Written in the trough of the Great Depression and set among the tenements of New York’s Lower East Side two decades earlier, this ambitious, cantankerous, and profoundly autobiographical first novel is ripe with the sensuous realities of the urban setting it powerfully depicts. Henry Roth set out to treat the immigrant experience in America with the freshness of literary modernism, and he brings to his fictional New York not a little of the rigor and verve that James Joyce brought to Dublin in Ulysses, impelled by a sense of writerly vocation similar to the one memorialized in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Pretty much unknown today but a wonderful look at the Jewish community of New York in the early days of the 20th century.
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