Dec

5

2025

Naomi Gordon-Loebl (deputy publisher): For years, Call It Sleep—Henry Roth’s 1934 autobiographical novel about growing up on the Lower East Side in the early 20th century—languished in my pile of to-read books. It shifted from my dresser to my desk to my nightstand, nearly 500 pages long with small type.

I wanted to read it; it had been described to me as a modernist Jewish epic akin to Ulysses, or, as the cover blurbs reminded me every time I relocated my copy, “arguably the most distinguished work of fiction ever written about immigrant life” (Lis Harris) and “the most profound novel of Jewish life by an American” (Alfred Kazin). But the descriptions I’d heard from friends were not exactly enticing. They often used words like “brutal” and “depressing.” They frequently mentioned the ubiquitous portrayals of abuse and abject poverty. It didn’t seem, by most accounts, to be a particularly enjoyable read. (To say nothing of Henry Roth’s own troubling biography, which I only discovered far later.) In our current political context, where I find much to be horrified about every day, I was not eager to pick up fiction that would plunge me into fresh despair.

I was surprised when I finally read Call It Sleep earlier this year. Make no mistake: It is indeed a heavy book, and it does not shy away from the harsh reality that was life on the Lower East Side at the turn of the 20th century. But to define the novel solely on the basis of the suffering it depicts is, perhaps, the same trap we fall into when we define people based on their suffering. The gift of Call It Sleep is the remarkably rich world it portrays, complete with sights, sounds, and smells that are more than a century old. As the protagonist David Schearl wanders around the streets of the Lower East Side, we are wandering with him—and experiencing every mystery, mishap, and adventure along with him, too. Rather than feeling weighed down by misery during the month that I read Call It Sleep, I felt like I was living part-time in its universe—hitching a rollerskate ride on the back of a horse-drawn buggy, or walking along trolley tracks on Avenue D, only to look up and remember that I was aboard a smartphone-filled Q train car in Eric Adams’s New York.

(An aside for the New York City geography nerds among us: David lives on East 9th Street and Avenue D, in the neighborhood now called “Alphabet City.” As a native New Yorker who grew up with the notion that the Lower East Side ends at Houston Street—and who now lives in a part of Flatbush that the realtors have christened “Prospect Park South”—I was fascinated to encounter yet another example of the longstanding New York City practice of gentrification-rebranding.)

Roth made a few important stylistic choices that contribute to the immersive feeling of Call It Sleep. Probably the best known is that when the characters speak in English, their accented speech is rendered phonetically—for example, “I know sommbody wod he hoided his hand on de Futt f’om Jillai—wid a fiyuh crecker.” (I sometimes found myself reading aloud in order to figure out what was being said.) When they speak in Yiddish, however, the transcription is delivered in perfect English, and often poetic: “She was very small, my grandmother, very frail and delicate. The light came through her hands like the light through a fan.” The effect of this is to reverse the standard othering of immigrant languages—while Yiddish may be the “other” in the characters’ new land, in Call It Sleep it is the master tongue, the “correct” way of speaking as opposed to the strange, foreign English that David hears and speaks outside of his home.

Roth’s other choice that allows us so completely to enter the world of Call It Sleep is a simple one—so simple, in fact, that I didn’t notice it until I was halfway through. The entire novel is written strictly, and without aberration, from the limited perspective of a child. There are no dips into omniscience; for all 440 pages, we see only what David sees. As adult readers, this is somewhat like being dropped into an unfamiliar landscape and having our glasses taken away from us. We watch as David parses the strange and inscrutable, from sex to his father’s mental illness, and while we may put the clues together faster than he can, we are ultimately at the mercy of what he perceives. He is at the helm; we are passengers along for the ride of his experience, and what an astonishing experience it is.

I might argue that Call It Sleep is a novel as much about agency as about despair. David’s world is full of danger and even terror, but we are moving through it on his terms, and in doing so we remember that human beings—even children—are fundamentally agents of their own existence. I am thinking a lot these days about how we tell stories of suffering—stories that bend the mind in horror, but that sometimes erase the lives at the center. What does it look like to make a different choice?

Mari Cohen (associate editor): Before coming across Run and Hide while searching for Pankaj Mishra books at the library, I admittedly hadn’t even known that the political essayist also wrote novels. But I was drawn in from the first few pages of the 2022 book, which begins with an unsettling scene of the narrator and his two college roommates, Aseem and Virendra, at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, undergoing the traditional hazing from upperclassmen, calibrated for their class and caste backgrounds. The college hostel setting is made immediate in its detail (“The walls of our room were distempered sallow, with marks where oiled heads had rested”) but the narration comes from a distance. There are frequent references to the pre-college past—in which the narrator and the other boys endured poverty while their parents put all resources into their education in the hope of upward mobility—and to some undetermined time in the future, in which Aseem, Virendra, and their upperclass tormenter Siva have apparently managed to rise to positions of wealth and influence, and have then experienced some type of disastrous downfall.

