How past-drenched present life was.
—Bernard Malamud, A New Life
The year 2014 marked the hundredth anniversary of Bernard Malamud’s birth. Born in Brooklyn, New York, on April 26, 1914, to Russian-immigrant parents Max and Bertha (née Fidelman) Malamud, Bernard Malamud would become one of three major post–World War II American-Jewish writers to distinguish and authenticate the richly nuanced, urban voice of an emerging Jewish presence in American literature, a presence that has influenced generations of writers. In concert with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, Malamud sanctioned the wide and fluid range of Jewish expression in American culture, a distinct ethos in the literature and life of postwar America that continues to speak to the felt experience of the changing culture of Jewish American life. In Malamud’s fiction, one finds the possibilities, the promise and the failures, the small victories and the inevitable disillusions of self-reinvention and self-fashioning in the second half of the twentieth century, a transformative period in American history. For Malamud, such an undertaking is all a part of the arduous affair of making a life, which can become, as one of Malamud’s characters ruefully reminds us, “a dreadfully boring business unless you think you have a future” (“The German Refugee” 106).1 Imagining a future becomes the essential ordeal—both invitation and impediment—that drives Malamud’s characters forward into the mercurial patterns of mid- to late-twentieth-century American life. Summoned into the future, Malamud’s characteristically weary wanderers and petitioners, “moved by a memory,” struggle against isolation and grief, all the while embracing their place in a long history of Jewish suffering and exultation (“The Jewbird” 154).
The blueprint of Malamud’s literary landscape draws on the re-created worlds of Jewish history and his own much-more-proximate familial past. The son of a struggling immigrant grocer and mother whose suicide came to haunt so many of his characters, Malamud shapes his fictional settings by the circumstances of his own background and, at the same time, invokes the conditions of the Jewish-immigrant experience in America, the instabilities and vulnerabilities of immigrant life and the Yiddish-inflected English that in many ways defined that life. As the biographer Philip Davis has suggested, “Malamud was a time-haunted man” (Davis 6). Although his literary sensibilities and, for the most part, his terrain are distinctly American, his writing is informed by distinct moments in Jewish history. The 1966 novel The Fixer, a fictionalized account of the Beilis trial in which a Jew was accused of blood libel and for which Malamud received both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, reveals this preoccupation with Jewish history. The short story “The Lady of the Lake,” in a similarly historicized way, evokes the suffering endured in the Holocaust. The trope of time is a fixture of Malamud’s writing: the narrative present as well as the imagined future as informed by the past, a distinctly Jewish past of lamentation and celebration, one, as Frank Alpine, at the close of the novel The Assistant, discovers, “enraged and inspired him” ([1974] 297).
Malamud’s characters, who straddle the dual worlds of Jewish and American and the requirements of brokering both, find themselves beholden to a cultural inheritance that shapes their experience of the juxtaposition of their worlds. In the introduction to The Stories of Bernard Malamud (published in 1983), Malamud explains about the early years of his writing career, “Almost without understanding why, I was thinking about my father’s immigrant life—how he earned his meager living and what he paid for it, and about my mother’s, diminished by fear and suffering—as perhaps matter for my fiction. . . . I had them in mind as I invented the characters who became their fictional counterparts . . . and felt I would often be writing about Jews, in celebration and expiation” (viii–ix). Thus, Malamud returns time and time again to stories about Jews, stories about impoverished grocers, shadchonim (marriage brokers), troubled rabbis, Jewish angels, schnorrers (beggars), lonely petitioners, mourners, and depleted refugees, those tragically for whom “broke what breaks” (“Take Pity” 6). Malamud is drawn to the past, and his fictive inspiration and landscape come instinctively from what he knows best, the daily sufferings of diasporic Jews. As the Soviet writer Feliks Levitansky, in Malamud’s short story “Man in the Drawer,” insists, “When I write about Jews comes out stories, so I write about Jews” (213). Jews and Jewish immigrant life become paradigmatic of both the success and failure of assimilation and also of the ways in which Jewish history and culture are grafted on American life. As Malamud explained, in “Imaginative Writing and the Jewish Experience,” “Writing about Jews, for me at least, extends the area of imagination. I mean to say that the story of the Jews, of their history and culture, and the Jews themselves as people, are so rich in the ingredients of drama, so fruitful as a source of image, idea and symbol, that I feel I can at present more fully, even more easily, achieve my purpose as an American writer by writing of them” (184). Thus, as the novelist Cynthia Ozick puts it in her tribute to Malamud, “Remembrances: Bernard Malamud,” “He wrote about suffering Jews, about poor Jews, about grocers and fixers and birds and horses and angels in Harlem and matchmakers and salesmen and rabbis and landlords and tenants and egg chandlers and writers and chimpanzees; he wrote about the plentitude and unity of the world” (27). And he did so in a language of the struggling immigrant Jew, the Yiddish of his background and his milieu, the sounds of home and of Eastern European Jewish life recreated in the voices of his characters and the very lives they embody—elegiac, plaintive, yearning voices, defining of the characters who inhabit them.
