Call It Sleep (66 page)

The Prologue, one of the few passages in the book rendered from an omniscient narrator and not through David as focalizer, introduces the main themes as well as the problem of translation, of bilingualism and biculturalism. It begins with a homogeneous English text and moves toward Yiddish; it moves inward, from the general description of New York Harbor and the mass immigration as part of the American experience, to the specific characters and their Yiddish world. The Prologue opens with an epigraph in italics: “I pray thee ask no questions / this is that Golden Land.” Traditionally, epigraphs provide a motto for a chapter or for an entire work, and they are often quotations from another text. In this case, the epigraph sounds like a quotation, and with its archaic second person singular, it can be associated with English prose of an earlier period. But it is not attributed to any source, nor is it a quotation that is easily recognizable on the part of a literate English reader. Moreover, the capitalizing of “Golden Land” draws attention to that phrase,
di goldene medine,
which in Yiddish is a popular way of referring to America, standard fare on Second Avenue but also echoed in Yiddish poetry, as in Moshe-Leyb Halpern's poem,
In goldenem land.
15
The epigraph is a purely invented quotation, one that
seems
to be part of English literature, but at the same time seems to be a statement from Yiddish, just as the novel itself, written in English and in the modernist experimental tradition of Joyce, also partakes of the world of Eastern European Jewish culture.

Furthermore, the epigraph itself is repeated two pages later as the reported first utterance of David's mother, “And this is the Golden Land.” Roth adds, “She spoke in Yiddish.” This explicit attribution of a different language to her speech is the first indication, after the general portrait of newly arrived immigrants, that the novel takes place in a Yiddish-speaking environment, and it provides what Sternberg has called “mimetic synechdoche.”
16
Once again, after all of the dialogue conveying the miscommunication and tension between the newly arrived immigrant mother and the settled immigrant father who perceives himself to be partly Americanized, there is a further repetition of the Golden Land motif near the end of the prologue in the narrated interior monologue of Genya, “This was that vast incredible land, the land of freedom, immense opportunity, that Golden Land.” But the prologue actually ends with a short dialogue in Yiddish without any translation:

“Albert,” she said timidly, “Albert.”

“Hm?”

“Gehen vir voinen du? In New York?”

“Nein. Bronzeville. Ich hud dir schoin geschriben.”
17

In short, the prologue ends with establishing the literal location of Albert and Genya, not in the Golden Land, but in a real place called Bronzeville, a city of bronze (actually Brownsville). And it is accessible only to the bilingual reader.

The movement of the prologue is inward, from English to Yiddish, from the general depiction of immigration with the image of the Statue of Liberty and the synoptic view of the couple to the individual characters and their specific plans. It moves from the metaphor of the Golden Land, first appearing in an English epigraph, to identification of the Golden Land with the dreams of the Jewish immigrant conveyed in English translation, to the final exchange in Yiddish, which displaces the figurative America with a literal geographical location. With each new repetition, the Golden Land slips into an ironic tone, reinforced by the very tarnished, industrial, and demystifying description of the Statue of Liberty marking the entry to America.

The rest of the novel moves in the opposite direction as that of the Prologue, namely outward, from David's mother's kitchen, the realm of Yiddish, to the street and the English world. David's first word, “Mama,” rather than “Mommy” or “Mother,” marks him as an immigrant. For the first several pages the dialogue between David and his mother takes place in refined, sensitive, and normative language. “‘Lips for me,' she reminded him, ‘must always be cool as the water that wet them'” (18). Only when David descends to the street and his speech in English dialect is reproduced – “Kentcha see? Id's coz id's a machine” (21) – does the reader realize that the previous pages were all taking place in Yiddish. The next stage in the movement toward English is the introduction of English folklore in the form of children's street chants, transported onto the streets of New York: “Waltuh, Waltuh, Wiuhlflowuh / Growin' up so high; / So we are all young ladies, / An' we are ready to die” (23). Not only is the dialect comical, but the refrain is clearly a foreign element in David's world: Walter is not a Jewish name; wildflowers, even figuratively, are not in evidence anywhere in the urban immigrant neighborhood; and the rest of the book demonstrates that romantic love, young ladies ready to die, is a concept alien to David's world. The additional irony in this folklore is that its sexual connotations are not evident to the children who are chanting the rhyme.

