The Nature of Redemption: The Life and Art of Henry Roth
Abram Van Engen, Calvin College Class of 2003
Books & Culture

It makes for a good story, that's for sure. At the age of 28, a poverty-stricken Jewish immigrant writes a book that's published to critical acclaim, then suffers from a decades-long writer's block, only to find his voice again in his old age with a monumental, four-part novel that picks up where the first left off. It reads like good fiction-so much so that Philip Roth nearly turned the story into a novel of his own. He never did, though, probably because Henry Roth, the man in question, had already written the story himself. Beginning with Call It Sleep in 1934 and concluding with Mercy of a Rude Stream in the '90s, Henry Roth wrote fiction composed of memory. In writing Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth, Steven Kellman has faced the difficult task of separating the one from the other: the story of David Schearl and Ira Stigman (Roth's alter egos) from the story of Roth himself. For a good biographer like Kellman, however, that is not the only task-or even the primary one.

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