Bernard Malamud
A writer who used the Jew as a metaphor for humankind.
Reprinted with permission from Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, published by W.W. Norton & Company.
"Every man is a Jew though he may not know it," Bernard Malamud has said. For him, this notion of the Jew as Everyman comprises "the primal knowledge…that life is tragic, no matter how sweet or apparently full."
Beginning with God's gift of "a spirituality that raises man to his highest being," the Jewish drama persists through betrayal of that gift, destruction, exile, and "an oftentimes agonizing defense" of moral selfhood, human responsibility, even occasional joy. As for the local version of this drama, Malamud sees the ethical ideal of compassion echoed in American democratic principles, and he sees Jewish historical experience--"a rich and tragic drama of the self‑realization of a people"--akin to this country's own self‑realization.
Malamud (in 1966) thinks it "a lucky break to be a member of a minority group…in America." "Everyone has a heritage," he says, "but the Jews because of their everlasting struggle to maintain theirs, are especially conscious of it." However debatable Malamud's inclination to "see the Jew as universal man," it can justify and deepen his fiction.
Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn on April 26, 1914, to an immigrant grocer, Max Malamud, and his theatrically talented wife, Bertha Fidelman, who helped him in the store. The Jewish past "came to me…through the immigrant Jews of New York City, those who visited our house to sit and talk, or came to my father's place of business…and those whom I saw on the streets and in the trolley cars." These were hardworking shopkeepers or else luftmenschen, people with no discernible occupation, especially during the depression. Their concerns were money, health, citizenship--"How much of being a Jew did you give up to be an American?"
Alfred Kazin recalls Malamud's "memories of his father's keeping a failing grocery in a hostile gentile neighborhood, his mother's death when he was fifteen, a younger brother's descent into schizophrenia," and notes the aloneness of Malamud's characters with no connection to the Jewish socialism of the period or to Jewish synagogal faith.
After earning a B.A. at City College of New York, Malamud wrote a Columbia master's thesis on Thomas Hardy's poetry while also teaching at his former high school and in Harlem. Later he taught at Oregon State and at Bennington College in Vermont. His first novel, The Natural (1952), has to do with the quintessential American sport, baseball, and not at all with Jewish characters or milieus.
In The Assistant (1957), however, an ailing, struggling Jewish grocer is robbed by a young Italian whom he then unknowingly takes on as an "assistant." Frank Alpine falls in love with (and at one point rapes) Morris Bober's daughter but also studies him: " 'Tell me why is it that the Jews suffer so damn much, Morris?…What do you suffer for, Morris?'... 'I suffer for you,' Morris said calmly." Eventually, Morris dies and Frank takes over the store. The novel ends with his being circumcised: "For a couple of days he dragged himself around with a pain between his legs. The pain enraged and inspired him. After Passover he became a Jew." Despite the somewhat discordant image of Morris as a Christ figure, The Assistant, with its charged prose and human sympathy, is Malamud's best novel.
The Magic Barrel (1958), Malamud's first collection of stories and probably his finest, staked the terrain that still seems most his: urban, bleak, unforgiving, tenanted by luckless Jews, yet a world in which goodness and grace crop up sporadically. In "Take Pity," a census taker enters a dim, sparsely furnished room and asks Rosen: "'What's the matter you don't pull the shades up?'…'Who needs light?' 'What then you need?' 'Light I don't need,'" replies Rosen. But in "Angel Levine," a beneficent Negro angel recites the blessing for bread "in sonorous Hebrew." And in the book's title story, a betrothal occurs with Chagallesque élan: "Violins and lit candles revolved in the sky, Leo ran forward with flowers outthrust."
Several appealing elements mark Malamud's storytelling: a strong folkloric hint of fable or fairytale or fantasy, as in "The Magic Barrel" and "The Last Mohican"; an affectionate ear for Yiddishly inflected speech, as in the rhythms and questions of "Take Pity"; a wry comic bent. All of these combine in "The Jewbird," from Malamud's second collection, Idiots First (1963), which begins in the kitchen of the Cohen family's top floor apartment near New York's East River: "The window was open so the skinny bird flew in. Flappity‑flap with its frazzled black wings. That's how it goes. It's open, you're in. Closed, you're out and that's your fate." The Jewbird, whose name happens to be Schwartz, is fleeing "Anti‑Semeets"; he tutors the son of the family, but Cohen eventually throws him out. Here, too, what matters most is the moral Law (often capitalized in Malamud): "Connection, indebtedness, responsibility, these are his moral concerns," as Philip Roth put it.
Yet Malamud, Roth also says, does not really write about modern American Jews, their "anxieties and dilemmas and corruptions." Malamud's people "live in a timeless depression and a placeless Lower East Side." And the scholar Robert Alter notes the absence of Jewish milieus and communities in Malamud's work.
We are faced again with the idea of the Jew as Everyman since Malamud digs for universal themes: failure, entrapment, isolation, gentleness, choice, compassion, redemption. Yet Malamud insists that the drama of "Jewish history--suffering, expiation, renewal"--inspires him. "I'm an American, I'm a Jew, and I write for all men…I write about Jews because they set my imagination going."
Malamud did once present an actual Jew in a Jewish plight, in The Fixer (1966), which won the National Book Award (like The Magic Barrel) and also the Pulitzer prize. This novel recreates the story of Mendel Beilis, a simple man in czarist Russia (1911) who suddenly finds himself accused of ritual murder, the age‑old libel that Jews kill Christians to use their blood for Passover matzoth. Malamud paints a gripping portrait of anti-Semitism, imprisonment, degradation, torture, and human integrity. At the same time, The Fixer works as a semblance of the Holocaust, which Malamud otherwise dealt with only indirectly as in "The Last Mohican."
In that story, too, the ethical burden straddles humanness and Jewishness. Susskind, a European refugee, tries to cadge a warm suit off the American Fidelman. "Am I responsible for you then, Susskind?" "Who else?" Susskind replies and tells why: "Because you are a man. Because you are a Jew, aren't you?"
Bernard Malamud died on March 18, 1986, and is buried on a grassy slope in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