Indeed, Malamud’s fiction, in particular the short stories that create the urgency and immediacy of a dramatic moment—as Philip Roth has said, some “of the best American short stories I’d ever read (or ever will)”—unfold to the sound and gestures of language (“Pictures”). In recreating the voice of the Jewish immigrant, Malamud captures the felt expression of the lives of the inheritors of dual histories, of those living in between worlds: the receding life of Eastern European Jewry and the accelerating exigencies of twentieth-century, post-Holocaust American life. This is, for Malamud’s characters, a world of contradictions: insider / outsider; hope / despair, belonging / marginalization; comfort / disease; American / Jewish; English / Yiddish—poised in tense juxtaposition. In the very fluidity and malleability of the Yiddish-English that his characters, with great relish, speak, Malamud illustrates the pliability of that enormous representational project, the ways in which language defines experience as it is simultaneously shaped by that experience, signifying the past with the language, attitudes, and demeanor of Eastern European Jewish life grafted onto a volatile American cultural landscape. As Philip Davis has suggested, the voice of Malamud’s characters is “the Yiddish-English amalgam that was in memory of the way his own father spoke. The second language of the son of immigrants with the original Yiddish still hanging around it” (117). Malamud skillfully re-creates the spoken tongue of the immigrant Jew, his signature idiom of the clatter of two worlds, his special brand of Yiddish-English: “It’s not English and it’s not Yiddish,” explains Davidov, the census-taker in the short story “Take Pity,” but rather “an old-fashioned language they don’t use it nowadays” (11). And Malamud, in his skillful fusion of the languages of past and present, brings to life the sensations and dispositions of his Jewish characters, the condition, as one character puts it, of “what it means human” (“Idiots First” 44).
Reflecting a long and elastic tradition of Jewish linguistic fluidity and adaptability, Malamud celebrates the durability, the strength, and the resilience of his characters, those for whom the spoken word becomes an insistence on survival, the affirmation of self in a world that would prey on those who are most vulnerable. For the despondent transplant Oskar Gassner, a refugee of Nazi Germany, in the short story “The German Refugee,” as for so many others, “the great loss was the loss of language—that they could not say what was in them to say” (97). Thus, Malamud creates an idiom that speaks to his struggling characters’ attempts to shape, through language, the duality of worlds that they uneasily inhabit. The very language they speak provides a bridge to both worlds, a matter of clinging to the past and embracing an uncertain future. As Ozick has suggested, in giving life to his characters, Malamud “brought into being a new American idiom of his own idiosyncratic invention. . . . He not only wrote in the American language, he augmented it with fresh plasticity, he shaped our English into startling new configurations” (“Remembrances” 26). His characters speak their own intimate version of American English, drawing on the language of their forebears, the diasporic language of assimilation. In doing so, Malamud reshapes the linguistic structures and patterns, as Roth puts it, so “to make them dance to his sad tune” (“Pictures”). The Yiddish-English that defines Malamud’s characters evokes the contradictory impulses of their lives; it comes to represent ambiguous moments of exile and home. A language of assimilation and accommodation, their characteristic speech patterns—the idiomatic inversions and linguistic blending and recanting—create, as Davis suggests, “the powerful intermingled language of thirst and hunger; the need for magic, or if not that, at least, a second chance” (7).
