Henry Roth - Mercy of a Rude Stream - The Complete Novels

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Sixty years after the publication of his great modernist masterpiece,
, Henry Roth, a retired waterfowl farmer already in his late eighties, shocked the literary world with the announcement that he had written a second novel. It was called, he reported,
, the title inspired by Shakespeare, and it followed the travails of one Ira Stigman, whose family had just moved to New York’s Jewish Harlem in that "ominous summer of 1914."
"It is like hearing that…J. D. Salinger is preparing a sequel to
," the
pronounced, while
extolled Roth's new work as "the literary comeback of the century." Even more astonishing was that Roth had not just written a second novel but a total of four chronologically linked works, all part of
. Dying in 1995 at the age of eighty-nine, Roth would not live to see the final two volumes of this tetralogy published, yet the reappearance of
, a fulfillment of Roth's wish that these installments appear as one complete volume, allows for a twenty-first-century public to reappraise this late-in-life masterpiece, just as
was rediscovered by a new generation in 1964.
As the story unfolds, we follow the turbulent odyssey of Ira, along with his extended Jewish family, friends, and lovers, from the outbreak of World War I through his fateful decision to move into the Greenwich Village apartment of his muse and older lover, the seductive but ultimately tragic NYU professor Edith Welles. Set in both the fractured world of Jewish Harlem and the bohemian maelstrom of the Village,
echoes Nabokov in its portrayal of sexual deviance, and offers a harrowing and relentless family drama amid a grand panorama of New York City in the 1910s and Roaring 20s.
Yet in spite of a plot that is fraught with depictions of menace, violence, and intense self-loathing,
also contains a cathartic, even redemptive, overlay as "provocative as anything in the chapters of St. Augustine" (
), in which an elder Ira, haunted by the sins of his youth, communes with his computer, Ecclesias, as he recalls how his family's traditional piety became corrupted by the inexorable forces of modernity. As Ira finally decides to get "the hell out of Harlem," his Proustian act of recollection frees him from the ravages of old age, and suddenly he is in his prime again, the entire telling of
his final pronouncement.
Mercy of a Rude Stream Mercy of a Rude Stream: The Complete Novels
A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park, A Diving Rock on the Hudson, From Bondage
Requiem for Harlem

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“What? What do you mean, Mrs. Shapiro? How can He not make sense for you?” Minor surprise, minor perplexity, oscillated fleetingly within Ira’s mind. Was she serious, twitting him, or what?

“You’ll forgive me: I don’t know. That is for the educated.”

“Oh.” Ira relaxed. He was about to chuckle.

“When one speaks of sense, of wisdom, then for the educated, the Epikouros , it must spring from here, no?” She touched the thin, graying hair of her temple.

“I suppose so.” This time Ira did chuckle. “And for you?”

“Only when I go to buy something, if it’s worth the money, if I can get it for less, from the seller or somewhere else.”

“Yes?”

“But of God I can’t think. He doesn’t spring from the same place, because as you know, I’m an illiterate woman. He has no place, so He makes no sense.”

“Oh, boy.”

“But on Friday nights, erev Shabbes , He seems to alight here.” She spread a hand over her heavy breast. “Here where the tears flow from.”

“I see.”

Here where the tears flow from . How bitter the taste of his own lips, and how fitfully they matched together again. He exhaled breath in a gust.

Noo , Mrs. Stigman.” Mrs. Shapiro turned the doorknob. “You’ll read me the rest of the roman tomorrow?”

“Of course.”

Ihr zolt hub’n a gitten Shabbes .”

A sheinem dank. Ihr aukh .” House keys clinking, Mrs. Shapiro padded out from kitchen into hall.

“She’s smart,” Ira acknowledged.

“Indeed, she retains more from my reading to her about political matters than I do myself. She retains more and construes better.”

“Yeah?” He sat down in his favorite chair.

“Are you going to become a guest?” Mom said, after a pause.

“You didn’t worry about me?”

“One night. I’m used to that.”

“I’m afraid I’m really going to become a guest, Mom.”

“Yes? When?”

“Beginning now.”

Azoy? ” She moved her forearms across the strawberry-and-white sheaves printed on her housedress, until her elbows locked against her abdomen. “Are you staying here tonight?”

“No, I’m staying at Edith’s apartment.”

Azoy . And for how long?”

“That’s what I came to tell you. I don’t know.”

Edith had asked him to bring some of his belongings to the apartment. Now that he was her lover, she saw no reason why he shouldn’t stay overnight more often. She would rather he did, she said: she missed his company. And that way too, staying with her often, he would avoid, avoid as much as possible, a recurrence of the ugly situation at home. Ugly situation, she called it. There was his father to consider, Edith emphasized: the always latent violence between them.

