Mythologies of Migration in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep

in his 1934 novel, Call It Sleep, Henry Roth describes the motley crew of migrants landing in 1907 at Ellis Island according to a definitely WASP perspective, selecting the various stereotypical features of each community in order to trigger in the reader a sort of automatic response, an in-bred strategy of recognition of the “alien” based on the common-sense perception of otherness constructed by dominant culture. The essay examines how Roth tries to balance this “mythology of migration” which is the very foundation of the ideology of the “melting pot” with the dislocated vision of his young protagonist, Davis Schearl, who is at the same time an outsider, coming as he does from an Easter European Jewish village, and an awkward insider who shares many of the prejudices of WASP America towards the other ethnic groups peopling the spaces he inhabits in New York City – an attitude many migrants have showed one way or another in order to distinguish their own predicament from that of the other “uprooted”. Henry Roth’s (ambiguous) deconstruction of the “mythologies of migration” which at the beginning of the 20th century were central to the definition of “Americanness” highlights how complex are the survival strategies of migrants – in the case of Call It Sleep, both its author’s and its protagonist’s – even at the price of a more or less painful renunciation to some essential aspect of their own original identities. The term “harbor” (the noun as well as the verb) is used in the essay in its various meanings as a “port of entry” into the dynamics of hospitality and rejection all the migrants face when trying to accommodate to the new environment, because in its trajectory through the noisy streets of New York City the young protagonsit of the novel does only look for some kind of safe “harbor” (his home, the friendship of his peers, the cheder school), but also for a new and more comprehensive identity, which may “harbor” and articulate in some kind of dialogue all the conflicting tensions (between the Old and the New World, and inside the various ethnic groups peopling the latter but coming from the former) that threaten to disrupt his own self but at the same time may provide new patterns of relating with the kaleidoscope of modernity.