Allusion to English sources, whether they be street chants, fairy tales, or songs, are always experienced as foreign, and are always ironic. When David perceives their boarder Luter as an ogre, he places him in the folk tale of Puss in Boots (36), in a world of a marquis who marries a princess; and when he tries to keep himself from fearing the cellar door, he repeats stanzas from an American patriotic song, “My country 'tis of dee!” only to reach the refuge of his mother's kitchen with the line “Land where our fodders died!” Quotations or allusions from English culture, despite their being embedded in an English text, appear as something foreign, as translation from another place.

The felt presence of an absent source language, then, which occasionally makes the English text read as if
it
were a translation, is conveyed in a number of ways: by explicit attribution of phrases as Yiddish in “reality”; by selective reproduction of Yiddish phrases; by English rendered in Yiddish dialect; and by references to English culture as if it were an intrusion into the main cultural environment of the text. Before looking at intertextual elements from Jewish culture, we need to examine three other strategies for conveying the multilingualism of the text and its cultural world: interlingual homonyms, self-embedding, single-word cultural indicators.

In the first instance, English words are perceived to be homonyms for Yiddish words, and are therefore either accidentally or deliberately misunderstood. When David hears the word “altar,” he thinks it means “alter,” the Yiddish for “old man.” When his aunt announces that her dentist is going to relieve her of pain by using cocaine, the others hear “kockin,” the Yiddish equivalent for defecating (160). And Aunt Bertha herself plays on the similarity between the “molar” which her dentist is going to extract, which she pronounces as “molleh,” and the Yiddish word for “full,” to invent a vulgar pun. “I am going to lose six teeth. And of the six teeth, three he called ‘mollehs'. Now isn't this a miracle? He's going to take away a ‘molleh' and then he's going to make me ‘molleh'” (160). David makes the mental note that “Aunt Bertha was being reckless tonight.”

In the case of self-embedding, a word, phrase, symbol, or archetype which is actually in English is imported into the dialogue and rendered as verbal transposition of Yiddish into English; this English element appears
foreign,
as “other” within the rest of the
English
text. Here is an example in a dialogue between Aunt Bertha and David's mother Genya:

“I'm not going to the dentist's tomorrow,” she said bluntly. “I haven't been going there for weeks – at least not every time I left here. I'm going ‘kippin' companyih!”

“Going what?” His mother knit her brow. “What are you doing?”

“Kippin' companyih! It's time you learned a little more of this tongue. It means I have a suitor.” (163)

Finally, occasionally a single word, because it has no referent in the home culture, evokes the entire alien culture. This is true of the word “organist” when David overhears his mother and aunt speaking in Yiddish. “What was an ‘orghaneest'? He was educated, that was clear. And what else, what did he do? He might find out later if he listened. So he was a goy. A Christian … Christian … Chrize. Christmas. School-parties” (196). The word “altar” also functions as one of these single-word indicators, as well as a homonym. In fact, in each of the above three types of bilingual strategies, there is a conflict of cultures, for obviously both the Church and romantic courtship are alien to much of the Eastern European Jewish world of the turn of the century.