This is the setup for a sober, contemplative novel that makes use of Mishra’s facility with both prose and social critique. Each IIT student confronts the 21st century vision of a “New India”—the hope that, via increased economic and political liberalization and globalization, the giant country might become a hub of modernity, mobility, and financial power, with the spoils accessible even to those from the poorest backgrounds. Aseem has a vision of a New India that will allow him a chance at cultural cachet; on his path there, he makes an impressive commitment to social justice journalism, but also displays an unending appetite for status and a pernicious misogynistic streak. For Virendra and Siva, the New India means a chance for jobs at American hedge funds and untold riches, and the attendant temptations of corruption. Arun, the narrator, is more ambivalent, committed to escaping the one-room, unfurnished cabin and volatile father of his childhood, but exhausted by the social world of the Delhi cultural elite; he works as a literary translator and retreats to an almost monkish existence in a Himalayan village, where real estate speculators are slowly beginning to hunt for land. In the meantime, he learns that for many of his countrymen, the dream of a New India is increasingly synonymous with the Hindu nationalist vision of Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.

Some readers might complain that most of the characters in the book remain archetypes, designed to flesh out a moment of complex political transformation rather than to stand alone, and they would not be wrong. Still, the novel remains propulsive, thanks in part to how the narrator continually addresses a mysterious “you”—a woman named Alia, apparently working on a book about the trajectories of men like Siva and Virendra, whom we eventually meet. When we finally do see Arun’s romance with Alia, who comes from a well-off family and is a rising name in leftist advocacy on Twitter, our narrator is initially caught up in the ease and excitement of her international lifestyle. Eventually, though, the sparkle wears off: Mishra paints an uncomfortably accurate portrait of the superficiality of a certain set of well-meaning affluent lefty literary types. (At one party in London with Alia, Arun records the chatter taking place around him, with someone saying, “Maybe Rebecca Solnit is an exception, but white feminists are the embodiment of neo-imperalism” as another comments, “Airbnb really should have a filter for smart TVs.”)

Arun, more and more, gravitates toward retreat into Buddhist meditation—a retreat, his monk guide promises him, from the “self” entirely. Mishra’s narrative successfully punctures the idealization of a New India, making plain how unevenly its benefits have accrued, and equally deflates any faith in the social media-inflected political response of Alia and her cohort. Yet if the book is often harsh on Alia, the finale, which I won’t spoil here, comes to complicate that picture, as Arun begins to recast some of her public activism as resolute and brave. Was Alia truly so shallow, or was he just too distant to fully see her? Her hypocrisies and stumbles may be embarrassing, but, the novel posits, not so shameful as Arun’s attempts to “run and hide.”

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): The Future Was Then: The Changing Face of Fascist Italy, on display at Poster House in Chelsea until February 22th, 2026, is a remarkable show for many reasons. It put me in mind of the former Communist turned Fascist Black Shirt Niccola Bombacci, who claimed that the two great revolutions were the Russian and Fascist revolutions. Bombacci, who was executed and whose body was displayed alongside Mussolini’s when the latter was killed by partisans, meant it in a political sense. But in this wide-ranging display of advertising posters, political messaging, self-praise on the part of the government, and exaltation of the Duce, I was reminded of nothing so much as Russian revolutionary posters—indeed, of radical posters and art from around the world.

Mussolini didn’t wage war on degenerate art the way Hitler, his student and later master, did. He might not have really cared for any avant garde literature or art, but he knew how to praise it and make use of it. Italy was a key player in modernist art, so cutting the country off from it would have been a foolish move, even more so in that so many of Italy’s most important artists, most famously the Futurists, were Fascists of the first hour. We are accustomed to being told how the geist of Futurist art was inherently fascist; in The Future Was Then we get the opportunity to see how that fascism manifested itself in directly political terms. Most striking is a strange bust, Renato Giuseppe Bertelli’s “Profilo continuo” (Continuous Profile), which on first glance looks like a pawn in a chess set, but when viewed from certain angles is the profile of Mussolini in motion. Mussolini and the masses are blended in posters like “L’Italia fascista in cammino” (Fascist Italy on the move) and a 1932 poster for an exhibition celebrating ten years of Fascist rule.

That Mussolini should be the focus of so many works, either his image or just in striking versions of the letter “M”, which in context can only stand for the name of the Duce, is hardly surprising. The man, his image, and his party were everything. The posters we see here express the totalitarian nature of the state in ways that are aesthetically surprising, but that are in many ways like the work produced in the early years of the Soviet Union, when the Russian avant garde placed its talent at the service of the new state.

