arts & entertainment
Malamud's
Magic
Novds anti Stones
R f the 1940s & ios
I
Re-evaluating the great (but underappreciated) novelist on the 100th anniversary of
his birth, the Library of America enshrines his deeply humanistic works.
Diane Cole
Special to the Jewish News
inally: With the publication of two
handsome volumes (and a third in
the works) of the novels and short
stories of Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), the
Library of America has at long last welcomed
into its pantheon of American literary greats
the Brooklyn-born author of such well-
known works of fiction as The Natural (yup,
the source for the blockbuster baseball movie
starring Robert Redford), The Fixer (which
won the Pulitzer Prize and also spawned a
movie, this one starring Alan Bates), The
Assistant and others.
Literary reputations are more unpredict-
able than the weather, so one can only guess
why it took longer for Malamud to receive
such eminently deserved recognition than
it did for Saul Bellow and Philip Roth; they
are the two literary luminaries with whom
Malamud's work is most often linked, by
virtue of the fact that all three frequently
(though by no means exclusively) drew upon
their experience as Jews to write about Jews.
Each of these three writers is distinctive in
his greatness. But Malamud's relative neglect
in recent years has been a mystery. His care-
fully crafted sentences can dazzle with their
deft precision and unexpected humor. His
plots easily mix the absolute realism of daily
life with the zany illogic of myth and magic.
Many of his characters can be described
as heroic schlemiels — downtrodden, vul-
nerable and mournful of their past failures,
yet nonetheless persistent in their eager and
often clueless efforts to redeem their losses
and start anew. Whether they succeed or not,
it is in their pursuit of such quests that their
souls are revealed, both to the reader and to
themselves.
And now the Library of America's publi-
cation of Malamud's works from the 1940s
through the 1960s — the decades in which
the author was at his most productive —
has made the time ripe for a re-evaluation
through rereading for those familiar with his
work, as well as an introduction upon first
reading for those new to the fiction of this
great literary humanist.
Humanist, because what it means to be
human — and what it takes to remain not
just human but humane despite great suf-
fering — are among the subjects Malamud
explores in greatest depth.
My personal favorite among his novels is
his second, The Assistant, published in 1957.
The setting — a mom-and-pop neighbor-
hood grocery store always on the verge of
failing — comes from Malamud's life.
Malamud's father was — like Malamud's
fictional character Morris Bober — a
Russian-Jewish immigrant with limited edu-
cation who, as a grocer, struggled to make a
decent living for his family.
Decency is the key word here, the defin-
ing quality that Morris will not let go of,
even after he is robbed and beaten in his
deserted store, threatened out of business by
a newly opened price-cutting supermarket
around the corner, saddened by his inability
to brighten the limited prospects for his
beloved daughter, Helen.
It is she who becomes the romantic focus
of the sad-sack "assistant" of the title, Frank
Alpine, a non-Jew who ultimately appren-
tices himself to the goal of learning what it
means to be a mentsh.
For these characters, and throughout
Malamud's work, mentshlichkeit (all the qual-
ities that make someone a mentsh) is akin to
a spiritual value that transcends observance
or religious belief.
The rabbi's plainspoken eulogy for
Morris Bober sums up this creed this way:
"There are many ways to be a Jew:' the rabbi
declares. "Morris Bober was to me a true Jew
because he lived in the Jewish experience,
which he remembered, and with the Jewish
heart. Maybe not to our formal tradition
— for this I don't excuse him — but he was
true to the spirit of our life — to want for
others that which he wants also for himself.
... He suffered, he endured, but with hope....
What more does our sweet God ask his poor
people?"
In terms of asking, in Malamud's short
stories, it's usually the poor immigrant Jews
struggling to make ends meet who pray for
a miracle. But whether the events that tran-
spire in the aftermath of those requests are
the work of God, fate or the trickster powers
of coincidence is left for the beseeching pro-
tagonists, and the reader, to decide.
