The Assistant. New York: Dell, 1957; repr., 1974.
The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997.
Dubin’s Lives. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979.
The Fixer. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.
God’s Grace. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982.
Idiots First. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1963. Repr., New York: Pocket Books, 1975.
The Magic Barrel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1958.
The Natural. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1952.
A New Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961.
The People and Uncollected Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989.
Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969.
Rembrandt’s Hat. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973.
The Stories of Bernard Malamud. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983.
The Tenants. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971.
Bilder einer Ausstellung. Köln, Germany: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1975.
Cuentos. Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 1987.
Cuentos reunidos. Barcelona: El Aleph, 2011.
Das Zauberfass und andere Geschichten. Köln, Germany: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1962.
Der Fixer. Reinbek, Germany: Rowolht, 1971; Berlin: Verlag Volk und Welt, 1989.
Der Gehilfe. Reinbek, Germany: Rowohlt, 1969.
Der Unbeugsame. Munich: DTV Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1984.
Die Leben des William Dubin. Köln, Germany: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1980.
Die Mieter. Berlin: Volk und Welt, 1979.
Ein neues Leben. Munich: DTV Deutscher Taschenbuch, 1988.
El barril mágico. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1962.
El dependiente. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1984.
El hombre de Kiev. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1967.
El mejor. Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 1984.
El reparador. Madrid: Sexto Piso, 2007.
El reparador. Barcelona: El Aleph, 2011.
El sombrero de Rembrandt. Barcelona: Destino, 1979.
H τελευταία χάρη. Athens: Psychoyios, 1983.
Eνοικιοστάσιο. Athens: Viper, 1974.
Idiotas primero. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1969.
La grâce de Dieu. Paris: Flammarion, 1983.
La gracia de Dios. Barcelona: Plaza y Janés, 1984.
Las vidas de Dubin. Barcelona: Plaza & Janés, 1981.
La vie multiple de William D. Paris: Flammarion, 1980; Paris: Le livre de poche, 1990.
Le commis. Paris: Gallimard, 1960; Genève: Éditions Métropolis, 2006.
Le meilleur. Paris: Rivages, 2015.
Le people élu. Paris: Rivages, 1992.
Les idiots d’abord. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1965.
Les locataires. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1976.
Le tonneau magique. Paris: Gallimard, 1967.
L’homme dans le tiroir. Paris: Flammarion, 1992.
L’homme de Kiev. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967.
Los inquilinos. Barcelona: Destino, 1975.
O βοηθός. Thessaloniki, Greece: ASE A.E. 1979.
Pluie de printemps. Paris: Rivages, 1992.
Portraits de Fidelman. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1971.
Rembrandts Hut: Erzählungen. Berlin: Volk und Welt, 1980.
Retratos de Fidelman. Barcelona: Lumen, 1981; Buenos Aires: Raíces, 1988.
Schwarz ist meine Lieblingsfarbe: Kurzgeschichten. Köln, Germany: Kiepenheuer & Witsch Verlag, 1971; Berlin: Verlag Volk und Welt, 1977; Munich: DTV Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1981.
Será crime ser judeu? Lisbon: Minerva, 1968.
To μαγικό βαρέλι. Athens: Grammata, 1983; H Φυλακή. Athens: Roes, 2008.
Una nueva vida. Barcelona: Lumen, 1966.
Une nouvelle vie. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.
Antin, Mary. The Promised Land. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912.
Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. 1962. New York: Harcourt Brace, 2000.
Balzac, Honoré de. “The Unknown Masterpiece.” 1845. Project Gutenberg ebook 23060. 2007. www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23060 (accessed 4 February 2015).
Baraka, Imamu Amiri. Transbluesency: The Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka / Leroy Jones (1961–95). New York: Marsilio, 1995.
Cahan, Abraham. The Rise of David Levinsky. 1917. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Prioress’s Tale.” Canterbury Tales. The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore. Ed. Alan Dundes. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. 91–98.
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans. 2 vols. Philadelphia: H. C. Carey and I. Lea, 1826.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Double: A Petersburg Poem. 1846. Trans. Constance Garnett. University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2006.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: Random House, 1952.
———. Three Days before the Shooting. Ed. John F. Callahan and Adam Bradley. New York: Modern Library, 2010.
Hoban, Russell. Ridley Walker. 1980. London: Picador, 1982.
James, P. D. The Children of Men. 1992. London: Faber and Faber, 2000.
Lawrence, D. H. Sons and Lovers. 1913. London: Penguin Books, 1995.
Lessing, Doris. The Memoirs of a Survivor. 1974. London: Flamingo, 1995.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Knopf, 2006.
Miller, Walter M., Jr. A Canticle for Leibowitz. 1960. New York: Bantam, 1997.
Shelley, Mary. The Last Man. 1826. Ware, UK: Wordsworth, 2004.
Updike, John. Forty Stories. London: Penguin Books, 1987.
———. Hugging the Shore. New York: Knopf, 1983.
———. A Month of Sundays. 1974. London: Penguin Books, 2007.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Galápagos. London: Flamingo, 1985.
Woolf, Virginia. “Kew Gardens.” 1919. The Penguin Book of English Short Stories. Ed. Christopher Dolley. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1974. 201–7.
———. To the Lighthouse. London: Hogarth, 1927.
Aarons, Victoria. “‘In Defense of the Human’: Compassion and Redemption in Malamud’s Short Fiction.” Studies in American Fiction 20.1 (Spring 1992): 57–73. Taking as a point of departure Mendel’s well-known “you bastard, don’t you understand what it means human,” this essay demonstrates that in Malamud’s world, compassionate and merciful acts, which do not come from God but from human beings, help us achieve redemption.
———. “A Kind of Vigilance: Tropic Suspension in Bernard Malamud’s Fiction.” Avery 175–86. This chapter focuses on the term “chiasmus”—a group of words balanced by their reversed order and arranged spatially around an implied center—in order to explore the implications of this figure of speech in Malamud’s fiction.
Abramson, Edward A. Bernard Malamud Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1993. This comprehensive book-length study follows the development of Malamud’s themes and techniques through a chronological study of his novels and a thematic discussion of his short stories.
———. “Zen Buddhism and The Assistant: A Grocery as a Training Monastery.” Avery 69–86. This chapter analyzes The Assistant in light of the impoverished grocery store that, according to the author, can be regarded as a training monastery in the tradition of the Soto Zen school of Buddhism.
Ahokas, Pirjo. “Through the Ghetto to Giotto: The Process of Inner Transformation in Malamud’s ‘Last Mohican.’” American Studies in Scandinavia 19 (1987): 57–69. By drawing on Freudian and Jungian psychology, this essay shows that from the protagonist’s viewpoint, the long journey in Italy is, in the critic’s phrase, “a protracted integrative individuation process.”
Allen, John Alexander. “The Promised End: Bernard Malamud’s The Tenants.” Field and Field, Malamud: A Collection 104–16. Although the title of this essay points to Malamud’s 1971 novel—and as such addresses the Jewish-black troubled relationship during the second half of the 1960s, the figure of the Malamudian antihero, and the like—it also analyzes the behavior of other schlemiel-like characters such as Morris Bober and Yakov Bok.
Alonso, Pilar. Tres aspectos de la frontera interior. Salamanca, Spain: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 1987. One-third of the book is devoted to addressing the issue of suffering throughout Malamud’s novels and short fiction. The other two-thirds explore the same theme in the fiction of two other key Jewish American novelists, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.
Alter, Iska. The Good Man’s Dilemma: Social Criticism in the Fiction of Bernard Malamud. New York: AMS Press, 1981. In order to analyze Bernard Malamud’s novels and short stories, the author of this volume starts from the so-called social criticism and explores issues such as responsibility, compassion, and goodness in Malamud—referred to as the “humanistic spokesman.”
Alter, Robert. “Jewishness as Metaphor.” Field and Field, Malamud and the Critics 29–42. This essay provides an in-depth analysis of the figure of the shlemiel-shlimazel that plays a key role in novels such as The Assistant and The Fixer.
———. “A Theological Fantasy.” Bloom, Bernard 187–91. This is a review of God’s Grace in which the critic addresses the biblical elements in Malamud’s apocalyptic novel.
Astro, Richard. “In the Heart of the Valley: Bernard Malamud’s A New Life.” Field and Field, Malamud: A Collection 143–55. Defining A New Life as a roman à clef, this essay provides the key autobiographical/historical background in order to better understand the novel, set in the fictional Cascadia (Corvallis, Oregon).
Avery, Evelyn, ed. The Magic Worlds of Bernard Malamud. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. This book is divided into three parts. The first part, “The Author,” focuses on an analysis of the writer from a human(e) perspective; the second part, “Individual Works,” addresses some Malamud novels and short stories; and the last part, “Thematic Threads,” explores the writer’s fiction from a thematic standpoint.