The works cover a wide number of aspects of life in fascist Italy. The exaltation of aviation, that most modern means of transport, are stunning, and sport is shown to be a key part of Fascism. More surprising are simple advertising posters for fabrics and milk and cars (FIAT, of course) and chocolates, among other things. The art work on all of them is far from merely functional. It is, in fact, revolutionary.

After over 20 years away from home, Jacob gets word from God near the end of last week’s parshah that it’s time for him to return. Our portion, Vayishlach, opens with Jacob’s understandable anxiety about the prospect of seeing his twin brother Esau, whose vow to kill him prompted his flight. When his messengers report that Esau is approaching with 400 men, Jacob’s fear only grows. He divides his camp in two, in the hopes that at least one party will survive the expected attack; he then prays for protection and sends abundant gifts ahead to appease Esau’s wrath. Yet when Esau finally approaches, he seems only joyfully relieved to be reunited with his brother: “Esau ran to greet him. He embraced him and, falling on his neck, he kissed him; and they wept.”

In the biblical text, the Hebrew word for “he kissed him” is written with diacritic dots above the letters, one of only ten words in the Torah with such “puncta extraordinaria,” as academics call them; this prompts the Sifre—the earliest Rabbinic text on our verse, from around the third century—to inquire into the meaning of these marks. The text claims the dots indicate that Esau “did not kiss him wholeheartedly,” but one sage, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, dissents. “The halachah is known that Esau hates Jacob,” he replies, “but his mercy took over at that moment, and he kissed him wholeheartedly.” After Rashi cited both of these positions in his commentary on the Torah, the slogan “the halachah is known that Esau hates Jacob” became a common trope. Given the association between Esau and the Roman Empire, and thus Christianity and the West as a whole, the statement has come to be interpreted as an eternal truism about gentiles’ enmity toward Jews.

Some who see this assertion as an immutable axiom have found support from Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai introducing the claim as “halachah.” In the early 1970s, for example, when the great halachic decisor Rabbi Moshe Feinstein was asked whether British Jews who believed Jewish private schools were being discriminated against in public funding allocations should sue the government in the European Court of Human Rights, he cautioned that this move would “likely cause the government to hate the Jews and cause far worse results.” He then quoted Rashi’s citation of the Sifre and commented on our phrase: “Just as halachah doesn’t change, so too Esau’s hatred of Jacob never changes. Even those who treat [Jews] well, their hatred is actually very great.” This view has permeated into more mainstream forums as well: Yoel Kretzmer-Raziel, a scholar of Rabbinic literature, has documented how popular pamphlets on the parshah distributed in Religious Zionist synagogues in Israel have portrayed the statement about Esau’s loathing “as a foundation-stone of the” proper “religious-political worldview”—even using the line in question to denigrate Arabs, who are traditionally understood to be the descendants of Ishmael, not Esau. He cites over a dozen examples of such texts using the line to discuss Jew-hatred, including one that deems it “the most decisive expression defining antisemitism and its features.” The pamphlet goes on to explain, “‘It is halachah’! Whether you like it or not—this is not a narrative story, not a casual remark, not a historical tradition: This is halachah! One must not budge from it, nor argue with it, nor ‘soften’ it or ‘refine’ it according to the needs of the generation.”

But as Kretzmer-Raziel points out, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai’s usage of “halachah” is unusual: The term generally refers to guidelines around normative practice for Jews, not the inner feelings of non-Jews. In fact, modern scholars have found that its appearance is the result of a textual error. As it turns out, only one manuscript of the Sifre—the one Rashi happened to have, and thus the version that was promulgated—contains the word, while all others render the line: “Is it not known that Esau hates Jacob?” It seems that a scribe abbreviated “is it not” (“ve-ha’lo”) as “ve-hal,” which a later scribe incorrectly interpreted as an abbreviation for “ve-halachah” (“and it is halachah”). Freed from the prescriptive flavor and sense of eternality introduced by the scribal error, the line refers not to an archetype of the non-Jewish Other, filled with irrational hatred, but to Esau the character, who hated his brother, as the Torah tells us, for a specific reason: Jacob denied him food when he was starving and then tricked their blind, elderly father in order to steal his twin’s birthright.

This manuscript blunder highlights the dangers of understanding our own world in terms of mythologized archetypes, an approach that is not unique to the right. For example, many more progressive benchers add an additional “haRachaman” (a petitionary request of God) to the traditional text of the Birkat HaMazon, asking for “the Merciful One [“haRachaman”] to grant peace between the children of Sarah and the children of Hagar”—that is, between Isaac, understood to be the ancestor of the Jews, and Ishmael, understood to be the ancestor of Muslims. However well-meaning, such textual innovations may strengthen a sense of today’s Israel/Palestine as defined by abstract, eternal typologies, rather than specific policies of dispossession and violence. Yet bringing about justice will depend not on untangling the knots of monotheistic history, but on confronting the concrete harm and the structures that produce it.

Maya Rosen is an assistant editor at Jewish Currents.