Bernard Malamud: A Centennial Tribute

By Victoria Aarons

Master storyteller and literary stylist Bernard Malamud is considered one of the top three most influential postwar American Jewish writers, having established a voice and a presence for other authors in the literary canon. Along with Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, Malamud brought to life a decidedly American Jewish protagonist and a newly emergent voice that came to define American letters and that has continued to influence writers for over half a century. This collection is a tribute to Malamud in honor of the hundredth anniversary of his birth. Literary critic Harold Bloom suggests that “Malamud is perhaps the purest storyteller since Leskov,” the nineteenth-century Russian novelist and satirist. Novelist Cynthia Ozick, in a tribute to Malamud, described him as “the very writer who had brought into being a new American idiom of his own idiosyncratic invention.”

Unlike other collections devoted to Malamud, this collection is international in scope, compiling diverse essays from the United States, France, Germany, Greece, and Spain, and demonstrating the wide range of scholarship and approaches to Bernard Malamud’s fiction. The essays show the breadth and depth of this masterful craftsman and explore through his short fiction and his novels such topics as the Malamudian protagonist’s relation to the urban/natural space; Malamud’s approach to death; race and ethnicity; the Malamudian hero as modern schlemiel; and the role of fantasy in Malamud’s fiction.

Bernard Malamud is a comprehensive collection that celebrates a voice that helped to shape the last fifty years of literary works. Readers of American literary criticism and Jewish studies alike will appreciate this collection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Release date: Sep 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9780814341155

Victoria Aarons

Victoria Aarons is O. R. & Eva Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature at Trinity University and the author of A Measure of Memory: Storytelling and Identity in American Jewish Fiction and What Happened to Abraham?: Reinventing the Covenant in American Jewish Fiction. She has published widely on American Jewish and Holocaust literatures and is a contributor to the two-volume compendium Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work. Avinoam J. Patt is Philip D. Feltman Professor of Modern Jewish History at the Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Hartford, where he is also director of the Museum of Jewish Civilization and administers the Edward Lewis Wallant Award. He is the author of Finding Home and Homeland: Jewish Youth and Zionism in the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Wayne State University Press, 2009) and co-editor with Michael Berkowitz of “We Are Here”: New Approaches to the Study of Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Wayne State University Press, 2010). He has been a contributor to several projects at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and is co-author of the recently published source volume Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1938­–1940. Mark Shechner is professor emeritus at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. He has published widely on American literature and American Jewish fiction and intellectual life and has done extensive book reviewing over the course of his career.

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For our children,

Aaron and Gabriel

and

Federico and Micaela

A smart man hears one word but he understand[s] two.

—Bernard Malamud, The Assistant

Contents

Preface

Bernard Malamud, Person and Writer by Paul Malamud

Mediterranean by Paul Malamud

Part I. U.S. Voices

Introduction: Moved by a Memory: Bernard Malamud’s Literary Landscape

VICTORIA AARONS

Novels

1. The Beard Makes the Man: Bernard Malamud’s A New Life

LEAH GARRETT

2. I Shit My Death: From the Providential to the Excremental in The Fixer

HOLLI LEVITSKY

3. The Jew as Vampire in Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer

ANDREW M. GORDON

4. Malamud’s The Tenants and the Problem of Ralph Ellison’s Second Novel

TIMOTHY PARRISH

5. Unbound and Un-bodied: Reading Race in Malamud’s The Tenants

JESSICA LANG

Short Stories

6. Midrash, Memory, and Miracles or Near-Miracles: Bernard Malamud’s All-Too-Human Project

VICTORIA AARONS

Part II. European Voices

Introduction: Encountering Bernard Malamud through an I-Thou Relationship

GUSTAVO SÁNCHEZ CANALES

Novels

7. Rethinking the Discourse of Suffering in Bernard Malamud’s Fiction

PILAR ALONSO

8. What’s in a Name?: Aptronyms and Archetypes in Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant and The Fixer

GUSTAVO SÁNCHEZ CANALES

9. Fixing Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer through Translation: From El hombre de Kiev (1967) to El reparador (2011)