Beer, Brian. “Bernard Malamud’s Religious Duality: Frank Alpine and Morris Bober.” Explicator 70.2 (2012): 78–82. This essay establishes parallels between Jews and Christians in The Assistant. Just as Frank Alpine represents in the initials of his name and in his actions the person of Saint Francis of Assisi, Morris represents not only Martin Buber but also Jesus, the Jew who sought to bring the faithful into an I-Thou relationship with the deity.
Beilis, Jay, Jeremy S. Garber, and Mark S. Stein. “Pulitzer Plagiarism: The Malamud-Beilis Connection.” Cardozo Law Review de novo 225 (2010). This essay demonstrates that in writing The Fixer, the novelist did not plagiarize from Mendel Beilis’s memoir and, therefore, the novel was not an attempt to debase the memories of Beilis nor his wife.
Bellman, Samuel Irving. “Women, Children and Idiots First: The Transformation Psychology of Bernard Malamud.” Critique 7 (Winter 1964–65): 123–38. This article addresses what the author calls “the great Malamud mystery,” that is to say, the writer’s literary success despite the sorrow, misery, and weirdness of the characters that populate his work. Bellman discusses much of Malamud’s work and its place in the contemporary literary scene, focusing especially on his then-last collection of stories Idiots First. He concludes that the key to Malamud’s acceptance by the public is “his reconstructionist view of society and man’s position in it.”
Bellow, Saul. “In Memory of Bernard Malamud.” Bellow, Letters 435–36. This is a letter in which Saul Bellow answers Malamud’s criticisms of his 1953 novel The Adventures of Augie March.
———. Letters. Ed. Benjamin Taylor. New York: Viking, 2010. This book collects Bellow’s letters sent to fellow writers (William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, and Philip Roth, among others), wives, lovers, and friends.
Benedict, Helen. “Bernard Malamud: Morals and Surprises.” Malamud, Conversations 130–38. This interview appeared originally in Antioch Review (1983) after the publication of God’s Grace.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Bernard Malamud. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. This book gathers a collection of essays arranged in the chronological order in which they were originally published. The essays range from The Natural to God’s Grace, and some of them also address the writer’s short stories.
———. Introduction. In Bloom, Bernard 1–4.
Briganti, Chiara. “Mirrors, Windows and Peeping Toms: Women as the Object of Voyeuristic Scrutiny in Bernard Malamud’s A New Life and Dubin’s Lives.” Salzberg, Critical 174–86. This essay, which focuses on A New Life and Dubin’s Lives, shows that the Malamudian protagonist’s search for identity engages in a sentimental education. In the process of self-knowledge, women typically serve to precipitate the hero’s crisis.
Brooks, Jeffrey R. “Stranger than Fiction: Historical ‘Truth’ in Malamud’s The Fixer and Samuel’s Blood Accusation.” CLIO 31.2 (2002): 129–50.
Brown, Michael. “Metaphor for Holocaust and Holocaust as Metaphor: The Assistant and The Fixer of Bernard Malamud Reexamined.” Judaism 29.4 (Fall 1980): 479–88. This essay analyzes the setting of the writer’s 1957 novel, focusing on the idea that the place the Bobers inhabit is reminiscent of Holocaust Europe.
Broyard, Anatole. “Review of Pictures of Fidelman.” New York Times 4 May 1969: 5. This review compares The Assistant and Pictures of Fidelman on the basis of the Italian-Jewish background of Frank Alpine and Arthur Fidelman, respectively.
Buchen, Irving L. “Malamud’s God’s Grace: Divine Genesis, Mortal Terminus.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 10.1 (1991): 24–34. This essay analyzes the themes, motifs, symbolism, and so on of Malamud’s most apocalyptic novel—the end of civilization—departing from the statement that the writer’s 1982 novel caps his work with “a worrying and often angry resentment” of some of his concerns.
Cohen, Sandy. Bernard Malamud and the Trial by Love. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1974. This book explores the theme of self-transcendence, in connection to a myth-based literary technique, as an ideal that drives the development of the protagonists of Malamud’s novels. The author argues that Malamud’s central characters, from Frank Alpine in The Assistant to Yakov Bok in The Fixer (and, arguably, Roy Hobbs in The Natural) “begin as egocentric, frustrated individuals with an insecurity-dominated need for success and status” and evolve toward self-transcendence through intense suffering and an “elaborate and ritualistic trial by love” (9).
Cronin, Gloria L. “The Complex Irony of Grace: A Study of Bernard Malamud’s God’s Grace.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 5 (1986): 119–28. This essay demonstrates that Calvin Cohn can only win the knowledge of grace through ironic twists and reversals, fact and fantasy that take place in a setting where terror and humor are alternating all the time.
Dachslager, Earl L. “‘Hateful to Crist and to His Compaignye’: Theological Murder in ‘The Prioress’s Tale’ and The Fixer.” Lamar Journal of the Humanities 11.2 (1985): 43–50. This essay is partly devoted to exploring the implications of the figure of the Christ-like Yakov Bok in The Fixer.
Davis, Philip. Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. This first full-scale account of Bernard Malamud’s life and works sheds light on one of the finest twentieth-century Jewish American writers. This valuable biography includes exclusive interviews with Malamud’s family, friends, and colleagues and reproduces extracts of his journals, letters, and manuscripts.
Ducharme, Robert. Art and Idea in the Novels of Bernard Malamud: Toward “The Fixer.” The Hague, Netherlands: Mouton, 1974. This book-length study addresses Bernard Malamud’s novels (from The Natural to The Tenants) from different perspectives, including his use of irony, father-son relationships, and suffering.
Epstein, Joseph. “Malamud in Decline.” Commentary 74.4 (1982): 49–53. www.commentarymagazine.com/article/malamud-in-decline. Although this is a review about God’s Grace, it also addresses the artist’s previous works.
Field, Leslie A., and Joyce W. Field. “The Art of Fiction: Bernard Malamud.” Malamud, Conversations 54–68.
———, eds. Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1975. Published five years after Bernard Malamud and the Critics, this collection of essays continues where the 1970 volume stops. Among other chapters, it is worth reading the well-known “Interview with Bernard Malamud,” granted to the editors of the book.
———, eds. Bernard Malamud and the Critics. New York: NYU Press, 1970. This collection of essays not only approaches Malamud’s fiction from a thematic viewpoint but also addresses specific novels (The Assistant, A New Life, and The Fixer) and short stories (“The Magic Barrel”).
———. “An Interview with Bernard Malamud.” Field and Field, Malamud: A Collection 8–17. This is one of the most well known and frequently cited interviews granted by the novelist; in it, he addresses characteristic Malamudian themes like the imprisonment motif and suffering.
———. “Introduction: Malamud, Mercy, and Menschlechkeit.” Field and Field, Malamud: A Collection 1–7.
Fisch, Harold. “Biblical Archetypes in ‘The Fixer.’” Studies in American Jewish Literature 7.2 (Fall 1988): 162–76. In order to explore the writer’s use of myth and archetype as marks of virtuosity, this essay focuses on the analysis of The Fixer.
Fishman, Boris. “Seeking Bernard Malamud on His 100th Birthday: A Young Novelist Explores the Anxieties of Influence.” Jewish Daily Forward 25 April 2014. forward.com/culture/196989/seeking-bernard-malamud-on-his-100th-birthday/. On the occasion of Malamud’s one hundredth birthday, the author of this article—in charge of hosting the centennial celebration of the artist at the Center of Fiction in Midtown Manhattan, takes a very personal approach to the novelist’s life and work.
Freedman, William. “From Bernard Malamud, with Discipline and with Love (The Assistant and The Natural).” Field and Field, Malamud: A Collection 156–65. This essay shows that the Malamudian character, who prepares mainly through education, endures and waits, and although he complains about the yoke of his endurance, he eventually demonstrates that his renunciation leads (him) to higher spirituality.
Freese, Peter. “Trouble in the House of Fiction: Bernard Malamud’s The Tenants.” Self-Reflexivity in Literature. Text & Theorie 6. Ed. Werner Huber, Martin Middeke, and Hubert Zapf. Würzburg, Germany: Verlag Köningshausen and Newmann, 2005. 99–112. This book chapter not only explores the troubled relations between Jews and blacks in New York as presented in The Tenants but also serves as a reflection about different types of literature and how they may affect the writing process.
Friedman, Alan Warren. “The Hero as Schnook.” Bloom, Bernard 113–28. This essay focuses on Yakov Bok (The Fixer) as schnook—a gullible Jew who is distinguished only by misery and his sense of victimization. Bok inhabits a meaningless, arbitrary world, which, in spite of his own feebleness and irrelevance, he confronts and eventually triumphs because he endures.
Furman, Andrew. “Revisiting Literary Blacks and Jews.” Midwest Quarterly 44 (2003): 131–47. This essay addresses The Tenants, and in order to analyze the troubled relations between Jews and blacks at that time, the author responds to Ozick’s well-known essay “Literary Blacks and Jews.”
