return to the scene of his troubled East Side boyhood and techniques of narrative inquiry to exorcise its ghosts. Within the framework of immigrant naturalism, Roth produced a lyrical stream-of-consciousness novel — Call It Sleep (1934) — focused on the Oedipal struggles between David Schearl, from age six to nine, and his father, Albert, an immigrant from rural Austria earning a precarious living as a sometime printer's helper and sometime milkman. Insecure and, for most of the novel, impotent, Albert Schearl stirs in David shockingly precocious fantasies of patricide and sexual displacement. David pushes these fantasies to near fruition by provoking his father to violence (giving his mother little alternative but to alienate her husband and embrace her son), a recurrent cycle that climaxes with David brandishing a crucifix and declaring his real father to have been a Gentile.
When the novel was originally published, Roth's supporters fended off the charge of his sacrificing social realism to sexual prurience by underscoring the stunningly sensual rendering of the East Side (which the novel makes the reader see, hear, and smell in all its fiercesomeness and occasional glory) and by insisting that the political agenda of literature is better served when the truth, whatever its makeup, is told without ideology's prepackaging (an implied criticism of Gold et al.). Since the 1960s, what has most interested critics is Roth's 60page penultimate chapter, in which David strives for a symbolic cessation of his Oedipal battles against the backdrop of a cacophony of lower-class voices, who are at once down-'n'-dirty and rhapsodically spiritual. Prose poetry modeled after Eliot and reminiscent of Hart Crane's The Bridge, chapter 21 of Call It Sleep yields an orgy of ethnic multivocality partly for its own sake, a lyrical envisioning of intergroup toleration and solidarity, and partly for the sake of the novel's protagonist, realizing in high modernist artistry David's yearning for mercy and redemption.
The vicissitudes of Call It Sleep's reception reflect the novel's un-394- usual combination of high modernist structure (it is arguably the most Joycean of any novel written by an American) and ethnic themes, a combination that continues to embarrass our terms of critical inquiry. In its Ballou edition of 1934, Call It Sleep did not find an enthusiastic readership beyond the coterie of New York intellectuals then coalescing around the Partisan Review, whose reviewer praised it as the best first novel since James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In 1956, long out of print, it was proclaimed 'the most neglected book of the past 25 years' by Alfred Kazin and Leslie Fiedler. In 1964, Avon released a paperback edition that was heralded in a front-page review by Irving Howe in the New York Times Book Review (the first ever for a paperback), which initiated a resuscitation of the novel: over a million in sales, translation into several languages, and some salience in modern American fiction courses. By 1973, its reputation seemed to have been secured — R. W. B. Lewis proclaiming it 'incomparably the best of those novels which, from the perspective of the thirties, looked back on the ghetto life and the immigrant Jewish community.' Yet the half-dozen stateof-the-art anthologies released in the late 1980s and early 1990s have passed over Call It Sleep and chosen instead selections from Cahan, Yezierska, and Gold.
From the 1870s through the 1920s, Irish materials were a stockin-trade for important creative journalists such as Finley Peter Dunne and Fitz-James O'Brien as well as for major figures of the American stage including Edward Harrigan and, of course, Eugene O'Neill himself. Yet the country's most notable novelist with an Irish surname, F. Scott Fitzgerald — half 'black Irishman' and 'half old stock American,' scion to an alliance of wealthy, educated families — had chosen to depict neither the Irish settlement nor the American Catholic Church that set the Irish apart. Similarly, in the mid-1930s, John O'Hara began a well-received series of novels in the tradition of Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis that also avoided foregrounding Irish themes. In 1928, an Ohio-born writer of Irish background, Jim Tully, published a semiautobiographical novel, Shanty Irish, that by its focus on a poor Irish family set the theme and by its title's ugly epithet set the tone for the breakthrough of Irish Americans into the fiction of cultural mediation.
From 1932 to 1978, James T. Farrell published forty-seven books -395- of fiction. In 1941, he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters; and in 1979, the year of his death, he received the Emerson-Thoreau Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his lifetime achievement. Despite his prolificness, Farrell's reputation stands on a trilogy of novels that recalled the South Side of his Chicago boyhood and that focused on 'a normal American boy of Irish-Catholic extraction'; not on Farrell, who had made the long cultural journey to the University of Chicago, but on the young men he had left behind, trapped by and among themselves. Farrell's famous 800-page saga, written proudly in the tradition of Theodore Dreiser, began with his very first book, Young Lonigan (1932), and was completed with two sequels, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1934) and Judgment Day (1935). Critical acclaim from the beginning was high. A Guggenheim fellowship and selection in the Book-of-the-Month Club
