Volume 52, Number 20 · December 15, 2005
The Last Minstrel
By Daniel Mendelsohn
Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth
by Steven G. Kellman
Norton, 371 pp., $25.95
Halfway through the first installment of the four-volume autobiographical novel Mercy of a Rude Stream, which the late Henry Roth wrote in the ninth decade of his long and tormented life, an immigrant Jewish schoolboy named Ira Stigman, the author's fictional stand-in, is called on by his grade school teacher to recite from Walter Scott's 1805 poem 'Lay of the Last Minstrel' at a school assembly. ('Breathes there a man with a soul so dead/who never to himself hath said:/ this is mine own, my native land...') Ira is so honored because he'd previously recited the poem in the classroom with great fluency; but at the large public assembly he falters, and the words come out 'stiff and mechanical.' Humiliated, Ira chides himself afterward for having disappointed his teacher:
Review, 4989 words
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