Giroux, Robert. Introduction. Malamud, Complete ix–xv.
———. Introduction. Malamud, People vii–xvi. In this introduction, the author recalls his first encounters as editor with Bernard Malamud.
Grebstein, Sheldon Norman. “Bernard Malamud and the Jewish Movement.” Field and Field, Malamud: A Collection 18–44. This essay takes as its point of departure suffering as a major and recurrent theme of the Jewish movement, focusing on the analysis of this dominant issue in Malamud’s The Natural, The Assistant, and The Fixer.
Greenfeld, Josh. “The Six Lives of Fidelman.” New York 12 May 1969: 58, 60. This review of Pictures of Fidelman shows why its author views Malamud as “the most Jewish of the significant American-Jewish writers.”
Guttmann, Allen. “All Men Are Jews.” Bloom, Bernard 151–58. This essay explores the theme of Jewishness in some of Malamud’s works, like The Natural, The Assistant, and The Fixer, among others.
Hays, Peter L. “The Complex Pattern of Redemption.” Field and Field, Malamud and the Critics 219–33. This essay explores The Assistant in terms of the complexity with which Malamud’s realistically presented pattern is reinforced with myth and symbol. The last part of the article studies the novel’s philosophy in light of Martin Buber’s I-It, I-Thou relationship.
Helterman, Jeffrey. Understanding Bernard Malamud. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985. This volume, which is part of a series titled Understanding Contemporary American Literature, caters to university students and nonacademic readers interested in an analysis of the writer’s use of language and symbolism, among other relevant themes.
Hershinow, J. Sheldon. Bernard Malamud. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980. This monograph, which includes an analysis of Malamud’s novels from The Natural to Dubin’s Lives, examines Pictures of Fidelman as a novel. The book focuses on the novelist’s style, humor, and moral vision, among other patterns.
Hoag, Gerald. “Malamud’s Trial: The Fixer and the Critics.” Field and Field, Malamud: A Collection 130–42. Almost five years after the publication of The Fixer, this essay is a reassessment of the reviews about this novel written until then.
Hornung, Alfred. “Zwischen Realismus und Anti-Realismus: Malamud—Roth—Hawkes.” Der zeitgenössische amerikanische Roman: Von der Moderne bis zur Postmoderne, Vol. 2: Tendenzen und Gruppierungen. Ed. Gerhard Hoffman. Munich: Fink, 1988. 102–45. This comprehensive essay situates Malamud’s fiction, together with that of Philip Roth and John Hawkes, between modernism and postmodernism and points out the diverging concepts of reality of these writers.
Ingliss, Ruth. “The Book-Makers.” Malamud, Conversations 27–28. Originally published in Nova (1967), this interview appeared after the publication of The Fixer.
Kellman, Steven G. “The Tenants in the House of Fiction.” Studies in the Novel 8 (Winter 1976): 428–67. This essay explores the turbulent mid- and late 1960s in light of the novelist’s 1971 novel.
Kernan, Alvin B. “The Tenants: ‘Battering the Object.’” In Bloom, Bernard Malamud 193–206. This essay analyses Malamud’s novel as a confrontation of text and society and, as such, argues that The Tenants portrays the romantic beliefs about the reality of a literary text and the breakdown of these beliefs when confronted by social realities.
Kessner, Carole S. “Two Views of Jews: Bernard Malamud, Maurice Samuel and the Beilis Case.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 29 (2010): 90–101. This is a comparative analysis of the Beilis trial (1913) from two points of view: Maurice Samuel’s historical account and Malamud’s fictional narrative.
Kremer, S. Lillian. “Reflections on Transmogrified Yiddish Archetypes in Fiction by Bernard Malamud.” Avery 123–38. This essay presents Malamud as the most successful contemporary writer who incorporates into fiction stock figures from Yiddish literature and folklore, such as the tzaddik and the schnorrer.
Langer, Lawrence. “Malamud’s Jews and the Holocaust Experience.” Salzberg, Critical 115–25. This essay examines what its author calls “the gift of suffering” in characters like Morris Bober (The Assistant) and Yakov Bok (The Fixer) and proposes how an exposure to physical anguish or deprivation enriches the human being’s inner self.
Leibowitz, Herbert. “Malamud and the Anthropomorphic Business.” Bloom, Bernard 37–39. This essay looks at the behavior of a Malamudian character like Mendel in “Idiots First” as an idiot—that is, a fool, clown.
Lelchuk, Alan. “Malamud’s Dark Fable.” New York Times 29 August 1982. www.nytimes.com/1982/08/29/books/malamud-s-dark-fable.html. This review of God’s Grace partly addresses the presence of biblical elements in the novel.
Malamud, Bernard. Conversations with Bernard Malamud. Ed. Lawrence Lasher. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991. This volume, which collects twenty-eight of Malamud’s best interviews, includes the last one the writer granted before his death.
———. “Imaginative Writing and the Jewish Experience.” Malamud, Talking 184–90. In this essay, the novelist addresses key themes in his writing such as Jewishness, suffering, and the like.
———. Introduction. In Malamud, Stories vii–xiii.
———. “Source of The Fixer.” Malamud, Talking 88–89. This two-page piece written by the novelist gives the reader keys to the composition of The Fixer.
———. Talking Horse: Bernard Malamud on Life and Work. Ed. Alan Cheuse and Nicholas Delbanco. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. This book includes a number of the novelist’s previously unpublished interviews, essays, lectures, and notes.
Malamud Smith, Janna. My Father Is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. On the occasion of the anniversary of Malamud’s death, the novelist’s daughter analyzes his unpublished letters and journals as a tribute to him.
———. Private Matters: In Defense of the Personal Life. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997. In this book, Bernard Malamud’s daughter addresses the concept of private life or at least what can be considered private life.
Mandel, Siegfried. “Bernard Malamud’s ‘Alma Redeemed’: A Bio-Fictional Meditation.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 14 (1995): 39–45. This essay, which starts from the idea that Malamud’s preoccupation with redemption has been present throughout his career, attempts to demonstrate Malamud’s fascination with biography by the early 1980s. His short story “Alma Redeemed” provides a case study.
Marshall, John. “Author of A New Life Likes Coming Back.” Malamud, Conversations 76–79. This interview, which originally appeared in the Gazette Times (1977), was granted on the occasion of the novelist’s visit to Corvallis (i.e., Cascadia in A New Life) sixteen years after the publication of this novel.
Masilamoni, E. H. Leelavathi. “Bernard Malamud—An Interview.” Malamud, Conversations 69–73. This interview originally appeared in the Indian Journal of American Studies (1976).
Mellard, James M. “Four Versions of Pastoral.” Bloom, Bernard 101–12. This essay analyzes the pastoral mode—according to this critic, Malamud’s greatest strength as a fiction writer—in The Natural, The Assistant, A New Life, and The Fixer.
Meras, Phyllis. “An Interview with Its Author [The Fixer].” Malamud, Conversations 16–18. This interview originally appeared in the Providence Sunday Journal (1966) just after the publication of The Fixer.
Mesher, David. “Gorilla in the Myth: Malamud’s God’s Grace.” Avery 111–19. The first part of the title points to the presence of a kaddish-reciting gorilla at the end of Malamud’s 1982 novel. The author of the article uses this image to underscore his attempt to argue for an optimistic reading of the book.
Müller, Kurt. “Biblische Typologie im zeitgenössischen jüdisch-amerikanischen Roman: E. L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel und Bernard Malamud’s God’s Grace.” Paradeigmata: Literarische Typologie des Alten Testaments. Zweiter Teil: 20. Jahrhundert. Ed. Franz H. Link. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1989. 831–51. This book chapter explores biblical archetypes in Jewish American fiction, focusing on Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel and Malamud’s God’s Grace.
Nisly, L. Lamar. “‘What about God?’: Evidence of Bernard Malamud’s Beliefs,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 21 (2002): 39–45. Drawing on the writer’s interviews, essays, letters, and the like, the author of this essay sheds light on a number of key Malamudian themes such as his approach to Jewishness, suffering, and so on.
Ochshorn, Kathleen. The Heart’s Essential Landscape: Bernard Malamud’s Hero. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. This book-length study, which focuses on the Malamudian protagonist’s character, places an emphasis on his flawed nature. The volume addresses major themes such as basic dignity and humanity of the writer’s characters.
Ozick, Cynthia. “Judging the World: Library of America’s Bernard Malamud Collections.” New York Times Sunday Book Review 13 March 2014. www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/books/review/library-of-americas-bernard-malamud-collections.html. The author of this article gives some keys to the novelist’s creative powers and craftsmanship.
———. “Literary Blacks and Jews.” Field and Field, Malamud: A Collection 80–98. Reprinted in Cynthia Ozick, Art & Ardor. New York: Knopf, 1983. 90–112. This essay analyzes The Tenants in light of Irving Howe’s well-known “Black Boys and Native Sons,” which triggered a debate with Ralph Ellison about an issue similar to that addressed in Malamud’s novel.