As Saul Bellow wrote in a eulogy for the novelist following his premature death on March 18, 1986, at the age of seventy-two, “Malamud in his novels and stories discovered a sort of communicative genius in the impoverished, harsh jargon of immigrant New York (“Memory” 436). Indeed, without question, Malamud was a wordsmith, a masterful craftsman of the carefully turned phrase, whose scrupulous, exacting prose becomes the measure of the painstaking construction of his characters’ lives. In the tribute, “In Memory of Bernard Malamud,” Bellow poses that for first-generation Americans, “language is a spiritual mansion,” expansive and with room for experimentation (436). The Yiddish-English of the sounds and utterances, the shape of the language in the mouths of Malamud’s characters—the linguistic tropes and turns of phrase—bend ordinary expression into extraordinary cadences. We find in Malamud’s fiction the perfect sentence—perfectly balanced, perfectly poised, as is the character of Teddy in the short story “The Letter,” a man who stands at the gate of a psychiatric hospital with a worn, “finger-soiled” letter in his hand. Standing in place, Teddy is poised as sentry with his letter in hand, a letter on which nothing is written, addressed to no one. Nonetheless, “he held it as he always held it, as though he had held it always” (156). Here the phrases are balanced by the chiasmus—“always held it . . . held it always”—and thus suggest the inversion and cessation of time, creating both timelessness and anticipation. Teddy waits for the reluctant Newman—the son who unwillingly comes to visit his father in the psychiatric hospital—to take from him his letter and, in something like a leap of faith, place it in the mailbox, for, as Teddy enigmatically cautions Newman, “it won’t do you any good if you don’t” (157). Clinging to his letter, Malamud’s guardian of time and irrevocability will remain poised at the edge of possibility.
The troping of language as a signifier for its own production of meaning makes imperative, as Malamud once put it, the “struggle to achieve order” through fiction (introduction vii). The very texture of the language for Malamud makes emphatic the desperation with which his characters attempt to contain and mediate their lives. A writer of contradictions, Malamud captures the paradoxes and tensions of the lives his characters live in the linguistic push/pull and contrasting elements of his tightly constructed syntactical design. Consider, for example, the following antithesis from the short story “Talking Horse,” a line that, in its paradoxical apposition provides a choice: his character wonders, “if I’m Abramowitz, a horse; or a horse including Abramowitz” (329; emphasis in the original); and this from “Rembrandt’s Hat”: “Each froze the other out of his life; or froze him in” (273). These structural antitheses offer choices that are not really choices but a refashioning of the lens through which his characters mark their place in the world. The syntactical antitheses have the effect of simultaneously pushing out and pulling in, holding characters in the balance but also in an inseparable and irresistible alliance with each other. They are allied in their juxtaposition, mirror images of one another. As the beleaguered grocer Morris Bober, in the novel The Assistant, tells Frank Alpine, the man who came to rob him and now labors alongside him in the store, “I suffer for you. . . . I mean you suffer for me” (150). In such figuring of speech, Malamud creates the condition of antithesis, balanced by contradiction: perfectly aligned—perfectly precarious. We are presented with such paradoxes in, for example, the rabbinical student Leo Finkle’s mystification about his own motives and shortcomings: “He had never loved anyone. Or perhaps it went the other way, that he did not love God so well as he might, because he had not loved man” (“The Magic Barrel” 135); and this from The Assistant: “The right thing was to make the right choice but he made the wrong. Even when it was right it was wrong” (249). After all, in Malamud’s fictional world, “nothing meant yes or it meant no” (“The Letter” 155). The language of his utterance takes back just at the moment it gives.
