Parables in a Booklyn accent
DavidHerman pays a centenary tribute to a great American writer. Jennifer Lipman enjoys some stories
a job teaching English composition in Oregon, on the other side of America.
He had written to 200 colleges. Only two offered him a job. The move transformed him.
The 1950s were hugely productive. In 1952, he wrote The Natural, a novel about a baseball player, later filmed with Robert Redford. Then came his masterpiece, The Assistant (1957), a dark story of loyalty and betrayal, set in a grocery store in Brooklyn, a world familiar from his childhood.
This tells of a struggling Jewish grocer, Morris Bober, who is robbed by a young Italian whom he then, without knowing who he is, takes on as an “assistant”.
“‘Do you consider yourself a real Jew?’” Frank the Italian assistant asks Morris at one point. This is one of the questions at the heart of Malamud’s work. What makes an authentic Jew?
Many of Malamud’s most interesting characters, especially in his earlier work, are tormented by this question. There i s of t e n something weak, unmoored and anxious about his younger characters, in contrast with something strange yet more authentic about the older Jews.
The year after the publication of The Assistant — 1958 — saw his brilliant short-story collection, The Magic Barrel. Like Bellow and Roth, Malamud was a great short-story writer as well as novelist.
In 1961, Malamud and his family moved back east. He continued
WH E N B E R - NARD Malam u d d i e d i n 1986, his great friends and contemporaries, Saul B e l l o w a nd Philip Roth, were quick to pay tribute. Malamud, said Roth, “wrote of a meagre world of pain in a language all his own”, which, Roth explained, was comprised of “the locutions, inversions and diction of Jewish immigrant speech, a heap of broken verbal bones that looked, until he came along in those early stories to make them dance to his sad tune, to be no longer of use to anyone other than the Borscht belt comic and the professional nostalgiamonger.”
“Malamud,” Bellow agreed, “in his novels and stories discovered a sort of communicative genius in the impoverished, harsh jargon of immigrant New York.” He was, Bellow said, “a writer of exquisite parables.”
Born in Brooklyn in April 1914, Malamud was the son of a Russian immigrant grocer, Max, and his wife, Bertha. He was part of that extraordinary generation of Jewish-American writers born either side of the First World War — Delmore Schwartz (1913), Saul Bellow and Arthur Miller (1915), Joseph Heller and Norman Mailer (1923).
It was a hard childhood. Malamud’s father was ground down by poverty. When Bernard was still in his teens, his mother died in a mental hospital after years of suffering from schizophrenia. His brother Eugene later spent much of his adult life in and out of institutions.
Malamud struggled to find his way as a writer and then, in his 30s, his life changed. In 1945, he married; in 1949 he landed to be enormously productive: six more novels and numerous short stories.
Perhaps his most successful novel in this later phase was The Fixer (1966), which recreates the story of Mendel Beilis, a Russian Jew accused of ritual murder. It was awarded both the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize and was filmed two years later, starring Alan Bates.
Malamud said that he wrote “simple stories about simple people” — grocers in The Assistant. Yakov Bok, a handyman, in The Fixer. These were very different characters from Bellow’s Herzog or Roth’s Portnoy or Zuckerman, writers and intellectuals.
But though his novels may seem “simple,” they were far from being so. In his fascinating biography of Malamud, Philip Davis quotes a revealing line from his subject: “I’ve often thought of giving a course in the human sentence.”
Davis shows how Malamud worked and reworked his manuscripts, always shortening and tightening the sentences till he got them right. The result was a distinctive style: spare, lean prose, very different from Bellow’s verbal torrents.
This is perhaps the picture of Malamud that endures through Davis’s biography and Philip Roth’s moving account. A craftsman, dedicated to his writing, a great writer creating moving stories, which seem simple but which are so much more. In his story, Take Pity, Rosen is asked how a poor Jewish refugee died. He replies: “Broke in him something, that’s how.”
“Broke what?” “Broke what breaks.” David Herman is the JC’s chief fiction reviewer. To mark the Malamud centenary, Atlantic Books are issuing special editions of ‘The Fixer’ and ‘The Assistant’