———. “Remembrances: Bernard Malamud.” Avery 25–27. A telephone conversation held with Malamud in 1976 elicits the author’s remembrances.
Pinsker, Sanford. “Bernard Malamud’s Ironic Heroes.” Field and Field, Malamud: A Collection 45–71. This essay examines the significance of the figure of the schlemiel in The Magic Barrel, The Assistant, A New Life, and The Fixer.
Pringle, Mary B. “(Auto)biography: Bernard Malamud’s Dubin’s Lives.” International Fiction Review 9.2 (Summer 1982): 138–41. This review of the novelist’s 1979 novel Dubin’s Lives establishes parallels between the lives of two writers, William Dubin and Bernard Malamud.
Rajagopalachari, M. Theme of Compassion in the Novels of Bernard Malamud. New Delhi, India: Prestige Books, 1988. This monograph, which offers an overview of Malamud’s novels and short stories, revolves around the theme of compassion, a core issue in the novelist’s fiction.
Richman, Sidney. Bernard Malamud. New York: Twayne, 1966. This seminal study of Malamud’s early novels and short stories places an emphasis on the writer’s craftsmanship.
Rohner, Thomas L. “Enigmatic Humor in the Novels of Bernard Malamud.” Ph.D. dissertation, Zurich, 1985. This dissertation addresses the use of irony in the novelist’s novels.
Salzberg, Joel, ed. Critical Essays on Bernard Malamud. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. This book is a compilation of reviews, book chapters, and essays about different themes connected with the artist’s fiction.
———. “The Rhythms of Friendship in the Life of Art: The Correspondence of Bernard Malamud and Rosemarie Beck.” Avery 43–58. This chapter, which provides extracts of Malamud’s correspondence with Rosemarie Beck, aims to show how seriously the novelist took friendship.
Sánchez Canales, Gustavo. “Bernard Malamud’s Russian Background in The Fixer.” Mundo Eslavo 5 (2006): 55–62. This essay establishes a comparison between the historical context of the Beilis case and the fictional world as presented in the writer’s 1966 novel.
Scholes, Robert. “Portrait of the Artist as ‘Escape-Goat.’” Saturday Review 10 May 1969: 32–34. www.unz.org/Pub/SaturdayRev-1969may10-00032. In this review of Malamud’s collection of six short pieces, Pictures of Fidelman, Scholes argues for the way in which Malamud comically paints the Six Stations of the Cross. In this way, Fidelman attempts to navigate his way through this shifting landscape.
Shear, Walter. “Culture Conflict.” Field and Field, Malamud and the Critics 207–18. This essay looks at The Assistant as a novel of culture—i.e., it examines the ambiguities in the relationship between individuals and their values.
Shenker, Israel. “For Malamud, It’s Story.” New York Times 3 October 1971. www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/28/reviews/malamud-talk.html. This is an interview the novelist granted to the New York Times after the publication of The Tenants.
Sheres, Ita. “The Alienated Sufferer: Malamud’s Novels from the Perspective of Old Testament and Jewish Mystical Thought.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 4.1 (Spring 1978): 68–76. This essay explores the significance of the story of Abraham’s sacrifice (akedah) as the first and main key to the understanding of Malamud’s fiction.
Shimazu, Atsuhisa. “Numbers in ‘Still Life.’” Kobe International Communication Center Journal 7 (2010): 7–14. Kobe University Repository. www.lib.kobe-u.ac.jp/handle_kernel/81002798 (accessed 17 March 2015). This essay examines the relationship between Annamaria and Fidelman in “Still Life” through the use of the numbers 2 and 3.
Sío Castiñeira, Begoña. The Short Stories of Bernard Malamud: In Search of Jewish Post-immigrant Identity. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. In this book-length study of Malamud’s short fiction, the author attempts to capture an instance of identity by denouncing the isolation caused by extreme Jewish orthodoxy and by brutal assimilation.
Solotaroff, Robert. Bernard Malamud: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1989. This volume, which focuses on Malamud’s short stories, addresses Malamud’s most significant short fiction, including biographical data and style. This book-length study includes a chronology of the writer’s life and works and a small but representative selection of critical responses until the late 1980s.
Solotaroff, Theodore. “Bernard Malamud: The Old Life and the New.” Red Hot Vacuum and Other Pieces on the Writing of the Sixties. Ed. Theodore Solotaroff. New York: Atheneum, 1970. 71–86. This book chapter addresses the fiction of Malamud and is included in a collection of essays that explore some key figures in American letters, such as Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Isaac Rosenfeld, and James Purdy.
———. “An Evening with Bernard Malamud.” New England Review 24.2 (2003): 27–31. The author of this article recalls the writer’s visit to Oregon State upon receiving the National Book Award for his 1958 collection The Magic Barrel.
Stern, Daniel. “The Art of Fiction: Bernard Malamud.” Malamud, Conversations 54–68. Originally published in Paris Review 61 (Spring 1975): 40–64, www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3869/the-art-of-fiction-no-52-bernardmalamud. This is an interview that Malamud granted to the literary critic in his Bennington (Vermont) house on the occasion of the novelist’s sixtieth birthday.
Stevenson, David L. “The Strange Destiny of S. Levin.” New York Times Book Review 8 October 1961: 1–2. This is a review of A New Life.
Tritt, Michal. “Mendel Beilis’s The Story of My Sufferings and Malamud’s The Fixer: A Study of Indebtedness and Innovation,” Modern Jewish Studies 13.4 (2004): 58–78. This essay establishes parallels between the life of Yakov Bok, the protagonist of The Fixer, and Mendel Beilis, the man whose life inspired Malamud to write the novel.
Urdiales Shaw, Martín. Ethnic Identities in Bernard Malamud’s Fiction. Oviedo, Spain: Universidad de Oviedo, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2000. The author of this volume refers to the term “ethnic identities” to approach Malamud’s fiction from the point of view of race, nationality, cultural conditioning, attitude to heritage, and other related relevant issues. The chapter “Historical Source: The Beilis Case” is a comparative analysis of the historical and fictional elements in the writer’s 1966 novel The Fixer.
Walden, Daniel. “Bernard Malamud and His Universal Menschen.” Avery 167–73. This essay examines the concept of the mensch—the idea that the Malamudian character can create a new life for himself through moral obligation with others—in The Natural, The Assistant, and The Fixer.
Watts, Eileen H. “Not True Although Truth: The Holocaust’s Legacy in Three Malamud Stories: ‘The German Refugee,’ ‘Man in the Drawer,’ and ‘The Lady of the Lake.’” Avery 139–52. One of the major points made by the author of this chapter is that, in contrast to the grotesqueness of the Holocaust experience, Malamud underscores the significance of the individual’s intrinsic value and dignity.
Wegelin, Christof. “The American Schlemiel Abroad: Malamud’s Italian Stories and the End of American Innocence.” Twentieth Century Literature 19.2 (April 1973): 77–88. This essay addresses the behavior of Malamud’s schlemiel-like characters in Italian contexts, such as Fidelman’s in Rome, and the implications of their European tour.
Wershba, Joseph. “Not Horror but Sadness.” Malamud, Conversations 3–7. Originally published in the New York Post (1958), this interview appeared one year after the publication of The Assistant.
Wolford, Donald L. “Calvin Cohn: Confidence Man Interpreting Bernard Malamud’s ‘God’s Grace’ as a Parody of Herman Melville’s ‘The Confidence-Man.’” Master’s thesis, Youngstown University, 2009. This study, which addresses God’s Grace from a parodic perspective, establishes parallels between Calvin Cohn and Melville’s The Confidence Man.
Zucker, David J. “Malamud as Modern Midrash.” Judaism 43.2 (Spring 1994): 159–72. This essay focuses on the idea that Malamud’s fiction serves as a figurative parallel to the rabbis’ use of the midrash.
Aarons, Victoria. “‘The Tune of the Language’: An Interview with Grace Paley.” The Changing Mosaic: From Cahan to Malamud, Roth and Ozick. Ed. Daniel Walden. Studies in American Jewish Literature 12 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 50–61. In this interview, Paley speaks to the influence of her early life and the lives of her immigrant parents on the narrative voices in her short fiction.
Abellán, Manuel. Censura y creación literaria en España: 1939–1976. Barcelona: Península, 1980. This book addresses the theme of censorship in Spain during Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (1939–75). Among other issues, the author explores how books and films underwent censorship in the course of those years.
Anders, Günther. Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, Vol. I: Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution. Munich: Beck, 1994. This volume addresses the idea that a gap has developed between humanity’s technologically enhanced capacity to create and destroy. The author reflects on the human being’s ability to imagine that destruction.