Such shaping of the language creates a kind of stasis, possibility held in abeyance in the sharply constructed linguistic reversals and arrangements. Of Rubin regarding himself in the mirror wearing the hat that is the source of such tsouris, Malamud’s narrator says, “He wore it like a crown of failure and hope” (“Rembrandt’s Hat” 276). And of the chastened tailor Manischevitz, seeking God, bewilderingly “cursing himself for having, beyond belief, believed,” and later, having acknowledged that the black man sitting in his living room was, in fact, a disincarnated angel of God, he wonders, “If you said it it was said. If you believed it you must say it. If you believed, you believed” (“Angel Levine” 285, 289). Here the reversal—“if you said it it was said”—is arrested at the moment of the repetition (“it it”) whose proximity holds the utterance at its center, thus creating a momentary suspension, a stark exposure of desired surety in an otherwise unstable and inscrutable condition of living. In Malamud’s fictive enterprise, there are no such guarantees. Such tropes of contradiction in an otherwise static world offer possibilities, second chances for Malamud’s characters. For, after all, “second chances” is the language of the immigrant, as we find in the short story “The Jewbird”: presented with an open window, “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” (144). His characters’ confusions about their futures and insecurities about place and identity are revealed in the balanced sentence, in the syntactical complexities, Malamud’s Yiddish-inflected English itself becoming an opening of possible meanings and permutations. We can see this anxiety about the opening up of possibility in the recurring pattern of the polyptoton, a repetition of the root of a term with different prefixes or suffixes: “I’m frightened of the world. . . . It fills me with fright” (“My Son the Murderer” 91). And even when up against the harsh reality of finalities, closures, as the narrator of “Man in the Drawer” discovers, “there comes a time in a man’s life when to get where he has to—if there are no doors or windows—he walks through a wall” (225).
In Malamud’s fiction, one hears the voices of his literary predecessors, establishing his place in the long and rich oral and written tradition of Jewish literature, storytellers attempting to fill in the gaps, to explain and adjudicate, to live in the world among others. When a character in the story “The Mourners,” for example, experiencing a shattering moment of mirroring, uncanny clarity, we are reminded of I. B. Singer’s host of dybbuks and dreamers, who pursue life beyond the material realm: “Then it struck him with a terrible force that the mourner was mourning him: it was he who was dead” (34; emphasis in the original). So, too, in a Kafkaesque occasion of disorientation, a character such as the lonely, frightened son in “My Son the Murderer” stands “staring with shut eyes in the mirror” (85). And we hear the narrative assurance of Sholom Aleichem’s Tevye when Malamud’s character simply but aptly appraises life: “Everybody that don’t die by age fifty-nine gets to be sixty” (“My Son the Murderer” 88). And reaching back further into history and myth, a Malamudian character laments his forlorn and hapless condition in the elevated language of lament: “Baring his chest, he smote the naked bones” (“Angel Levine” 285).
Reading Malamud is, at times, sheer poetry, as in the following lines from some of his short fiction: “The wind white-capped the leaden waves and the slow surf broke on the empty beaches with a quiet roar” (“My Son the Murderer” 91); “All that can be seen is the white shawl luminously praying” (“Man in the Drawer” 236); “Albert, wearing a massive, spike-laden headache, rushed down the booming stairs” (“The Silver Crown” 328); “The thick ticking of the tin clock stopped” (“Idiots First” 35); and “violins and lit candles revolved in the sky” (“The Magic Barrel” 143). The sharp crispness of the sentence, the sound and sensations and implied gesticulations, the figures and figuring of speech, and Malamud’s affinity for the texture of language create the balanced feat of making sense of experience. And, one might well suggest, as does the novelist Ehud Havazelet, that Malamud’s true mastery is realized in the short form: “His genius is in the stories. Nobody will ever write stories like he did. That’s his crowning glory” (Wasserman).
The spoken utterance becomes for Malamud’s characters a means of combating the solitary condition of grief. “To his anguish, loneliness,” as one character imagines, might come the momentary reprieve of human connection (“My Son the Murderer” 85). The minimalist, elliptical construction of the lament—“To his anguish, loneliness”—suggests the cumulative effect of suffering. What’s left out in the implied ellipsis makes emphatic the additive effect of sorrow: on top of anguish, for this character, is piled loneliness, misery accumulated, extended, endless, the weight of suffering. Enjoined together, anguish and loneliness will define his isolated experience. Standing alone, this singular, stark, minimal expression of grief foregrounds the aloneness of this character’s anguish, lonely because silenced, unacknowledged, and thus unrequited. This is why the imperiled writer-turned-taxi-driver in “Man in the Drawer,” with determined perseverance, attempts to have his stories smuggled out of the Soviet Union: “I feel I am locked in drawer with my stories. Now I must get out or I suffocate” (214). After all, as the Soviet writer of stories about Jews tells the reluctant narrator, “Imagination makes authority” (213). The voiced imagination here is—in keeping with a long tradition of Jewish storytelling—the measure of a life, as we find in this, a sentence to fall in love with: “He could, with a little more courage, have been more than he was” (The Assistant 278). As Malamud himself has expressed, “Working alone to create stories . . . is not a bad way to live our human loneliness” (introduction xiii). Malamud’s novels and short fiction conclude with a perfect sense of closure—we know they are coming, we anticipate them, and at the same time we do not want them to end because we are invested in the lives of his characters and the tenor of their unsettled futures.
