Haunted by Memory : Among the last literary voices of Jewish New York, Henry Roth struggled with writer’s block and Daniel Fuchs came West to Hollywood. : MERCY OF A RUDE STREAM: A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park, <i> By Henry Roth (St. Martin’s Press: $23; 290 pp.)</i>

‘Literary history and the present are dark with silences,” Tillie Olsen wrote in her remarkable book on writers who ceased to write. “These are not natural silences, that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural; the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot.”

Though he is mentioned only once in Olsen’s “Silences,” and in a footnote at that, Henry Roth’s literary muteness has been formidable, as monumental in its own way as the reputation of his first novel, the legendary “Call It Sleep.”

Originally published in 1934, that autobiographical look at a painful coming of age among the tenements of New York’s Lower East Side did not come into its own until 1964. In an often-recounted bit of publishing lore, its mass-market edition became the first paperback to be reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, and it went on to sell 1.2 million copies in 33 printings.

Extraordinary in its treatment of childhood and the family, the immigrant experience in general and the Jewish-American situation in particular, the intensity of “Call It Sleep’s” emotional impact, how close it gets to the rawness of truth, outwits all superlatives. To read Roth’s densely written, poetic account of the childhood of David Schearl is to wonder how he dredged this kind of intimate material out of himself--and to hunger for more.

For 60 years, however, there was no more. For though Roth was well-reviewed by the mainstream press, he was disheartened by attacks on his book by doctrinaire publications allied with the Communist Party he passionately believed in.

When left-wing voices like the Daily Worker and the New Masses complained that he had betrayed his proletarian experience by using it “as material for introspective and febrile novels” instead of a clarion call for mass action, Roth tried to atone with a book about a Midwestern union man. He was unable to finish it, and gradually retreated from writing. He moved to New England and took a series of impermanent jobs, including serving as an orderly in a mental institution and working as a waterfowl farmer, and entered into a literary silence so nearly complete many readers thought him dead.

Now, 60 years after “Call It Sleep’s” publication, comes “Mercy of a Rude Stream,” subtitled “A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park,” the first of a projected six-volume series of novels that Roth, age 87 and now living in New Mexico, has been working on since 1979.

Though one inevitably approaches this kind of literary second childhood with a certain amount of trepidation, the news is remarkably good. For what Roth has produced here is not only an evocative continuation of his autobiographical story but also a meditation on that enormous and profoundly troubling “literary desolation” (his own phrase) that turns out to have been as great a trauma to Roth as his agonizing childhood years.

A continuation of “Call It Sleep,” yes, but a carbon copy, no. More has been changed here than just the name of the novel’s protagonist, now called Ira Stigman. The pace and tone are more leisurely and episodic, as much memoir as novel, befitting the author’s venerable age. And, most radical of all, a second voice has been added, nominally the aged Ira’s but sounding very much like Roth, the voice of an old writer sharing thoughts with a word processor he calls Ecclesias.

The narrative line picks up in 1914 almost exactly where the first novel left off, with a pair of momentous events in 8-year-old Ira’s life. First, his maternal grandparents and four of his mother’s brothers and sisters arrive in New York from the old country. And more importantly, changing his world as completely as only a child’s world can change, the Stigman family moves way uptown from the familiar, largely Jewish Lower East Side to the more affordable, more Gentile precincts of Harlem.

“Mercy” follows Ira and his family for six tumultuous years. Once again we meet the boy’s mismatched parents, the sad, uncertain, oversized mother who above all else “craved a window to lean out of and contemplate the changing scene below,” and his bitter, rail-thin father, a doomed entrepreneur, “unstable and violent,” who ferociously blamed everyone but himself for “his malign fate.”

There are new characters as well, like the charismatic Uncle Moe, a head waiter whose service overseas in World War I causes all manner of family crises, as well as childhood friends (invariably non-Jewish), a job in the elegant gourmet precincts of Park and Tilford that opens up a side of New York Ira has never seen, and the boy’s continuing struggle with his hostile environment as well as his own uncertain sexuality. But the pull of this book is not so much any specific events or a straight narrative line but the way Roth tells the tale, his ability to pull us back emotionally into a world that is no more.

The last voice still active of that great New York first generation that included Anzia Yezierska, Abraham Cahan, Sholem Asch and non-immigrants like “Jews Without Money’s” Michael Gold and the Williamsburg trilogy’s Daniel Fuchs, Roth’s specificity of memory about a city and a culture that have disappeared is remarkable.

Though contemporary novelists such as Oscar Hijuelos (“Our House in the Last World,” “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love”), Cristina Garcia (“Dreaming In Cuban”) and Amy Tan (“The Joy Luck Club”) have continued and expanded what has become a tradition of immigrant literature, the particular culture Roth celebrates ended abruptly with World War II. Yet whether describing what his mother saw out of that front window or the commotion the family made when Uncle Moe finally came home from the war, Roth’s powers of observation and recall make it all come completely alive.

It’s not just the understandably indelible scenes of sexual embarrassment and difficulty that Roth remembers so well, but smaller, less consequential moments, like his mother’s furious reaction to a bruised knee or the acid grudges he still bears (“to this very day”) against some of his early teachers. To understand Henry Roth is to understand that to him no moment, no matter how brief, can ever safely be forgotten.

But at the same time memory for this writer is, in several senses, a burden as much as a gift, for Roth is troubled by a great deal of what he remembers. His family’s move to Gentile Harlem, he announces almost at once, “altered his entire life for the worse.” It precipitated a defensive alienation from the Judaism that had been so prominent in his life, a removal from tradition and roots he in part blames for those years of creative bleakness. And Roth, feeling responsible for the stories he never told, is guilty about that silence as well, considering it a squandering of life experience now so distant that he can’t help bemoaning the fact that “every precious memory now is tarnished.”

That heartfelt rumination on what might have been is one of several from the dialogues with Ecclesias sections of “Mercy of a Rude Stream.” Roth seems to have needed these quasi-journal sections as a way to ease himself back into the novel form; they have the characteristic feel of a testing of the waters, the safest way to reconnect the urge to write with the primary source material that has always been his life.

When he allows himself to be more personal, talking for instance about M (for Muriel), his beloved wife of many years, his thoughts can’t help but be touching. And when he is disturbed about the difficulty of going back over material that once was fresher, when he tells himself to “salvage whatever you can, threadbare mementos glimmering in recollection” or refers sadly to “the lost richness . . . the Joycean, sordid richness,” Roth’s frisson of regret provides a poignant gloss on one of the most moving and unusual of American fiction careers, a career that this book shows is thankfully far from over.