Anzieu, Didier. Le corps de l’oeuvre: Essais psychanalytiques sur le travail créateur. Paris: Gallimard, 1981. This volume starts from the idea that not only is a given work of art deeply influenced by a creative piece of work, but its originality and the power it exerts over us is greatly due to its shape and style. The body of the work of art (not just the text itself) is the work of art itself.
Arlow, Jacob A. “Aggression and Prejudice: Some Psychoanalytic Observations on the Blood Libel Accusation against the Jews.” The Spectrum of Psychoanalysis: Essays in Honor of Martin S. Bergmann. Ed. Arlene Kramer Richards and Arnold D. Richards. Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1994. 283–94. This essay examines the reasons that may account for the appeal of anti-Semitism to some people, a psychological predisposition associated with unconscious fantasies and reactions to primitive, irrational, and childhood wishes, among others.
Atwood, Margaret. Moving Targets: Writing with Intent, 1982–2004. Toronto: House of Anansi, 2004. This book collects Margaret Atwood’s nonfiction covering the years indicated in the second part of the title. Among other writings, it is composed of autobiographical essays, book reviews, and introductory pieces.
Bal, Mieke. “Over-writing as Un-writing: Descriptions, World-Making, and Novelistic Time.” Narrative Theory: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies. Ed. Mieke Bal. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. 341–88. This chapter, included in a volume that offers a brief history of the applicability of narrative theory, develops a view of narrative as generated by what the author calls “a descriptive motor.”
Baldeshwiler, Eileen. “The Lyric Story: The Sketch of a History.” Studies in Short Fiction 6 (1969): 443–53. By making a distinction between two narrative modes—the lyrical and the epical—the author of this essay gives a general overview of the history of the lyrical short story in which she addresses major writers who have made a significant contribution to it.
Barnstone, Willis. The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. This book gives an overview of the history and theory of literary translation as an art form and argues that literary translation, which goes beyond the transfer of linguistic information, has imaginative originality not only in the translation but also in the source text.
Belluscio, Steven J. To Be Suddenly White: Literary Realism and Racial Passing. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. This is an in-depth study about the relationship between literary passing and literary realism, the dominant aesthetic motivation behind the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century ethnic texts.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays. Ed. P. Adams Sitney. Trans. Lydia Davis. New York: Station Hill, 1981. The editor of this book has carefully collected a number of excerpts from Blanchot’s most influential works.
Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. This well-known book is a first attempt made by its author to advance a new “revisionary” (“antithetical”) approach to literary criticism.
Boelhower, William. Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. The author of this volume, in questioning current ideas about the American literary canon, applies semiotics to the study of American ethnicity.
Boettger, Suzaan. Earthworks: Art and the Landscape of the Sixties. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. This is a comprehensive history of the Earthworks movement in the United States, providing an in-depth analysis of the forms that initiated the broader genre of Land Art.
Bohrer, Heinz Karl. Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. This book, which takes as its point of departure the term suddenness as an expression of discontinuity and rupture, resists aesthetic integration. The essays included in this volume explore a romantic (and modernist) literary phenomenon and trace its textual appearance in the works of early German Romantics such as Schlegel, Schleiermacher, and Kleist through Nietzsche.
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. This volume addresses the idea that plot reflects the patterns of human destiny, and as such, it aims to impose a new meaning on life.
Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. 1970. New York: Touchstone, 1996. Originally published in German as Ich und Du. Köln: Verlag Jakob Hegner, 1962. This book focuses on the premise that the human being’s life is meaningful in relationships. Humans’ relationships are defined by two word pairs: I-It and I-Thou.
Buchen, Irving H. “The Aesthetics of the Supra-Novel.” The Theory of the Novel: New Essays. Ed. John Halperin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974. 91–108. This chapter sets forth the structural, stylistic, formalistic, and epistemological aspects of the theory of the novel.
Buhle, Paul, and Robin D. G. Kelley. “Allies of a Different Sort: Jews and Blacks in the American Left.” Struggles in the Promised Land: Towards a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States. Ed. Jack Salzman and Cornel West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 197–230. This book chapter examines new ways to think about the American Left and those Jewish and African American radicals who played a key role in it.
“Conceptual Art Movement.” The Art Story. www.theartstory.org/movement-conceptual-art.htm (accessed 21 May 2015). This article offers a synopsis and some key ideas about “conceptual art.”
De Bellis, Jack. The John Updike Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000. This encyclopedia includes a chronology that summarizes the major events in Updike’s career, as well as an introductory chapter that examines his progress as a writer and entries summarizing Updike’s books, all his major characters, allusions, images, and symbols, and it includes the most significant scholarship on the novelist.
Delbo, Charlotte. Auschwitz and After. Trans. Rosette C. Lamont. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Narrated in first person, this trilogy gives an account of Delbo’s life and survival in Birkenau, the concentration camp.
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. New York: Routledge, 1994. Originally published in French one year before the English version appeared, this book collects a series of lectures during “Whither Marxism?,” a conference on the future of Marxism that Derrida gave at the University of California in 1993.
Des Pres, Terrence. “Excremental Assault.” Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications. Ed. John K. Roth and Michael Berenbaum. New York: Paragon House, 1989. 203–20. This book chapter is an in-depth study of problems like dysentery and diarrhea that afflicted prisoners in concentration camps.
Detweiler, Robert. John Updike. 1972. Rev. ed. New York: Twayne, 1984. Starting from the term “secular baroque,” this is a seminal book-length study of the novelist that focuses on Updike’s use of mythic patterns in his novels published until the late ’60s and early ’70s.
Duchamp, Marcel. “The Creative Act.” The Writings of Marcel Duchamp. Ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson. New York: Da Capo, 1989. 138–40. This collection of essays brings together two essential interviews and two statements about Duchamp’s art that underscore the serious side of the writer. In “The Creative Act,” Duchamp explains what he understands by this concept.
Dundes, Alan. “The Ritual Murder or Blood Libel Legend: A Study of Anti-Semitic Victimization through Projective Inversion.” The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore. Ed. Alan Dundes. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. 336–38. This essay examines the theme of “blood libel” or “false accusation” and attempts to demonstrate the power of folklore to influence thought and history.
Eakin, Paul J. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. This book argues that autobiographical truth is not a fixed but an evolving content in a process of self-creation through an analysis of the writing of Mary McCarthy, Henry James, Jean-Paul Sartre, Saul Friedlander, and Maxine Hong Kingston.
Elkins, James. The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. The author refers to drawings, paintings, diagrams, and photographs to order to raise new questions about the nature of vision.
Ellison, Ralph. The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. Ed. John F. Callahan. New York: Random House, 1995. This book includes posthumously discovered reviews, interviews, and criticism. There are also a number of essays that address the theme of race and explore literature and folklore, jazz and culture.
———. Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray. Ed. John Callahan. New York: Modern Library, 2001. This volume includes a collection of letters that span a decade in the friendship of two writers who discuss literature, race, and identity.
Encyclopedia Britannica Online. s.v. “aptronym.” www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/30911/aptronym (accessed 30 May 2014). Definition of the term “aptronym,” first coined by the American journalist Franklin P. Adams.
Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. “Rethinking Metaphor.” Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought. Ed. Ray Gibbs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 53–66. ssrn.com/abstract=1275662. This book chapter explores the metaphor of time as space.
———. The Way We Think. New York: Basic Books, 2002. This book focuses on the creative aspects of the mind, arguing that all learning and thinking consist of blends of metaphors based on simple bodily experiences.
Fiedler, Leslie A. Fiedler on the Roof: Essays on Literature and Jewish Identity. Boston: David R. Godine, 1991. Although the author of this book addresses the theme of Jewish identity, he extends his analysis to the works of writers such as James Joyce, I. B. Singer, William Styron, and Bernard Malamud, among others.
Freese, Peter. The Clown of Armageddon: The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut. Heidelberg, Germany: Winter, 2009. This volume gives an account of the novelist’s development from a neglected “hack” writer to an international celebrity and analyzes his fourteen novels, explaining how each one is related to the others by recurring characters and settings as well as by the themes and motifs that haunt Vonnegut’s fictional cosmos.
———. From Apocalypse to Entropy and Beyond: The Second Law of Thermodynamics in Post-war American Fiction. Essen, Germany: Die Blaue Eule, 1997. The author ponders the idea that in contemporary fiction, scientific theory has replaced metaphysical speculation.
Freud, Sigmund. “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. James Strachey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. 3–86. Freud analyzes from a psychoanalytic perspective the behavior of a young archaeologist called Norbert Hanold—Jensen’s protagonist—who realizes his love for a childhood friend through a complex process.
Friedman, Saul S. A History of the Middle East. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006. This history covers the Middle East from its ancient beginnings to the present. The confluence of events that produced civilized society is discussed in detail, along with the establishment of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Genette, Gérard. Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré. Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1982. Translated as Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. The term palimpseste (paratext), coined in this book for the first time, has been used since then to study the relationships between two or more texts and defines their hypertextual relationships.