The editors of this collection have divided the volume into two sections: the first composed of Malamud scholars from the United States, the second, European scholars. In doing so, we hope to show the wide range of approaches—international in scope—in response to this influential and enduring writer. The essays that follow show the immense fluidity and range of possibility in Malamud’s fiction, from his first publication of The Natural in 1952 to his late fiction. In doing so, we try to capture the rhythms and stylistic designs of genre and thematic arrangement, the leitmotif of voices aching to be heard, but also of the age in which Malamud wrote and lived. The essays gathered in this collection try to show the ways in which Malamud reaches back in history—his own and that of both American and Jewish histories—illustrating the myriad ways in which the past comes to inform present conditions and future possibilities. The relevance of Malamud’s fiction in the twenty-first century cannot be overstated. His fiction has helped shape both Jewish and American letters. The chapters that follow pay tribute to the influence and originality of this major postwar literary figure whose characters and uniquely idiosyncratic voices speak to a distinctly Jewish and American experience. It is in the intersection of Jewish and American that Malamud’s voice is most distinctly and exceptionally heard. The subsequent chapters thus demonstrate the breadth and complexity of this masterful storyteller, exploring the many directions that his rich body of work takes us. In touching on both the early and late works, the short fiction and the novels, the points of departure for these foci include the Malamudian protagonist’s relation to the urban/natural space; the tensions between American and Jewish; Malamud’s menschlichkeit and midrash; the Malamudian hero as modern schlemiel; suffering and the law; autobiography; comparative analyses; the complexities of gender, race, and ethnicity; anti-Semitism; and the function of the fantastical in his work.
Unlike the few other existing scholarly volumes devoted to Bernard Malamud, this collection has, at its center, an international emphasis, bringing together under one cover essays by leading Malamud scholars from across the globe, demonstrating Malamud’s enormous, far-reaching, and continuing influence both in the United States and abroad—an American writer, to be sure, but one whose narrative weight transcends borders.
Leah Garrett, in “The Beard Makes the Man: Bernard Malamud’s A New Life,” discusses Jewish male rebellion and reinvention in the character of the protagonist S. Levin, an urban Jew in exile in the Pacific Northwest. In doing so, Garrett places the novel’s dramatic center within the context of an American masculine ethos cultivated in the late 1950s, a postwar posture of self-reinvention and experimentation. Based loosely on Malamud’s own professional upheaval, S. Levin responds to the changing conditions from urban Jewish life to his existence as a lecturer at the fictive college of “Cascadia” in the Pacific Northwest. The protagonist’s quest for “an authentic self,” as Garrett suggests, ironically exposes the intellectual and cultural landscape of the postwar years. As Garrett poses, in A New Life, Malamud shows his protagonist’s attempts to navigate “four simultaneous cultural spaces that connote different visions of America in the postwar era: the city, the country town, the West, the broader America.” Here in the portrait of the Jew as “other,” Garrett shows Malamud’s critique of the anxious promise of self-reinvention in midst of America reinventing itself.
