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.