MARTÍN URDIALES SHAW

10. Dostoevsky, Lawrence, Malamud: Malamud’s Heroes, Facing the Twin Rejection of Identity and Sensuality

RÉMI ASTRUC, TRANSLATED BY ALAN ASTRO

11. Writing on the Edge of Doom: Theological Reflections on Bernard Malamud’s God’s Grace

TILL KINZEL

Short Stories

12. Seeking the Man behind the Text or a Biographical Approach to Bernard Malamud’s Short Stories

EMILIO CAÑADAS RODRÍGUEZ

13. Malamud’s Short Fiction: Angels and Specters

FÉLIX MARTÍN GUTIÉRREZ

14. Bernard Malamud’s and John Updike’s Art Stories: The Act of Creation in Still Life and Leaves

ARISTI TRENDEL

15. Arthur Fidelman’s Aesthetic Adventures and Malamud’s Poetics of Creativity

THEODORA TSIMPOUKI

Annotated Works Cited

Contributors

Index

Preface

Bernard Malamud (1914–1986), consummate storyteller, artful craftsman, and exacting stylist, is generally considered not only one of the three most influential postwar American-Jewish writers but also a writer holding a central place in the canon of twentieth-century American letters. Malamud came to prominence at an important moment in American social, political, and cultural history, writing at a time that saw dramatic changes in both America’s self-assessment in the aftermath of World War II and in its ability to assimilate diverse sectors of its population. Along with the novelists Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud brought to life a decidedly American-Jewish protagonist and a newly emergent Jewish voice that came to define American letters and influence American writers for over half a century, an influence that continues. The Malamudian voice and characteristic urban landscape that define his fiction speak to the changing ethos in American life and thought at this pivotal, mid-twentieth-century moment in American history. Malamud’s literary oeuvre reflects a struggle to achieve order in both life and literature, as well as a deep appreciation for the supple and elastic forms of the written word (Malamud, introduction vi). Malamud’s legacy continues to be a hallmark of American literature, with the very best of his work—the novels and short stories that create the felt conditions of what it means human (Idiots First, Stories 44)—an expression of the deep investment in an ethical life and in the rigors of the human sentence (Malamud, introduction xii).

While Malamud remains a major, formative voice in American letters, recent years have shown an emergent, burgeoning interest in Malamud among European scholars, who regard Malamud with growing interest not only as a central American voice but also as a writer whose fiction opens itself up to an exploration of stylistic technique, narrative voice, and the making of character. Thus, in recognition of this major voice in American literature, the editors of this volume have brought together both North American and European scholars in an attempt to show the range and depth of the possibilities for Malamud studies in the twenty-first century. In celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of Malamud’s birth and in recognition of the thirtieth anniversary of Malamud’s death, the editors of this tribute have attempted to bring together under one title a variety of approaches and responses to Malamud’s central, defining works of fiction.

We have intended the essays gathered here to play off one another, to show differences as well as overlapping concerns and interests. In engaging scholars from the United States and abroad, we hope to establish a dialogue between the critical, traditional study of Malamud in America and the newly emerging one in Europe. Malamud’s work lends itself to this cross-cultural engagement. Very much in the tradition of twentieth-century American writers, Malamud traveled to Europe, centering many of his stories there, a fertile context for looking back to the origins of America and its comparative cultural successes and failures. Many of Malamud’s stories are set in Europe, especially the Italian stories. Europe was, for Malamud, a landscape for his characters’ self-assessment against the backdrop of history. In, for example, The Last Mohican, Malamud’s recurring protagonist, Fidelman, in Rome, standing in the Eternal City, gazing at the remains of the Baths of Diocletian, whispers to himself, Imagine all that history (Complete 200). Europe figures in the Fidelman stories as a place of possibilities, opportunities, and self-reinvention. Abroad, Fidelman experienced the sensation of suddenly seeing himself as he was (201). And Henry Levin, in the story The Lady of the Lake, travels abroad seeking romance. . . . He liked the sense of foreignness of the city—of things different, anything likely to happen (Complete 221). Paul Malamud’s poem Mediterranean, which is a part of this collection, speaks to his father’s affinity and deep appreciation for a landscape and a history so different from his own, a poor Jew from Brooklyn who had made good, walking under the olive trees.