Both Jessica Lang and Timothy Parrish approach Malamud’s 1971 novel The Tenants but from very different perspectives. Timothy Parrish, in “Malamud’s The Tenants and the Problem of Ralph Ellison’s Second Novel,” provocatively shows The Tenants to be a response to Ellison’s own career, “a version of Ellison’s own authorial life, which twenty years after Ellison’s death we are only beginning to fully comprehend.” In thoughtfully aligning these two major twentieth-century writers, Parrish poses that “The Tenants tells the drama of Ellison’s long-anticipated sequel to Invisible Man that he was unable to complete in his lifetime.” In reading the one in relation to the other, Parrish evokes the underlying complexities in their literary kinship, demonstrating the ways in which Malamud refers to the situation of the black American writer in the politicized late 1960s–early 1970s to reflect on the aesthetic situation of the Jewish American writer during that same culturally and politically fraught era. In this way, Parrish’s chapter sets the scene for further discussion of The Tenants.
Lang, in “Unbound and Un-bodied: Reading Race in Malamud’s The Tenants,” approaches the novel from a fresh perspective, one that redirects the focus from more traditionally held assumptions about Malamud’s politicized novel that pose its central dramatic tension in the antagonistic relationship between two writers. Instead, Lang shows the novel’s central characters, Willie Spearmint, an African American, and Harry Lesser, a Jew, to be consanguineous, “in partnership with one another, learning from one another, and even being or passing as one another.” Instead of posing the two figures as murderous adversaries, Lang shows them to be deeply entwined, dependent on each other. Thus, the final, violent death scene, Lang argues, might be read as a suicide, as well. In demonstrating the characters’ complex relationship—as writers, as African American and Jew, as literary rivals—Lang historicizes the political climate of New York in the late 1960s, especially with regard to race relations. Another pairing of essays looks at Malamud’s 1966 novel The Fixer, recipient of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Both Andrew M. Gordon and Holli Levitsky explore Malamud’s literary resurrection of the 1913 Beilis affair, in which a Russian Jew was accused of blood libel. Levitsky, in “‘I Shit My Death’: From the Providential to the Excremental in The Fixer,” examines Malamud’s “revision” of the Beilis trial. As Levitsky shows, in Malamud’s imaginative reinvention of the events that provide the backdrop to his novel, the fate of Mendel Beilis in the guise of Malamud’s Yakov Bok is far more ambiguous. The historical Beilis was exonerated, but Malamud leaves his readers with no such clarity regarding the fate of Bok. Levitsky proposes that Malamud’s novel chillingly suggests a correspondence between the blood libel and the events of the Holocaust. Malamud, thus, recontextualizes the suffering of “the fixer” to reveal the ongoing, historical pattern of atrocities against Jews. The Holocaust consciousness that informs the novel, according to Levitsky, speaks to a potent legacy of anti-Semitism and opens up a potential space where a similarly tortured protagonist-victim might reflect on fundamental questions of faith in extreme circumstances.
Gordon turns to the history of the Beilis trial and the myth of blood libel as dramatized in The Fixer. In “The Jew as Vampire in Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer,” Gordon examines the accusation of blood libel and ritual murder brought against the Jews, providing a psychoanalytic reading of this complex anti-Semitic phenomenon that, as he suggests, “mixes together several primitive fantasies: that the Jews were supposedly responsible for the crucifixion of Christ and that therefore they periodically repeat the crucifixion by the ritual murder of saintly, helpless Christians, using the blood to make Passover matzoh.” Gordon argues that, ultimately and ironically, Malamud’s portrait of Yakov Bok, based on the historical figure of Menahem Mendel Beilis, “is mistreated like Christ, imprisoned, chained, and beaten. At the end of the novel, he is bloody but unbowed.”
Victoria Aarons, in “Midrash, Memory, and ‘Miracles or Near-Miracles’: Bernard Malamud’s All-Too-Human Project,” moves us in a different direction, focusing primarily on the short stories that, she argues, are at the center of Malamud’s thematic and stylistic oeuvre. Aarons argues that Malamud typically positions each of his small yet persistent characters at an instant of moral reckoning: their own or that of others. At such moments of exposure, Malamud’s “kleyne mentshelekh” insist existentially on their responsibilities as “human being” in a world that would pitilessly conspire against them. Aarons suggests that the short story, in particular, for Malamud might be seen as contemporary midrash, a genre of possibility, of second chances, of the making of character.
1. All of Malamud’s stories that are cited in this chapter are included in Malamud, Stories., except “The Lady of the Lake,” which is included in Malamud, Complete.