Henry Roth's Reimagination of Class Consciousness from Call it Sleep to the Mercy of a Rude Stream Novels

Writing in 1985 about the Six-Day War between Arab and Israeli forces in 1967, famed author of Call It Sleep Henry Roth recalls:

When the ’67 War broke out it acted upon me like a second vector, to borrow a term from mathematics, a second impulse acting in the same direction as the first, and reinforcing it. The Jewish identity came to the fore, asserting itself in consciousness. Not only that, but something else was being catalyzed, a changed personality, at last, an individual with an increasingly firm point of view, an ideology, however spotty, but durable, tenable, a new bond with tradition, a new reunion with folk.