Gibbs, Robert. “Suspicions of Suffering.” Christianity in Jewish Terms. Ed. Tikva Frymer-Kensky, David Novak, Peter Ochs, David Fox Sandmel, and Michael A. Signer. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000. 221–29. This book chapter, included in a collection of essays that explore a specific aspect of Christian thought from a Jewish standpoint, focuses on the issue of suffering.
“Giotto di Bondone.” Artble. www.artble.com/artists/giotto_di_bondone (accessed 21 May 2015). This webpage analyzes the figure of the Italian painter Giotto, focusing on his life, works, style, and influences, as well as the reception of his work.
Gitelman, Zvi. A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. This volume traces the historical experience of Jews in Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century through the paradoxes posed by the post-Soviet era.
Goffman, Ethan. “The Golden Age of Jewish American Literature.” Proquest Discovery Guides (March 2010). didattica.uniroma2.it/files/scarica/insegnamento/38823-Letteratura-Anglo-americana-1-Lm/6186-Saggio-The-Golden-Age-of-Jewish-American-Literature-Mod.-B. This essay examines the legacy of some Jewish American writers such as Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Cynthia Ozick who exemplify the tension between tradition and assimilation in a context of increasing acceptance and material comfort. The trajectory of Jewish American literature in the second half of the twentieth century is explored.
Gombrich, Ernst H. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Oxford, UK: Phaidon, 1959. This volume examines the history and psychology of pictorial representation in the light of present-day theories of visual perception information and learning. The author revisits many ideas concerning the imitation of nature and the function of tradition.
Goodman-Thau, Eveline. “Shoah and Tekuma—Jewish Memory and Morality between History and Redemption.” Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Studia Europaea 4 (2009): 5–30. This essay focuses on three key issues: (1) the Jewish contribution to the Western tradition in the age of secularization; (2) the clash of different cultures; (3) and the search for a united Europe.
Gottleib, Dovid. “Providence and Suffering.” Torah.org. www.torah.org/features/spirfocus/suffering.html (accessed 25 May 2015). This article—which opens with the question “Why do the innocent suffer?”—gives an account of the possible reasons for the existence of suffering.
Gubern, Román. La censura: Función politica y ordenamiento jurídico bajo el franquismo (1936–1975). Barcelona: Península, 1981. This book is an in-depth study of the theme of censorship during Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (1939–75). For example, it explores the origin, motives, and consequences of censorship in Spain throughout those years.
Guttmann, Allen. The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. This is a brief literary history of Jewish American fiction that partly focuses on assimilation and identity.
Hagman, George. Aesthetic Experience: Beauty, Creativity and the Search for the Ideal. New York: Rodopi, 2005. This book addresses psychoanalytic ideas about art and beauty through the lens of current developmental psychology. The author of this volume revisits theorists such as Freud, Ehrenzweig, Kris, Rank, Winnicott, and Kohut, among others.
———. “Art and Self: A New Psychoanalytic Perspective on Creativity and Aesthetic Experience.” Self and Systems. Ed. William J. Coburn and Nancy P. VanDerHeide. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2009. 164–73. In this essay, the author, who provides a contemporary self-psychological perspective on aesthetic experience, art, and creativity, argues that aesthetics is as important to human life as are sex, hunger, aggression, love, and hate.
Handy, William J. Modern Fiction: A Formalist Approach. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. This book examines the terms and methods used by the New Critics in their approach to poetry. The works analyzed in this volume include James Joyce’s “The Dead,” Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer, and Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day.
Harper, Howard M. “Trends in Recent American Fiction.” Contemporary Literature 12.2 (Spring 1971): 204–29. www.jstor.org/stable/1207737?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents. This essay analyzes the factors that help explain why the literary and cultural climate at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s was very different from that of the previous decades.
Harris, Jonathan Gil. “Four Exoskeletons and No Funeral.” New Literary History 42 (2011): 615–39. This essay examines the term exoskeleton as a metaphor through which to understand the untimely duration of the past within the present and in a manner different from Harold Bloom’s “apophrades” and Jacques Derrida’s “hauntology.”
Harshav, Benjamin. The Meaning of Yiddish. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990. This is an in-depth study of the major aspects of Yiddish language and culture.
Hassan, Ihab. Contemporary American Literature: 1945–1972. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1973. This is a brief study of American literature, ranging from the mid-1940s to the early 1970s. Among others, there are sections devoted to Jewish American writers like Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth.
Hersey, John. “A Completion of Personality: A Talk with Ralph Ellison.” Conversations with Ralph Ellison. Ed. Graham Maryemma Graham and Amritjit Singh. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. 272–301. Originally published in A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by John Hersey, this is an interview with the novelist.
Hess, Richard S. “Getting Personal: What Names in the Bible Teach Us.” Bible Review 6 (December 1997): 31–37. This article looks at the role biblical names such as Abram/Abraham and Sarai/Sarah played in the ancient world.
Hobbs, Allyson. A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. This book explores the challenges and possibilities that racial indeterminacy presents to men and women living in a country obsessed with racial distinctions.
Horstmann, Ulrich. Abschreckungskunst: Zur Ehrenrettung der apokalyptischen Phantasie. Munich: Fink, 2012. The author of this volume, who asks why the Third World War has not started (yet), reflects upon the role that apocalyptic fantasy plays in contemporary literature.
———. “Post-nuclear Dystopia: Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980).” Dystopia, Science Fiction, Post-apocalypse: Classics, New Tendencies, Model Interpretations. Ed. Eckarts Voigts and Alessandra Boller. Trier, Germany: WVT, 2015. 303–16. This is a model interpretation of a major postnuclear novel, presented by a professor of English who is also one of the most radical apocalyptic thinkers, suggesting that postapocalyptic fictions may have contributed to the actual nonoccurrence of the nuclear apocalypse during the Cold War.
Jacobs, Joseph. “Little St. Hugh of Lincoln,” The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore. Ed. Alan Dundes. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. 41–71. This is an in-depth study about an English boy (1246–1255) whose death prompted a blood libel during the second half of the thirteenth century.
Jaspers, Karl. Die Atombombe und die Zukunft des Menschen: Politisches Bewußtsein in unserer Zeit. Gütersloh, Germany: Bertelsmann, 1988. This is a CD that includes a 55-minute speech given in 1956 by Karl Jaspers. The speech is about the effects of the A-bomb in the future.
Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. 1914. Toronto, ON: Dover, 1977. This is an in-depth study that explores the most genuine reasons for creating art. One of Kandinsky’s key ideas is that there is an “internal necessity” that leads artists to create as if they were impelled by a spiritual force. That same “internal necessity” makes their audiences admire art as a spiritual hunger.
Kawash, Samira. Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity and Singularity in African-American Narrative. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997. This book, which explores the meaning of racial identity, shifts the focus of analysis from understanding differences to analyzing division.
Kempf, Wolfgang. “The Work of Art and its Beholder: The Methodology of the Aesthetic of Reception.” The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspective. Ed. Mark A. Cheetham, Michael Holly Ann, and Keith Moxey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 180–94. This book chapter analyzes the beholder’s relationship with the object—that is, the work of art—according to what the author calls “conditions of its appearance.”
Kernan, Alvin B. The Imaginary Library: An Essay on Literature and Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982. This volume explores the inability of contemporary writers to maintain a literary vision in a society that denies their values and methods.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling. 1843. Ed. C. Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. In this well-known book, the Danish thinker reflects on the biblical story of God’s command to Abraham from a philosophical standpoint. Kierkegaard also elaborates on the idea that Abraham’s determination to sacrifice his son, Isaac, was a test of faith.
Kifner, John. “Echoes of a New York Waterloo,” New York Times 22 December 1996. This article discusses Albert Shanker, a former local union chief and later a national educational leader who played a significant role in Brooklyn’s Ocean Hill–Brownsville district.
King, Francis. “Perfectionist.” Spectator 15 January 1983: 22. archive.spectator.co.uk/issue/15th-january-1983. The author of this article about Pictures of Fidelman establishes parallels between Arthur Fidelman and Bernard Malamud.
Kirsch, Sharon J. Gertrude Stein and the Reinvention of Rhetoric. Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 2014. By departing from the idea that rhetoric and literature still have a vexed relationship, the author of this book moves forward in an attempt to broaden the reader’s understanding of Gertrude Stein’s influence and impact on the field of rhetoric.
Klein, Marcus. After Alienation: American Novels in Mid Century. New York: World, 1964. This volume, which starts from the concept of “alienation” in order to move onto that of “accommodation,” looks at the novels of Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Wright Morris, and Bernard Malamud as epitomes of the mood of comic social accommodation, which the author sees as central in post-1950 American literature.
Koestler, Arthur. The Act of Creation. London: Hutchinson, 1964. This is a study of the processes of discovery, invention, imagination, and creativity in humor, science, and the arts in an attempt to develop an elaborate general theory of human creativity.