Particularly in his short stories (a genre
at which he excelled), these themes play out
with the upended logic of fable and folklore,
infused with what I think of as Malamud's
own brand of magical realism.
Malamud's first short story collection,
published in 1958, was in fact titled The
Magic Barrel, after one such magical story: A
serious-minded rabbinical student becomes
a fool to Cupid after engaging the services of
a cagey matchmaker who consults Tarot-like
cards filled with descriptions of any number
of possible matches.
In a similar vein, in "Angel Levine," a tailor
prays for his wife's recovery from fatal illness
and unwittingly conjures an angel who hap-
pens to be both black and Jewish. In "Idiots
First," a dying father desperate to seat his dis-
abled son Isaac on a train bound for relatives
who will care for him must wrestle first with
the conductor (or is he the Angel of Death?).
And in "The Jewbird," a crow that calls
himself Schwartz flies through the window
of a Jewish family in New York, asks, in flu-
ent Yiddish, for "a piece of herring with a
crust of bread:' and then explains he's on the
fly (literally) from "Anti-Semeets," including
"eagles, vultures and hawks:'
Malamud grappled with anti-Semitism
most directly and at greatest length in The
Fixer (1966), which he based on the infa-
mous "blood libel" case of the Russian Jew
Mendel Beilis, falsely accused and unjustly
imprisoned in 1913 for the purported ritual
murder of a Christian boy.
Malamud's fictional stand-in for Beilis is
Yakov Bok, a "fixer," or handyman, singled
out for punishment by the czarist govern-
ment for no other reason than his happening
to be a Jew.
This book, more than any other by
Malamud, can be said to be "about" some-
thing: a clear indictment of prejudice and
injustice. But as fiction, it did not stand up
to my memory of it, with Malamud's writing
sounding uncharacteristically flat, as if con-
strained by the importance of his historical
subject, his voice trapped within the confines
of Yakov Bok's prison cell.
All these works demonstrate Malamud's
deep commitment to what the rabbi in The
With two new Library of America edi-
tions, Bernard Malamud (1914-1986)
belatedly takes his place among fellow,
lauded 20th-century Jewish writers
Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.
Assistant aptly calls "the Jewish experience:'
Yet readers who think of Malamud as only
concerned with Jewish subjects can make the
mistake of assuming that those novels and
tales without Jewish characters at their center
(including most notably his first novel, 1952's
The Natural) are marginal to his opus.
The "collected works" nature of the Library
of America volumes loudly refutes that view.
It makes the case instead not just for the
breadth of Malamud's vision and for the agile
versatility of his craft, but also for the conti-
nuity of his themes throughout his career.
The Natural, for instance, is ostensibly
about the "natural" baseball pitcher and slug-
ger Roy Hobbs, a player for the New York
Knights so supernaturally gifted that he can
rip the cover off a baseball with a mighty
whack of the handmade bat he has dubbed,
in childlike innocence, "Wonder Boy:'
The subject is certainly not discernibly
"Jewish," but there is as much to ponder
about the unexpected workings of fate and
magic as there is in "Angel Levine" and
numerous others of Malamud's tales.
To be sure, Roy plays in a baseball field
imbued with mythic hope and tragedy
— a strikingly different setting from the
Depression-era grocery store of The Assistant
—but like Morris Bober and Frank Alpine,
Roy is also struggling to beat the long odds
with which his past has burdened him.
So is S. Levin, the no-more-than-nominal-
ly Jewish anti-hero of A New Life, Malamud's
1961 novel of academia, who leaves behind
him the sorrows of life in New York to reviv-
ify his very being in the wondrous natural
beauty of the Pacific Northwest.
That bucolic, light-flecked panorama
could not differ more from the rancid grim-
ness of Yakov Bok's cell. But Malamud's
imagination encompassed Bok and Levin,
as well as Morris Bober and Roy Hobbs and
Angel Levine and so many others. May his
writings, and his magic, endure.
❑
May 22 • 2014
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