“Have you got a carton in the house?” Ira asked.

“For what?” And then she nodded. “I can empty one. It has summer curtains in it. A large one I don’t have.”

“I don’t need a large one. I’m only taking a few things: some socks, my BVDs, a couple of ties, a couple of shirts — what else? My new pair of pants. A few books. I gotta carry my briefcase in the other hand.”

“And the heavy underwear, Ira? It’ll soon be December, you know. How about a sweater?”

“Maybe the one without sleeves.”

Mom sighed. “I’ll go empty the carton.” She went into the other part of the house. Even though the kitchen door was shut, he could hear the familiar thump and slither of cardboard. She was probably emptying the contents of the carton on her bed. .

Foreboding. . What the hell was the matter with him? Foreboding and cuckoo combinations of disparate quotes: Woe is me, my mother, that I was ever born to set it right. Foreboding of long journeys: “Oh, who is this one has done this deed?”

Mom brought the carton into the kitchen: medium-sized, sturdy, all four flaps intact. “It’s a handsome one,” she said. “Joey Shapiro brought it to me from the drugstore.”

“Let’s see if I can get my arm around it.” Ira stood up. He rested the carton on his hip. “Just about.”

“And while you’re collecting your belongings, I’ll make a little snack.”

“Don’t bother. I’m going to have supper with her tonight — dinner, they call it.”

“A little snack won’t mar your appetite. I have smoked whitefish.”

“Please, Mom.”

“A little Muenster cheese and a bagel. My son, my only son, how can it harm you?”

“Okay, okay.”

“And a little jabah .” She always punned bilingually on the English word “java,” making it sound like the word for frog in Yiddish.

The cardboard of the carton was cold to the touch when he picked it up — as cold as his dreary little bedroom when he entered it — his single bed with the coat across it. Maybe Minnie would sleep in it now — nevermore to return.

Couldn’t help his thoughts, though, his goddamn swoon of fantasy. He began packing the carton from the drawers in the mirror-surmounted bureau in the front room. Socks, oh, two pair — you could always wash them. BVDs, a couple. All right? One pair of gray flannel pants? Joke: how many pair of gray flannel pants you got? And two laundered shirts pinned to cardboard. Oh, where has the chinky Chinaman gone who gave you litchi nuts on the East Side? Hey, you know? It’s you you’re forsaking, you who took the litchi nuts. Well, bless my soul. . No neckties with gravy spots. Jesus, no room for old cardigan either. Hey. Look up there, will you? — on the wallpapered wall: Zaida, Baba, Mom’s parents, wearing earlocks he, and wig she, with what horror watching their young crazy grandson about to go live with a shiksa. Oy, vey iz mir! Well, not so bad, Zaida, Baba: Which is better? A little dump of a Harlem habitat with everyone crammed into the kitchen, or a cozy little corner of a Greenwich Village apartment under lemony lampshade on a card table? Or lusting after your sister or tearing off a paltry piece of your kid cousin — that, or being a shiksa’s lover. A petite Ph.D.’s pet, a petite shiksa’s lover-lad — such a sweet sound. Now, there’s one for you. Propound me that: untutored sister or ungifted kid cousin — or refined shiksa ? There’s one for Solomon, for Shloimeh ha Mailackh . Gotcha there. . Look out the north window, through the lace curtains, at the red-brick six-story, sick (sic) story dump, where Mrs. Green in her dingy white shift used to lean on her mop handle — mop handle in hand, mind you — framed in the first-floor window. Goodbye. Not bad, huh? And farewell, a long farewell to the little Dresden wolf and sheep and the shepherdess on the mantelpiece. Oh, fare thee well. And you too, dirty old lime-daubed bricks across the airshaft. Jesus, how you used to peal out, when that wasn’t a coat got laid across the bed. Like morning stars when they sang together. Comin’ through.

Carton under arm, he returned to the kitchen, relegating the cold behind the closed door. Strong aroma of Mom’s primitively brewed jabah, jabah coffee wafted through the room. On the table, two, no less, bagels, gold slab of whitefish, thick, inelegantly sliced Muenster cheese, big wedge of butter right out of the tub, were set out in hopes of filial seduction.

“What do you think I’m going to be able to eat tonight, Mom? If I eat this?” Ira tried to keep his voice gentle.

Seh gurnisht, gurnisht .”

“Some gurnisht .” Well, no point in making an issue of it with Mom, poor Mom. Don’t argue about it; just try to exercise a little restraint. He went to the drawers under the china closet, got out a couple of ed texts, and his copy of Milton, and put them in the carton on top of his clothes. Then he sat down at the table.

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