Krah, Markus. “Role Models or Foils for American Jews? The Eternal Light, Displaced Persons, and the Construction of Jewishness in Mid-Twentieth Century America.” American Jewish History 96.4 (December 2010): 265–67. This essay shows that The Eternal Light’s answer to the question of meaningful Jewishness, and by extension to the larger question of Jewish integration and distinctiveness in America, is closely connected with the reality of the post-Holocaust Jewish world.
Kreiger, Barbara. “The Jewish Literary Hero: Political Transformation in America,” Response 17 (Spring 1973): 131–38. In this article, the author analyzes the figure of the schlemiel—the typical Jewish (anti)hero. One of her arguments revolves around the idea of the schlemiel’s reliance on the redemptive nature of faith as a key way to come to terms with him- or herself.
Kremer, S. Lillian. Witness through the Imagination: Jewish-American Holocaust Literature. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989. This volume offers a critical reading of themes and stylistic strategies of major American Holocaust fiction.
LaCapra, Dominick. “Reflections on Trauma, Absence and Loss.” Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture. Ed. Peter Brooks and Alex Woloch. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. 178–204. The author, who establishes a distinction between the concepts of “absence” and “loss,” offers a general overview of contemporary trauma theory.
Lakoff, George. “Contemporary Theory of Metaphor.” Metaphor and Thought. Ed. Andrew Ortony. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 202–51. This essay is an in-depth analysis of the metaphor, focusing on the connection between conceptual metaphor and linguistic metaphor.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. This groundbreaking study of metaphor shows this trope to be a key mechanism of the mind that allows individuals to use what they know about their physical and social experience to provide understanding of other individuals.
Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. This volume addresses the idea that poetic metaphor is not very different from everyday language or thought processes.
Langmuir, Gavin J. “Thomas of Monmouth: Detector of Ritual Murder.” The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore. Ed. Alan Dundes. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. 3–40. This is a detailed analysis of the Benedictine monk Thomas of Monmouth, who published a controversial book titled The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich, commonly believed to be the origin of the blood libel against Jews.
Lee, Vernon. The Handling of Words and Other Studies in Literary Psychology. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1923. This groundbreaking work, which was a first attempt to design the method of close empirical analysis of texts, anticipates some of the developments in contemporary criticism such as the role of the reader as cocreator.
Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography: Theory and History of Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. The author of this book, addressing what he calls the “autobiographical contract,” attempts to examine literary texts as a “thing-in-itself.”
Leontiev, A. Dmitri. “What’s Hecuba to Us? Basic Propositions for a Psychological Theory of Art.” Emotions and Art: Problems, Approaches, Explorations. Ed. Leonid Ya. Dorfman. Perm, Russia: Perm Institute for Arts and Culture, 1992, 45–65. This essay offers an analysis of art as a counterweight to a theoretical-normative approach.
Lethem, Jonathan. “The Ecstasy of Influence.” The Best American Essays. Ed. Adam Gopnik. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008. 105–33. This volume is a collection of essays—memoir, fiction, and criticism, among others—that cover everything from major novels to old films, including graffiti and cyberculture. The chapter is inspired by Harold Bloom’s concept of “the anxiety of influence.”
Levin, Edmund. “The Last Blood Libel Trial.” Slate October 2013. www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2013/10/mendel_beilis_and_blood_libel_the_1913_trial_in_kiev_russia.html. This article examines the well-known “Beilis Case” on which The Fixer is loosely based.
“Ley 14/1966, de 18 de marzo, de Prensa e Imprenta.” Boletín Oficial del Estado 67 (19 March 1966): 3310–15. This makes reference to an Act passed in 1966—10 years before the end of Franco’s dictatorship—about freedom of the press and censorship.
“Ley 44/1967, de 28 de junio, regulando el ejercicio del derecho civil a la libertad en materia religiosa.” Boletín Oficial del Estado 156 (1 July 1967): 9191–94. This act, which was passed in 1967, almost a decade before the end of Franco’s dictatorship, makes reference to freedom of worship.
Louvel, Liliane. “Photography as Critical Idiom.” Poetics Today 29.1 (Spring 2008): 31–48. By focusing on the photography-text relationship, this essay examines how photography has renewed fiction and continues to do so through its specific properties.
Luscher, Robert M. John Updike: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1993. This book-length study on Updike focuses solely on the writer’s short fiction and explores each of Updike’s story collections separately and in approximate chronological order.
Maack, Annegret. “‘Aus dem Chaos eine neue Form der Stärke’: Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor.” Apokalypse: Weltuntergangsszenarien in der Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts: Materialien. Ed. Gunter E. Grimm, Werner Faulstich, and Peter Kuon. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1986. 168–86. This book chapter sketches the theme of catastrophe and the search for possibilities of survival in a number of works by Doris Lessing, a writer who is equally concerned with the physical survival of humankind as with the psychological survival of the individual.
Mann, Barbara E. “Visions of Jewish Modernism.” Modernism/Modernity 13.4 (November 2006): 673–99. Taking as point of departure the tension between text and image in modernism, this essay shows that Jewish writers and artists had a special relation to this tension, given the history of European Jewish culture and its prohibition on visual representation.
Marcus, Mordecai. “The Unsuccessful Malamud,” Prairie Schooner 41 (1967): 88–89. This short book review considers The Fixer an ambitious but flawed novel. It claims that while the novel contains familiar characters, themes, and techniques, they are not handled well. The ineffectual character of Yakov Bok is seen as emerging from a failure of sensibility on the part of Malamud rather than a quality that the character himself possesses. The themes are recalcitrant, and the technique is inept. All of this contributes to the failure of the novel.
Meyers, Carol L. Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. This book depicts Israelite women not as submissive chattel in an oppressive patriarchy but rather as strong actors within their families and the society of their time.
———. Households and Holiness: The Religious Culture of Israelite Women. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2005. This volume provides an overview of the role women played in ancient Israelite religion and shows the diversity of religious practices in ancient Israel.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. This volume looks at the interplay between the visible and the readable across culture, from literature to visual art and to the mass media.
Montefiore, C. G., and H. M. J. Loewe, eds. A Rabbinic Anthology. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1938. The two authors/editors of this anthology have selected and arranged with comments the entire manuscript, and all the texts are translated.
Moss, Kenneth. Jewish Renaissance in the Russian. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. This is a comprehensive study of the period ranging from 1917 to 1921, a five-year time span crucial in Jewish and Russian history. Numerous would-be cultural revolutionaries such as El Lissitzky and Haim Nahman Bialik are examined in relation to their implication for a new Jewish culture.
Myrdal, Gunnar. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. 1944. Repr., 2 vols. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 2009. In order to explore the contradictions of American democracy, the author of this book examines the moral contradiction of a country that moves between allegiance to its highest ideals and awareness of the realities of racial discrimination.
Ofrat, Gideon. “Why Is There No Jewish Surrealism?” Shofar 32.3 (2014): 102–19. This seminal essay addresses the reasons for the lack of true surrealism in Palestinian-Israeli art and literature, while all the other major trends of twentieth-century literature and art have found echoes in Palestinian-Israeli culture.
Paine, Stanley. The Franco Regime (1936–1975). Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. This volume offers deep insight into the career of Francisco Franco, a complex figure, and the enormous changes that shaped Spanish history during his regime.
Parker, Hershel. “The Determinacy of the Creative Process and the ‘Authority’ of the Author’s Textual Decisions.” College Literature 10.2 (Spring 1983): 99–125. This essay examines not only the way authority is infused into a literary text but also how this process comes to an end. The author refers to Herman Melville as an archetypal example to illustrate his point.
Pfeiffer, Kathleen. Race Passing and American Individualism: A Literary Study of the Ambiguities of Racial Identity in American Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. This volume explores the implications of the dilemma that black characters experienced in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century when they passed for white, through an analysis of the fiction of Jessie Fauset, Frances E. W. Harper, William Dean Howells, Nella Larsen, Jean Toomer, and James Weldon Johnson.
Podair, Jerald E. The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill–Brownsville Crisis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002. This volume is an in-depth study of the Ocean Hill–Brownsville crisis—a watershed in modern New York City race relations.
Rampersad, Arnold. Ralph Ellison: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 2007. This volume is an in-depth study of the life of a writer who is well known for his important work Invisible Man but, as the author of this biography shows, a writer who also produced influential essays on race, literature, and culture.
Reisner, Rosalind. Jewish American Literature: A Guide to Reading Interests. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2004. This volume covers a wide range of genres and literary works in Jewish American letters. Among others, there are chapters devoted to Holocaust literature and to biography/autobiography.
Rose, Gilbert J. The Power of Form: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Aesthetic Form. New York: International Universities Press, 1980. Although it seems that Freud never psychoanalyzed a living artist or wrote outside the context of analysis, the author of this volume has explored aesthetics from a Freudian perspective.