The editors have arranged this book in an attempt to illustrate the richness and complexity of Malamud’s work as a way of paying tribute to the writer and to the subtle utterance and perfection of the written word that is such a fundamental feature of Malamud’s craft. Our hope is that including scholarly approaches from a range of countries—the United States, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, and Greece—will multiply the possibilities of study and appreciation of this important author and his work. And while our intention, initially, was to show an understanding of Malamud from two different perspectives—U.S. and European—the exchange among scholars demonstrates the enormous breadth and complexity in such a diverse perspectival reach. For ease of reading, we have structured this book in two parts: U.S. and European Voices. Each is introduced separately in order to set up, in general terms, the direction and focus for the evolving perspectives. What we find in such a dialogue is a kind of chiastic exchange, reflecting one of Malamud’s major literary tropes, a relationship that has at its center the experience of an essential connection and consanguinity.

Bernard Malamud, Person and Writer

PAUL MALAMUD

(Address delivered at City College, New York, May, 2013)

Dad was known as a short-story writer and a novelist. The peak of his career was between the early 1960s and 1980 or so. He was known for his short stories, which began to appear in Commentary, the literary magazine, in the ’50s. He was also known for his novels, such as the baseball yarn The Natural and The Assistant. The latter book was based in part on his own father’s circumstances as an impoverished Jewish immigrant grocer living in Brooklyn, during the Great Depression. In the ’60s, Dad wrote The Fixer, set in tsarist Russia, dealing in a fictional manner with the anti-Semitism of that time and place. A number of his books became best sellers, and most have been made into movies, including, famously, The Natural, starring Robert Redford.

Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1914, into straitened circumstances. His family was Russian Jewish, immigrants who had virtually nothing, except their wits. His father, Max, owned a grocery store near the old Elevated Railroad. Since they lived in the back of the store, Dad’s childhood was full of roars, rumbles, and fumes from the trains. When Dad was a small child, he contracted pneumonia and almost died. Upon his unexpected recovery, Max gave him a children’s encyclopedia, though he could barely afford it, and that set Dad reading. His early life was not without frustrations and setbacks. His mother, Bertha, died early and under distressing circumstances, and Dad’s younger brother, Eugene, was ill all his life. Dad and his stepmother never got along.

What salvaged Dad’s ambitions were other relatives and Jewish families of the neighborhood, some of whom befriended him, and the New York City educational system of the day, which he came to esteem. As a child, he traveled alone a great distance each day to attend a good public school. He went on to Erasmus Hall high school and, as you know, received his bachelor’s degree at City College. Like many ambitious kids of his day, he also had an instinct for ideas, philosophies, and the written word.

He began writing in high school. From then on, he had no goal except to write fiction and, later, to teach English. He did not seriously consider any other path in life, whatever the risk to his opportunities or his finances. He had an unswerving belief in his ability to prevail as a writer. His great break was being published in the 1950s by Commentary magazine. His second break came in the form of the celebrated literary editor Robert Giroux, who accepted The Natural for publication on behalf of Harcourt Brace in the early ’50s. When Giroux moved on to a different publishing house, Farrar, Straus, he continued to publish Dad’s work there.

After my father married my mother, Ann, another New Yorker, in 1945, he occupied college teaching positions, first in Oregon, then in Vermont. Two novels, A New Life, and Dubin’s Lives, came out of those experiences. Throughout those years, they had many cordial community relationships, and my mother’s deserved reputation as a cook and hostess helped cement those. By the early ’70s, he and Mom had returned to Manhattan, this time uptown, and enjoyed such recognition and honor as comes the way of local boys who make good.

Dad was a very gentle man, who had great sympathy for the plights of others. Both my parents had an insatiable interest in whatever community they lived in, and in people’s life stories and adventures. Dad had great flashes of geniality and warmth and an unusual sense of fantasy and humor. He also had a pessimistic Russian quality. He did not see himself as a writer in the Russian tradition or even solely in the Jewish tradition and felt happy to be accepted as an American novelist. He used to make up droll and funny fantasy stories to tell me when I was a small boy. He encouraged me to read constantly and to do well in school. He was extremely proud to be able to give me a set of World Book Encyclopedia and all kinds of other things his parents had not been able to give him. When I got into a good college in the 1960s, he was pleased. He and my mother bickered, yet theirs was a close and enduring marriage. At the beginning, she typed his manuscripts, read his early stuff, critiqued it, helped him proofread, and made them friends throughout. Dad always saw people as individuals—he had little serious interest in politics, took his centrist liberal opinions from his friends, and never ever had the slightest interest in systemic ideology or what came to be called political correctness.

