What do you think?
Rate this book
Mercy of a Rude Stream #4
Requiem for Harlem
Completed just months before Henry Roth's death, the four-volume works of Mercy of a Rude Stream has become an epic American literary event. Here, in Requiem for Harlem , Roth tells the psychologically lacerating love story of Ira Stigman, a senior at City College, who has fallen for Edith Welles, NYU professor and muse of modern poets. Set both in the fractured world of Jewish Harlem and in the bohemian maelstrom of Greenwich Village, Requiem for Harlem provides a fitting epitaph that concludes the literary exodus that propelled Roth from alienation to artistic and personal redemption.
308 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1998
3 people are currently reading
205 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 13, 2019
In this final volume of Henry Roth’s fictional account of himself as Ira Stigman—Requiem for Harlem—Ira is able finally to cut the apron strings vouchsafed by his mother. Ira’s mother is emblematic of his world in Harlem, good and bad, and it’s a world that through her history extends into the old world of Galicia, where he was born before coming to the United States as a two-year-old infant. The lower east side of NYC was his first bulwark in the new world, and it was with great reluctance that he left at age eight to move to Harlem, where his mother could be closer to relatives that had recently come over from Austria/Poland (all chronicled in the first volume, A Star Over Mt. Morris Park).
Ira Stigman’s life in the 20s and early 30s revolved around Harlem, with excursions into other parts of Manhattan via trolley, train, and subway. It was a first-generation immigrant’s life, where Yiddish was spoken as much as street-mangled English. Life in Harlem was shared with the raw, rough-neck Irish Catholics, who presented a powerful contrast to/influence on the generally more subdued, quietly industrious Jews.
Ira’s life was circumscribed by these immediate influences, and it is through the course of this long, four-volume novel that we observe Ira take shape as a being that must, as Stephen Dedalus did, sheer himself from his folk in order to find himself. It is one of the novel’s chief ironies that the interpolative modern-day persona of Ira Stigman—“Henry Roth”—has come to disavow the selfish, isolationist credo of James Joyce in favor of a return to his roots and to a nationalist (and perhaps racial) identification.
In this final volume, the long, slow unraveling of the apron strings appears at novel’s end to be complete. There is some hope mixed with trepidation that Ira will be able to navigate the American world, one where people are able to act with poise and confidence. While incomparably gifted with language and insight, Ira’s education has been stunted by his surroundings, and at the same time enlarged in a way that the staid American paragon cannot grasp. It’s in the breadth of Ira’s experience that he comes to see things more clearly, more fully than his ideal American.
Ruefully, the modern-day Henry Roth comments on the wayward course his life takes, even as he plots with excruciating detail and exactitude the ways in which he wavered and hesitated, faltered and resisted his entrance into the wider world of NYC, literature, love, and life. The majesty of this series is Roth’s ability to recover the details of his perceptions sixty or more years in the past. This kind of memory is both boon and bane, as Roth makes it clear that there is no aspect of his life that is not fully, emotionally on tap, all the good and all the bad, and it sometimes overwhelms and cripples him. [Much easier, I thought as I read, to be a person of many parts (as I consider myself), with feeble memory, who only occasionally retrieves some mostly inchoate memory from the past.]
In this final volume, much to my annoyance, as everything seems to have led to the moment, Ira Stigman still does not compose the novel that in 1934 Henry Roth ushered into the world, Call it Sleep, a paean in Joycean stream of consciousness that recounts the perceptions and experiences of a young Jewish immigrant boy in years before World War I. What I would’ve paid to see how the modern-day Henry Roth recounted how his alter ego Ira Stigman had written that book under the aegis of his lover/mentor Edith Wells.
Ira Stigman’s life in the 20s and early 30s revolved around Harlem, with excursions into other parts of Manhattan via trolley, train, and subway. It was a first-generation immigrant’s life, where Yiddish was spoken as much as street-mangled English. Life in Harlem was shared with the raw, rough-neck Irish Catholics, who presented a powerful contrast to/influence on the generally more subdued, quietly industrious Jews.
Ira’s life was circumscribed by these immediate influences, and it is through the course of this long, four-volume novel that we observe Ira take shape as a being that must, as Stephen Dedalus did, sheer himself from his folk in order to find himself. It is one of the novel’s chief ironies that the interpolative modern-day persona of Ira Stigman—“Henry Roth”—has come to disavow the selfish, isolationist credo of James Joyce in favor of a return to his roots and to a nationalist (and perhaps racial) identification.
In this final volume, the long, slow unraveling of the apron strings appears at novel’s end to be complete. There is some hope mixed with trepidation that Ira will be able to navigate the American world, one where people are able to act with poise and confidence. While incomparably gifted with language and insight, Ira’s education has been stunted by his surroundings, and at the same time enlarged in a way that the staid American paragon cannot grasp. It’s in the breadth of Ira’s experience that he comes to see things more clearly, more fully than his ideal American.
Ruefully, the modern-day Henry Roth comments on the wayward course his life takes, even as he plots with excruciating detail and exactitude the ways in which he wavered and hesitated, faltered and resisted his entrance into the wider world of NYC, literature, love, and life. The majesty of this series is Roth’s ability to recover the details of his perceptions sixty or more years in the past. This kind of memory is both boon and bane, as Roth makes it clear that there is no aspect of his life that is not fully, emotionally on tap, all the good and all the bad, and it sometimes overwhelms and cripples him. [Much easier, I thought as I read, to be a person of many parts (as I consider myself), with feeble memory, who only occasionally retrieves some mostly inchoate memory from the past.]
In this final volume, much to my annoyance, as everything seems to have led to the moment, Ira Stigman still does not compose the novel that in 1934 Henry Roth ushered into the world, Call it Sleep, a paean in Joycean stream of consciousness that recounts the perceptions and experiences of a young Jewish immigrant boy in years before World War I. What I would’ve paid to see how the modern-day Henry Roth recounted how his alter ego Ira Stigman had written that book under the aegis of his lover/mentor Edith Wells.
March 28, 2012
Despite confessional tone of book, I got feeling that author left a great deal out, as if he couldn't after so many years and apparent false starts really look at himself by writing down what he had felt and experienced. The protagonist seemed very shallow and self-pitying to me. Ira is one of the least sympathetic "heroes" I have ever encountered in fiction. Having said that, a very nice feeling of the New York of the 1920's throughout.
October 18, 2009
Masterpiece. The best stuff seems to be able to move beyond balancing beauty and brutality to reveal them as an irreconcilable unity; a necessary paradox. This book, and the three volumes which set it up, do so with all the humor and cruelty of the early 20th century. Local and universal, this book is a difficult joy. Worth it despite the heavy Joyce-bashing.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews