Literary core samples exhibited + assayed

July, 1914, Jewish Harlem, Manhattan. Ira is 8. His uncle Max is one of four members of his mother's family, émigrés who have -- just an hour ago -- arrived from Austria-Hungary. Here is the passage from early in A Star Shines over Mt. Morris Park:

An hour after the new arrivals had installed themselves in the apartment—it was to be Ira’s earliest, earliest recollection of his uncle Max—the young immigrant invited his boy-nephew to guide him to the pushcart mart under the railroad overpass on Park Avenue. There, he asked Ira to inquire as to the price of two small carrots. They cost one cent. Max produced the copper, and Ira made the purchase. How neatly, how deftly Max scraped the carrots clean with his penknife—and then proffered his nephew the smaller of the two roots:

“But it’s raw!” Ira drew back. “Nobody eats a raw carrot, Uncle.”

“Ess, ess," Max urged (in Yiddish). “Taste. It’s sweet." And to Ira’s surprise, so it was: sweet and crunchy. The memory, the fading composite of the vaguely smiling Max, the produce on the pushcarts, the penknife peeling a carrot, the warmth of summer, and the contrast between the shadow under the huge steel canopy of the railroad trestle and the bright sunlight on the sidewalk would condense for Ira into the first inference he was ever conscious of as inference: From that summery composite, he could deduce the kind of life that was lived by Mom and her family, by Zaida, Baba and the rest in the lethargic, Galitzianer hamlet named Veljish. The moist, orangy, peeled carrot at the core of recollection substantiated all that Mom had told him: about the meagerness of rations, about the larder kept under lock and key . . .

-- Henry Roth, A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park

The surprise enjoyment of the carrot is a nice sketch: a rustic in an ultra-urban locale demonstrates an unsuspected knowledge.

But what I thought was most notable was the narrator's decision to butt in with his comment on the mental process of inference. Italics, even. It's explicitly about the mechanics of knowing, illustrative of Ira's growth. But it doesn't get didactic. "Composite" used twice in the second paragraph; "earliest, earliest" in the first; those two things establish a verbal mood of reaching back into the welter of experience. The moment of the boy's gaining expanding awareness is accompanied by a "moist, orangy" crunch. Roth is shooting here to get at what a memory of a mental milestone is like, and hits his mark.