Dad loved his college teaching. He admired intellect in his students, if he was sometimes scandalized by ignorance and humorlessness. He never questioned the premise that the teaching of literature was the core of civilized existence. His day was consumed by writing, teaching when he did it, and voracious reading and class preparation in the evening. As with all creative people, part of his mind was elsewhere—in his case, constructing plots, scenes, and dialogue. The great love of his life was the written word.

That is my memory of the person you are honoring here. Thank you again, on Dad’s behalf, for this recognition of his achievement, from his alma mater.

Mediterranean

Paul Malamud

The olive groves, the wine-blush of the sea,

the salt air, looking down from ancient cliffs

on the Mediterranean, as if blood

of the old world turned to gold in the bright sun,

gold stones and gold rough grasses underfoot

on the Mediterranean coast in the sixties:

me a gangling teenager with my parents.

We walked towards a cafe with marble floors—

through olive trees, there, then, the plinth of coolness.

The sea like Lacoon’s serpent, was coiled beneath

in compact sheathes, a cobalt blue, blood red.

We sipped wine—no-one knew we were alive.

My Dad said, this is Homer’s wine-dark sea,

as the sun glinted on the crinkled sea,

thousands of feet below, beneath the cliffs,

He could say it without too much irony,

letting it go, past irony, the feeling,

walking uphill with his wife on the small path,

there in late middle age, a happy day;

in sunny southern France, the olive groves

past the dry yellow grass, rough olive trees,

black-clad women going up the cobbled hills,

turning to dusk—the sea, a cobalt jewel,

liquid, coiling like intertwined snakes.

That was his gift, the oddest gift, the feeling,

letting it go, past irony, the feeling

that all experience was real, sea,

both blue and red, deep, indescribable.

This is Homer’s sea, my father said,

a poor Jew from Brooklyn who had made good,

walking under the olive trees,

in the hot sun, fifty years ago;

no-one could say it for me, then, like him,

so happy, self-assured, so full of life;

as I loped behind, in my penny loafers,

and my best checked summer short-sleeve shirt.

We walked on the streets of those medieval towns

sand in the rubber sandals, on our toes,

bitten to death by olive-fat mosquitoes,

laughing or shouting at the souvenirs,

walking towards the hillside cafe, laughing,

to eat a fish lunch in our relatively happy

discomfort and quarreling. See, that was it: feeling;

he had the gift of feeling—making it real

like the man in the play by Camus,

he made a coffee cup real when he touched it.

Mediterranean originally appeared in Old Poems, New Translations by Paul Francis Malamud, 2013.

PART I

U.S. Voices

Introduction

Moved by a Memory: Bernard Malamud’s Literary Landscape

VICTORIA AARONS

How past-drenched present life was.

—Bernard Malamud, A New Life

The year 2014 marked the hundredth anniversary of Bernard Malamud’s birth. Born in Brooklyn, New York, on April 26, 1914, to Russian-immigrant parents Max and Bertha (née Fidelman) Malamud, Bernard Malamud would become one of three major post–World War II American-Jewish writers to distinguish and authenticate the richly nuanced, urban voice of an emerging Jewish presence in American literature, a presence that has influenced generations of writers. In concert with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, Malamud sanctioned the wide and fluid range of Jewish expression in American culture, a distinct ethos in the literature and life of postwar America that continues to speak to the felt experience of the changing culture of Jewish American life. In Malamud’s fiction, one finds the possibilities, the promise and the failures, the small victories and the inevitable disillusions of self-reinvention and self-fashioning in the second half of the twentieth century, a transformative period in American history. For Malamud, such an undertaking is all a part of the arduous affair of making a life, which can become, as one of Malamud’s characters ruefully reminds us, a dreadfully boring business unless you think you have a future (The German Refugee 106).¹ Imagining a future becomes the essential ordeal—both invitation and impediment—that drives Malamud’s characters forward into the mercurial patterns of mid- to late-twentieth-century American life. Summoned into the future, Malamud’s characteristically weary wanderers and petitioners, moved by a memory, struggle against isolation and grief, all the while embracing their place in a long history of Jewish suffering and exultation (The Jewbird 154).