Rosenfeld, Alvin H. “Inventing the Jew: Notes on Autobiography.” The American Autobiography. Ed. Alfred E. Stone. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1981. 133–56. This book provides a wide selection of texts that deal with personal narratives from different perspectives, as is the case with Rosenfeld’s article. Rosenfeld explores the theme of autobiographical invention in modern Jewish autobiography.
———. “The Progress of the American Jewish Novel.” Contemporary Jewish Review 7 (1973): 115–30. Rosenfeld argues that themes of legitimate concern to Jewish writers—especially immigrant writers—have largely lapsed since the early literature in America as a response to assimilation and to the changing focus on other minority cultures.
Roth, Philip. “Pictures of Malamud.” New York Times 20 April 1986. In this sketch, Roth recalls how he met his fellow writer in Corvallis (Oregon) in February 1961.
———. “Writing American Fiction.” Reading Myself and Others. 1975. New York: Viking Penguin, 1985. 173–91. In this essay, the novelist analyzes the prose of Jewish American writers such as Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Grace Paley, among others.
Rothenberg, Albert. “Inspiration, Insight and the Creative Process in Poetry.” College English 32 (November 1970): 172–76, 181–83. This essay offers preliminary findings from the author’s research, including interviews with both prominent and novice writers, in order to explore the poetic creative process from a psychiatric and psychological perspective.
Ryken, Leland, James C. Wilhoit, and Tremper Longman III. Dictionary of Biblical Imagery. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1998. This reference work is dedicated to exploring the images, symbols, motifs, metaphors, and literary patterns found in the Bible.
Samuel, Maurice. Blood Accusation: The Strange History of the Beiliss Case. New York: Knopf, 1966. Appearing the same year as The Fixer, this book is an in-depth study of the Beilis case, on which Malamud’s 1966 novel is loosely based.
Sánchez Canales, Gustavo. “Alienation and Marginality in Saul Bellow’s Early Novels.” Evolving Origins: Transplanting Cultures. Ed. Laura Alonso and Antonia Domínguez. Huelva, Spain: Universidad de Huelva, 2002. 177–88. This article explores Saul Bellow’s first novels, Dangling Man and The Victim, from an existentialist perspective.
———. “The Significance of Martin Buber’s Philosophy of Dialogue and Suffering in the Overcoming of ‘Core-to-Core Confrontation’ in Chaim Potok’s The Chosen.” Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense 18 (2010): 53–65. revistas.ucm.es/index.php/EIUC/article/view/EIUC1010110053A. This article focuses on how Martin Buber’s philosophy of dialogue facilitates the mutual understanding between two opposing worlds in Potok’s novel The Chosen.
Santamaría López, José Miguel. “La traducción de obras narrativas en la España franquista: Panorama preliminar.” Traducción y censura inglés-español: 1939–1985. Ed. Rosa Rabadán. León, Spain: Universidad de León, 2000. 207–25. This essay looks at how literary works went through censorship during Franco’s dictatorship in Spain.
Sasso, James. “The Stages of the Creative Process.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124.2 (29 April 1980): 119–32. This essay analyzes the structures of the stages of the creative process as manifested in artistic production, taking the overlapping issues concerning cognitive development into account.
Schier, Helga. Going Beyond: The Crisis of Identity and Identity Models in Contemporary American, English and German Fiction. Tübingen, Germany: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1993. This study is an overview of the issue of identity crisis from a literary standpoint.
Schwartz, Daniel R. Imagining the Holocaust. New York: St Martin’s, 1999. This book addresses Holocaust narratives that have shaped the way we understand and respond to the events of that time, including analyses of first-person narratives such as Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s Survival at Auschwitz.
Schwarzschild, Steven S. “On Sufferings.” Encyclopedia Judaica. 2nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2007. xxviii. The Rabbinic attitude toward sufferings is one of humble resignation to the will of God. The convinced faith in a blessed future enabled the Rabbis to face sufferings with fortitude and even joy, because it was seen as a pathway to heaven. The old view of sufferings as punishment never entirely disappeared; it was better to be punished by sufferings on earth so as to ensure happiness in the world to come.
Scobie, Charles H. H. The Ways of Our God: An Approach to Biblical Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003. This book addresses the nature and task of biblical theology and some major themes such as God’s order, God’s servant, and God’s people.
Service, Robert. Historia de Rusia en el siglo XX. Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 2000. This book provides an overview of the history of Russia from its beginnings until Boris Yeltsin’s office.
Siegel, Katy. Since ’45: America and the Making of Contemporary Art. London: Reaktion Books, 2011. The year 1945 was not only when the center of the art world moved significantly from Paris to New York but also the year of the A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This book addresses the influence of history on art.
Silberman, Lou H. “Compassion.” Encyclopedia Judaica. 2nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2007. 122–23. This article gives a brief account of the theme of compassion as addressed in the Bible and in Rabbinic literature.
Sollors, Werner. Neither Black nor White yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. In order to explore the issue of race, this book analyzes recurrent motifs in scientific and legal works as well as in fiction, drama, and poetry.
Stein, Gertrude. “Portraits and Repetition.” Lectures in America. Boston: Beacon, 1985. 165–208. In this essay, the author defends herself against the criticism that her literary portraits of fellow artists are full of repetition. She insists on the difference between emphasis and repetition.
Steiner, George. Grammars of Creation. London: Faber and Faber, 2001. This book addresses the various “nothingnesses” that contemporary individuals live with. Not only are individual lives haunted by absence, but every work of art is influenced by what Steiner calls “a two-fold shadow”: that of its own possible or preferable inexistence and that of its disappearance.
Tanner, Tony. City of Words: American Fiction, 1950–70. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. This volume gives an overview of the most prominent literary figures in American letters of the 1950s and 1960s.
“Top Hamas Official: Jews Use Blood in Their Passover Matzos.” Israel National News 31 July 2014. www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/183541#.Vc0kwrJViko. This article deals with the idea that the “matzah blood libel,” traditionally used by some Muslims, was used by a top Hamas representative in Lebanon, Osama Hamdan.
Turtel, Chasia. “Beilis, Menahem Mendel.” Encyclopaedia Judaica. 2nd ed. Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2007. 267–68. This article gives a biographical sketch of M. Mendel Beilis, on whom Yakov Bok, the fictional character of The Fixer, is modeled.
Vigil, Barbara. “The Jewish Communities.” Multilingualism in Spain: Sociolinguistic and Psycholinguistic Aspects of Linguistic Minority Groups. Ed. M. Teresa Turell. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2000. 235–53. This book, which starts from the idea that multilingualism in Spain explores the sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic aspects of established and new migrant minority groups in Spain, covers three key areas: language, migration, and discrimination. The reference here is to Jewish communities in Spain.
Wasserman, Eric. “An Interview with Ehud Havazelet.” Bosewell Magazine (online) October 2000. www.ericwasserman.com/docs/EHUD%20HAVAZELET-interview.pdf. According to the interviewer, Israel-born Ehud Havazelet continues the tradition of storytellers such as Malamud. During the interview, in which the writer is asked about his work Eight Rabbis on the Roof, he talks about his writing habits and the themes that are of interest to him, among other things.
Wirth-Nesher, Hana. “Jewish-American Autobiography.” Prooftexts 18 (1998): 113–20. This essay gives a general overview of the theme of autobiography in Jewish American writing. Interestingly, Prooftexts devoted one special issue (18.2–3, 1998) and the Jewish Quarterly Review another one (95.1, 2005) to this question.
Wollheim, Richard. “Art, Interpretation and the Creative Process.” New Literary History 15.2 (Winter 1984): 241–53. The author of this essay proposes a method of criticism in the arts through what he calls “the Scrutiny thesis.”
Wroblewsky, Vincent von. “Jaspers, Sartre, Camus und die Atombombe.” Karl Jaspers und Jean-Paul Sartre im Dialog: Ihre Sicht auf Existenz, Freiheit und Verantwortung. Ed. Anton Hügli and Manuela Hackel. Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang, 2015. 209–33. The author of this chapter reflects on philosophical issues such as existence, freedom, and responsibility in light of the effects of the dropping of the atomic bomb. In order to find an answer, he establishes a dialogue between Jaspers, Sartre, and Camus.
Yacobi, Tamar. “Pictorial Models and Narrative Ekphrasis.” Poetics Today 16.4 (Winter 1995): 599–649. ncadjarmstrong.com/ma--art-through-a-lens-/pictorial_models.pdf. Taking the term ekphrasis as a point of departure, this essay analyzes two neglected forms—pictorial models and narrative ekphrasis.
Zamora, Lois Parkinson. Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary U.S. and Latin American Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. This is a comparative literary study of apocalyptic themes and narrative techniques in the contemporary North and Latin American novel. The author, demonstrating that there are symbolic tensions inherent in the apocalyptic myth with special meaning for postmodern writers, focuses on the works of Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Walker Percy.