Bernard Malamud 1914-1986

Bernard Malamud was born on April 26, 1914 in New York, the older of two sons of a Russian immigrant storekeeper. His mother died when he was fourteen. He grew up in Brooklyn in a household without books, music, or pictures on the wall. During the Great Depression, he worked at the census office and at a yarn factory to help support his family, but he felt these youthful deprivations were important to him as a writer.

After attending City College of New York and Columbia University, Malamud began publishing short stories in a number of well-known magazines. Malamud taught English in New York City high schools and fiction at Oregon State University and Bennington College in Vermont.

Malamud is often referred to as a “Jewish writer.” He is a Jewish writer in the same sense that Dickens is a social-protest writer, or Jane Austen a domestic novelist.

Suffering is Malamud's theme, and upon it he works a thousand variations: some comical, some menacing; some austere, some grotesque; some imaginative, others classic. The Jew as symbol for suffering mankind is hardly an original idea. The tormented characters of Bernard Malamud's fiction, although fated often to despair, curse, submit, and turn aside, still cling to the Romantic's determination to reject old evidence, to present a new solution.

It is a strange fact that Malamud's first novel has nothing to do with the Jews.

In 1952 he published his first novel The Natural. It depicts the life of a gifted baseball player. The young natural - the almost supernaturally gifted athlete - Roy Hobbs, begins his career by striking out the Whammer, greatest man in the game. This is not only pure American folklore, it is also right out of Frazer: the young God kills the old and takes his place. Roy thus earns the right to be cut down by a crazed woman assassin who wants to kill all the brightest and best men in sports, the heroes of the nation. He is not killed, however; only crippled. He is haunted by bad memories and evil women. After years, he pulls himself to the top again, only to be himself struck out by a new bright-faced boy. He is then plunged into a final scandal and humiliation, because of his own foolish lusts. But as he goes down he crushes the evil that has preyed on him; and there are the usual signs that he will rise again; a good woman waits for him.

The Natural was made into a popular film in 1984. After that several other works appeared, including The Assistant (1958), A New Life (1961), Pictures of Fidelman (1969), The Tenants (1971), and Dubin's Lives (1979).

The relationship between two men is the heart of the second novel The Assistant. They are the grocer and assistant, aggressor and victim. Frank Alpine, who has wandered into petty crime, becomes involved in the robbery and beating of Morris Bober, a luck-deserted Jewish grocer. The Assistant is the story of Alpine's slow, bitter self-subjection to his former victim; their lives become increasingly entangled until Alpine becomes Bober: at the grocer's death he takes his place, an assistant no longer. Out of the dirt and the deprivation of the novel's slum setting there has come, not the Naturalistic cry of pain, but an inescapable sense of mystic union: the identity of the oppressor and the oppressed. The oppressed is represented as the Jew in this novel; Alpine is Italian - "lam of Italian extraction." But from the start these distinctions are blurred; there is nothing particularly "Italian" about Alpine, except that he understands the preparation of minestrone and pizza. A short time later he is himself called a Jew, with some justice if little delicacy, by his former partner in crime. In some incomprehensible fashion Frank Alpine has taken Bober's fate upon himself.

In A New Life Malamud abandons the two-man relationship which forms the basis of most of his best work and returns to the problem of the hero solo, much as he set up in The Natural. In A New Life he puts some real effort into a heroine, Pauline Gilley, the married woman with whom Levin falls in love. She has suffered, she endures, she makes mistakes, she gives somewhat too liberally of her love. Malamud explores the new avenues opened by the relationship between Levin and Pauline with insight and affection. Levin has his new life at hand even if it may not be one of wine and song. His defeated adversary taunts him: Levin has now no money and no job_, and no prospect of one; a wife of notorious weakness, poor health and inconsistency and two expensive children not his own.

He was also a prolific writer of short fiction. Through his stories in collections such as The Magic Barrel (1958), for which he received the National Book Award, Idiots First (1963), and Rembrant's Hat (1973) he conveyed - more than any other American-born writer - a sense of the Jewish present and past, the real and the surreal, fact and legend.

The story The Magic Barrel is one of the most beautiful recreations of Malamud's vision, but it is outdone in some respects at least by the remarkable Angel Levine. Here the problem of suffering is formally stated, in almost Biblical, or to be more exact, Cabalistic terms. The struggles of its humble hero Manischevits are those of Job: his business is wiped out, even the insurance; his health is ruined, but he must work on for his.wife, who is on her deathbed. He prays to God to give his sweetheart health: "Give Fanny back her health, and to me for myself that I shouldn't feel pain in every step. Kelp now or tomorrow is too late." Help comes to him from a characteristically ludicrous source: a Negro Levine who claims to be an angel sent from Heaven. At first Manischevits rejects him but finally he overcomes his pride and his logic and seeks for. his own salvation, he publicly confesses his faith and at the last his faith has restored his wife and his health to him.

In his novels and short stories Bernard Malamud depicts the struggle of ordinary people, often focusing on their desire to improve their lives. He uses the Jewish people to represent all of humanity, capturing their attempt to maintain a link of their cultural heritage while trying to cope with the realities of the modern world. While some of Malamud's characters achieve success, others experience failure. By portraying people in both victory and defeat, Malamud creates a delicate balance between tragedy and comedy in his works. Bernard Malamud's monumental work The Fixer (1966) earned him the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. Set in Russia around the turn of the 20^th century, it is a thinly veiled glimpse at an actual case of blood libel. Malamud underscores the suffering of his hero, Yakov Bok, and the struggle against all odds to endure.

Bernard Malamud was one of the principal figures in the group of Jewish writers whose work has enriched American literature in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet Malamud preferred not to be so easily pigeon-holed. He did indeed write about Jews, but he wrote for all people.

Malamud's characters are usually discovered at some barren level of bare subsistence. Though we may feel compassion for them, they themselves do not display the least self-pity. If their plight is sad, it is also triumphant, because they are surviving in heroic fashion against the odds all humans face. "As you are grooved, so you are grieved," Malamud once wrote as preamble to an account of his own bleak upbringing. It was the suffering of European Jews during World War II that convinced Malamud he had something to say as a writer. "I for one believe that not enough has been made of the tragedy of the destruction of six million Jews," he has said. "Somebody has to cry - even if it's a writer, twenty years later."

Malamud's unique drama is spun out of the commonplace, the tragicomedy of survival in a brutal world. But his stories are always informed by love and, indeed, his characters are largely redeemed by human love.

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