The blueprint of Malamud’s literary landscape draws on the re-created worlds of Jewish history and his own much-more-proximate familial past. The son of a struggling immigrant grocer and mother whose suicide came to haunt so many of his characters, Malamud shapes his fictional settings by the circumstances of his own background and, at the same time, invokes the conditions of the Jewish-immigrant experience in America, the instabilities and vulnerabilities of immigrant life and the Yiddish-inflected English that in many ways defined that life. As the biographer Philip Davis has suggested, Malamud was a time-haunted man (Davis 6). Although his literary sensibilities and, for the most part, his terrain are distinctly American, his writing is informed by distinct moments in Jewish history. The 1966 novel The Fixer, a fictionalized account of the Beilis trial in which a Jew was accused of blood libel and for which Malamud received both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, reveals this preoccupation with Jewish history. The short story The Lady of the Lake, in a similarly historicized way, evokes the suffering endured in the Holocaust. The trope of time is a fixture of Malamud’s writing: the narrative present as well as the imagined future as informed by the past, a distinctly Jewish past of lamentation and celebration, one, as Frank Alpine, at the close of the novel The Assistant, discovers, enraged and inspired him ([1974] 297).

Malamud’s characters, who straddle the dual worlds of Jewish and American and the requirements of brokering both, find themselves beholden to a cultural inheritance that shapes their experience of the juxtaposition of their worlds. In the introduction to The Stories of Bernard Malamud (published in 1983), Malamud explains about the early years of his writing career, Almost without understanding why, I was thinking about my father’s immigrant life—how he earned his meager living and what he paid for it, and about my mother’s, diminished by fear and suffering—as perhaps matter for my fiction. . . . I had them in mind as I invented the characters who became their fictional counterparts . . . and felt I would often be writing about Jews, in celebration and expiation (viii–ix). Thus, Malamud returns time and time again to stories about Jews, stories about impoverished grocers, shadchonim (marriage brokers), troubled rabbis, Jewish angels, schnorrers (beggars), lonely petitioners, mourners, and depleted refugees, those tragically for whom broke what breaks (Take Pity 6). Malamud is drawn to the past, and his fictive inspiration and landscape come instinctively from what he knows best, the daily sufferings of diasporic Jews. As the Soviet writer Feliks Levitansky, in Malamud’s short story Man in the Drawer, insists, When I write about Jews comes out stories, so I write about Jews (213). Jews and Jewish immigrant life become paradigmatic of both the success and failure of assimilation and also of the ways in which Jewish history and culture are grafted on American life. As Malamud explained, in Imaginative Writing and the Jewish Experience, Writing about Jews, for me at least, extends the area of imagination. I mean to say that the story of the Jews, of their history and culture, and the Jews themselves as people, are so rich in the ingredients of drama, so fruitful as a source of image, idea and symbol, that I feel I can at present more fully, even more easily, achieve my purpose as an American writer by writing of them (184). Thus, as the novelist Cynthia Ozick puts it in her tribute to Malamud, Remembrances: Bernard Malamud, He wrote about suffering Jews, about poor Jews, about grocers and fixers and birds and horses and angels in Harlem and matchmakers and salesmen and rabbis and landlords and tenants and egg chandlers and writers and chimpanzees; he wrote about the plentitude and unity of the world (27). And he did so in a language of the struggling immigrant Jew, the Yiddish of his background and his milieu, the sounds of home and of Eastern European Jewish life recreated in the voices of his characters and the very lives they embody—elegiac, plaintive, yearning voices, defining of the characters who inhabit them.

Indeed, Malamud’s fiction, in particular the short stories that create the urgency and immediacy of a dramatic moment—as Philip Roth has said, some of the best American short stories I’d ever read (or ever will)—unfold to the sound and gestures of language (Pictures). In recreating the voice of the Jewish immigrant, Malamud captures the felt expression of the lives of the inheritors of dual histories, of those living in between worlds: the receding life of Eastern European Jewry and the accelerating exigencies of twentieth-century, post-Holocaust American life. This is, for Malamud’s characters, a world of contradictions: insider / outsider; hope / despair, belonging / marginalization; comfort / disease; American / Jewish; English / Yiddish—poised in tense juxtaposition. In the very fluidity and malleability of the Yiddish-English that his characters, with great relish, speak, Malamud illustrates the pliability of that enormous representational project, the ways in which language defines experience as it is simultaneously shaped by that experience, signifying the past with the language, attitudes, and demeanor of Eastern European Jewish life grafted onto a volatile American cultural landscape. As Philip Davis has suggested, the voice of Malamud’s characters is the Yiddish-English amalgam that was in memory of the way his own father spoke. The second language of the son of immigrants with the original Yiddish still hanging around it (117). Malamud skillfully re-creates the spoken tongue of the immigrant Jew, his signature idiom of the clatter of two worlds, his special brand of Yiddish-English: It’s not English and it’s not Yiddish, explains Davidov, the census-taker in the short story Take Pity, but rather an old-fashioned language they don’t use it nowadays (11). And Malamud, in his skillful fusion of the languages of past and present, brings to life the sensations and dispositions of his Jewish characters, the condition, as one character puts it, of what it means human (Idiots First 44).

Reflecting a long and elastic tradition of Jewish linguistic fluidity and adaptability, Malamud celebrates the durability, the strength, and the resilience of his characters, those for whom the spoken word becomes an insistence on survival, the affirmation of self in a world that would prey on those who are most vulnerable. For the despondent transplant Oskar Gassner, a refugee of Nazi Germany, in the short story The German Refugee, as for so many others, the great loss was the loss of language—that they could not say what was in them to say (97). Thus, Malamud creates an idiom that speaks to his struggling characters’ attempts to shape, through language, the duality of worlds that they uneasily inhabit. The very language they speak provides a bridge to both worlds, a matter of clinging to the past and embracing an uncertain future. As Ozick has suggested, in giving life to his characters, Malamud brought into being a new American idiom of his own idiosyncratic invention. . . . He not only wrote in the American language, he augmented it with fresh plasticity, he shaped our English into startling new configurations (Remembrances 26). His characters speak their own intimate version of American English, drawing on the language of their forebears, the diasporic language of assimilation. In doing so, Malamud reshapes the linguistic structures and patterns, as Roth puts it, so to make them dance to his sad tune (Pictures). The Yiddish-English that defines Malamud’s characters evokes the contradictory impulses of their lives; it comes to represent ambiguous moments of exile and home. A language of assimilation and accommodation, their characteristic speech patterns—the idiomatic inversions and linguistic blending and recanting—create, as Davis suggests, the powerful intermingled language of thirst and hunger; the need for magic, or if not that, at least, a second chance (7).

As Saul Bellow wrote in a eulogy for the novelist following his premature death on March 18, 1986, at the age of seventy-two, Malamud in his novels and stories discovered a sort of communicative genius in the impoverished, harsh jargon of immigrant New York (Memory 436). Indeed, without question, Malamud was a wordsmith, a masterful craftsman of the carefully turned phrase, whose scrupulous, exacting prose becomes the measure of the painstaking construction of his characters’ lives. In the tribute, In Memory of Bernard Malamud, Bellow poses that for first-generation Americans, language is a spiritual mansion, expansive and with room for experimentation (436). The Yiddish-English of the sounds and utterances, the shape of the language in the mouths of Malamud’s characters—the linguistic tropes and turns of phrase—bend ordinary expression into extraordinary cadences. We find in Malamud’s fiction the perfect sentence—perfectly balanced, perfectly poised, as is the character of Teddy in the short story The Letter, a man who stands at the gate of a psychiatric hospital with a worn, finger-soiled letter in his hand. Standing in place, Teddy is poised as sentry with his letter in hand, a letter on which nothing is written, addressed to no one. Nonetheless, he held it as he always held it, as though he had held it always (156). Here the phrases are balanced by the chiasmus—always held it . . . held it always—and thus suggest the inversion and cessation of time, creating both timelessness and anticipation. Teddy waits for the reluctant Newman—the son who unwillingly comes to visit his father in the psychiatric hospital—to take from him his letter and, in something like a leap of faith, place it in the mailbox, for, as Teddy enigmatically cautions Newman, it won’t do you any good if you don’t" (157). Clinging to his letter, Malamud’s guardian of time and irrevocability will remain poised at the edge of possibility.