The absent home language, then, is an exacting and even persecuting presence as it turns David's Americanness, through English, into an agent of the “other.” This is developed further in the motifs that accompany the other “Jewish” languages in the text. The most complex and significant instance of diglossia in the book is the infiltration of Hebrew and Aramaic, of
loshn-koydesh,
for David is bilingual when it comes to Yiddish and English, but diglossic when it comes to the sacred languages used only in connection with liturgical texts. In David's cheder class he is introduced to Hebrew, first through the learning of the alphabet which is reproduced in the text, and then through the study of a passage from Isaiah recounting the angel's cleansing of the prophet's lips with a burning coal. Roth solves the problem of the reader's incomprehension of the transliterated passage by having the rabbi explain it to the children in Yiddish, which appears in the text in English, thus by translation twice removed: “But when Isaiah saw the Almighty in His majesty and His terrible light – Woe me! he cried, What shall I do! I am lost!” (227). David identifies the fiery coal with an object in his own natural environment, and therefore with the possibility of revelation in his own life. This is communicated in quoted interior monologue: “But where could you get angel-coal?… Hee! Hee! In a cellar is coal. But other kind, black coal, not angel coal. Only God had angel-coal. Where is God's cellar I wonder? How light it must be there” (231). As the cellar has previously been the dark place which David fears, particularly because it is associated with the children's sexual games, David is now faced with the sacred and the profane in one image.

Since David does not understand Hebrew, the Aramaic passage is functionally the same as the Hebrew one, another aspect of
loshn-koydesh:
it introduces him to a popular and significant document in Jewish culture, namely one of the concluding songs of the Passover seder,
Ḥ
ad gadya.
Roth gives the reader who is unfamiliar with the Passover liturgy the translation of the song by having the rabbi ask, “Who can render this into Yiddish?” David responds with the last stanza which repeats all of the preceding ones: “And then the Almighty, blessed be He … killed the angel of death, who killed the butcher, who killed the ox, who drank the water, that quenched the fire, that burned the stick, that beat the dog, that bit the cat, that ate the kid, that my father bought for two zuzim. One kid, one only kid!” (233).

Although the reader is provided with translations of these two texts, in one case a loose paraphrase and in another an exact translation, the significance of these passages is clear only when they are perceived within both Jewish and Christian tradition, for they reappear in the final brilliant mosaic, chapter XXI. Both passages are associated with the spring, with Passover, and with the theme of redemption. In
Ḥ
ad gadya
the lyrics are cumulative, as the song runs through a hierarchy of power with each succeeding element overpowering the preceding one, until it reaches an omnipotent god. The kid is purchased for slaughter and ceremonial feasting, to recall the slaughter of the paschal lamb by the Hebrews in ancient Egypt, providing the blood on the doorpost to identify the Hebrew homes for the Angel of Death to pass over during the smiting of the Egyptian firstborn. The one only kid about whom David sings is David himself, an innocent sacrifice either for his parents' “sins” (mother's affair with a Gentile and father's passive witness to his father's death) or for those of the tough technological and vulgar city in which he finds himself. But as the languages of the climactic chapter indicate, he is also that other paschal lamb, namely Christ. Two cultural traditions, in some sense complementary and in others oppositional, coexist in this section, as they do in David's and Roth's world.

The Book of Isaiah prophesies redemption through the coming of the Messiah. In Christian hermeneutics, it is read as prefiguring the birth of Christ. Moreover, in Christian tradition, Easter is linked with Passover, with the Crucifixion, with redemption through the sacrificial offering of the one only kid, Christ himself, the sacrificial lamb who takes the sins of the community upon himself. In historical terms, Easter was also when tensions between the Jewish and Gentile communities were at their height in Eastern Europe, often taking the turn of blood libels and pogroms. All of this is eventually evoked in the final scene, when the multilingualism and biculturalism are placed in social, historical, religious, and psychological contexts.

In the last section, David runs from his father's wrath after the rabbi discloses the child's story denying Albert's paternity, insisting that his real father was a Christian organist, his mother's first love. To protect himself, David grabs his father's zinc milk ladle, and rushes to the crack in the trolley car tracks where, in an earlier scene with neighborhood boys, he witnesses the release of electric light from a short circuit. Associating the light between the tracks with God, David seeks refuge from the parents he believes have betrayed him. The electric charge is conducted through his body and he falls unconscious onto the cobblestones.