The troping of language as a signifier for its own production of meaning makes imperative, as Malamud once put it, the struggle to achieve order through fiction (introduction vii). The very texture of the language for Malamud makes emphatic the desperation with which his characters attempt to contain and mediate their lives. A writer of contradictions, Malamud captures the paradoxes and tensions of the lives his characters live in the linguistic push/pull and contrasting elements of his tightly constructed syntactical design. Consider, for example, the following antithesis from the short story Talking Horse, a line that, in its paradoxical apposition provides a choice: his character wonders, "if I’m Abramowitz, a horse; or a horse including Abramowitz (329; emphasis in the original); and this from Rembrandt’s Hat: Each froze the other out of his life; or froze him in" (273). These structural antitheses offer choices that are not really choices but a refashioning of the lens through which his characters mark their place in the world. The syntactical antitheses have the effect of simultaneously pushing out and pulling in, holding characters in the balance but also in an inseparable and irresistible alliance with each other. They are allied in their juxtaposition, mirror images of one another. As the beleaguered grocer Morris Bober, in the novel The Assistant, tells Frank Alpine, the man who came to rob him and now labors alongside him in the store, I suffer for you. . . . I mean you suffer for me (150). In such figuring of speech, Malamud creates the condition of antithesis, balanced by contradiction: perfectly aligned—perfectly precarious. We are presented with such paradoxes in, for example, the rabbinical student Leo Finkle’s mystification about his own motives and shortcomings: He had never loved anyone. Or perhaps it went the other way, that he did not love God so well as he might, because he had not loved man (The Magic Barrel 135); and this from The Assistant: The right thing was to make the right choice but he made the wrong. Even when it was right it was wrong (249). After all, in Malamud’s fictional world, nothing meant yes or it meant no (The Letter 155). The language of his utterance takes back just at the moment it gives.

Such shaping of the language creates a kind of stasis, possibility held in abeyance in the sharply constructed linguistic reversals and arrangements. Of Rubin regarding himself in the mirror wearing the hat that is the source of such tsouris, Malamud’s narrator says, He wore it like a crown of failure and hope (Rembrandt’s Hat 276). And of the chastened tailor Manischevitz, seeking God, bewilderingly cursing himself for having, beyond belief, believed, and later, having acknowledged that the black man sitting in his living room was, in fact, a disincarnated angel of God, he wonders, If you said it it was said. If you believed it you must say it. If you believed, you believed (Angel Levine 285, 289). Here the reversal—if you said it it was said—is arrested at the moment of the repetition (it it) whose proximity holds the utterance at its center, thus creating a momentary suspension, a stark exposure of desired surety in an otherwise unstable and inscrutable condition of living. In Malamud’s fictive enterprise, there are no such guarantees. Such tropes of contradiction in an otherwise static world offer possibilities, second chances for Malamud’s characters. For, after all, second chances is the language of the immigrant, as we find in the short story The Jewbird: presented with an open window, the skinny bird flew in. Flappity-flap with its frazzled black wings. That’s how it goes. It’s open, you’re in. Closed, you’re out and that’s your fate (144). His characters’ confusions about their futures and insecurities about place and identity are revealed in the balanced sentence, in the syntactical complexities, Malamud’s Yiddish-inflected English itself becoming an opening of possible meanings and permutations. We can see this anxiety about the opening up of possibility in the recurring pattern of the polyptoton, a repetition of the root of a term with different prefixes or suffixes: I’m frightened of the world. . . . It fills me with fright (My Son the Murderer 91). And even when up against the harsh reality of finalities, closures, as the narrator of Man in the Drawer discovers, there comes a time in a man’s life when to get where he has to—if there are no doors or windows—he walks through a wall (225).

In Malamud’s fiction, one hears the voices of his literary predecessors, establishing his place in the long and rich oral and written tradition of Jewish literature, storytellers attempting to fill in the gaps, to explain and adjudicate, to live in the world among others. When a character in the story The Mourners, for example, experiencing a shattering moment of mirroring, uncanny clarity, we are reminded of I. B. Singer’s host of dybbuks and dreamers, who pursue life beyond the material realm: "Then it struck him with a terrible force that the mourner was mourning him: it was he who was dead (34; emphasis in the original). So, too, in a Kafkaesque occasion of disorientation, a character such as the lonely, frightened son in My Son the Murderer stands staring with shut eyes in the mirror (85). And we hear the narrative assurance of Sholom Aleichem’s Tevye when Malamud’s character simply but aptly appraises life: Everybody that don’t die by age fifty-nine gets to be sixty (My Son the Murderer 88). And reaching back further into history and myth, a Malamudian character laments his forlorn and hapless condition in the elevated language of lament: Baring his chest, he smote the naked bones (Angel Levine" 285).

Reading Malamud is, at times, sheer poetry, as in the following lines from some of his short fiction: The wind white-capped the leaden waves and the slow surf broke on the empty beaches with a quiet roar (My Son the Murderer 91); All that can be seen is the white shawl luminously praying (Man in the Drawer 236); Albert, wearing a massive, spike-laden headache, rushed down the booming stairs (The Silver Crown 328); The thick ticking of the tin clock stopped (Idiots First 35); and violins and lit candles revolved in the sky (The Magic Barrel 143). The sharp crispness of the sentence, the sound and sensations and implied gesticulations, the figures and figuring of speech, and Malamud’s affinity for the texture of language create the balanced feat of making sense of experience. And, one might well suggest, as does the novelist Ehud Havazelet, that Malamud’s true mastery is realized in the short form: His genius is in the stories. Nobody will ever write stories like he did. That’s his crowning glory (Wasserman).

The spoken utterance becomes for Malamud’s characters a means of combating the solitary condition of grief. To his anguish, loneliness, as one character imagines, might come the momentary reprieve of human connection (My Son the Murderer 85). The minimalist, elliptical construction of the lament—To his anguish, loneliness—suggests the cumulative effect of suffering. What’s left out in the implied ellipsis makes emphatic the additive effect of sorrow: on top of anguish, for this character, is piled loneliness, misery accumulated, extended, endless, the weight of suffering. Enjoined together, anguish and loneliness will define his isolated experience. Standing alone, this singular, stark, minimal expression of grief foregrounds the aloneness of this character’s anguish, lonely because silenced, unacknowledged, and thus unrequited. This is why the imperiled writer-turned-taxi-driver in Man in the Drawer, with determined perseverance, attempts to have his stories smuggled out of the Soviet Union: I feel I am locked in drawer with my stories. Now I must get out or I suffocate (214). After all, as the Soviet writer of stories about Jews tells the reluctant narrator, Imagination makes authority (213). The voiced imagination here is—in keeping with a long tradition of Jewish storytelling—the measure of a life, as we find in this, a sentence to fall in love with: He could, with a little more courage, have been more than he was (The Assistant 278). As Malamud himself has expressed, Working alone to create stories . . . is not a bad way to live our human loneliness (introduction xiii). Malamud’s novels and short fiction conclude with a perfect sense of closure—we know they are coming, we anticipate them, and at the same time we do not want them to end because we are invested in the lives of his characters and the tenor of their unsettled futures.

The editors of this collection have divided the volume into two sections: the first composed of Malamud scholars from the United States, the second, European scholars. In doing so, we hope to show the wide range of approaches—international in scope—in response to this influential and enduring writer. The essays that follow show the immense fluidity and range of possibility in Malamud’s fiction, from his first publication of The Natural in 1952 to his late fiction. In doing so, we try to capture the rhythms and stylistic designs of genre and thematic arrangement, the leitmotif of voices aching to be heard, but also of the age in which Malamud wrote and lived. The essays gathered in this collection try to show the ways in which Malamud reaches