Bernard Malamud

Author

• Born: April 26, 1914
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
• Died: March 18, 1986
• Place of death: New York, New York

Writer

Affirming the value of suffering in his fiction, Malamud describes ordinary people who struggle with difficult circumstances and ultimately discover their moral selves.

Area of achievement: Literature

Early Life

Bernard Malamud (bur-NARD MAL-ah-mood) grew up in a home of meager circumstances. His father, Max, a Russian Jewish immigrant, ran a small grocery store in Brooklyn. His mother, Bertha, also a Russian Jewish immigrant, suffered from schizophrenia and died in an institution when Malamud was in high school. His younger brother, Eugene, inherited this mental illness. Malamud’s family life was a source of motivation and inspiration for his work.

Going to school, Malamud encountered a compelling and prosperous world, one that contrasted markedly with the simple, humble, limited grocery store. Delighted with books, art, and music, he thrived, attending two of the best public schools in New York City. Public School 181, which was out of his district, required his investment of travel time and money. Educationally renowned, Erasmus High School offered Greek as well as Latin. At both schools, Malamud met Jewish classmates of the upper middle class and became popular with them, their parents, and his teachers. He loved films and entertained his friends, at first by summarizing and elaborating on their plots and then by inventing his own stories. At Erasmus High School, telling everyone he would be a famous writer, he participated in theater, published literary editions of the school newspaper, and won an essay competition sponsored by Scholastic Publishing Company. Though he was busy away from home, his family life made an indelible impression on him. His works are replete with images of his father in the store, a place that would become the metaphoric monastic cell for spiritual growth.

Malamud graduated from City College in Manhattan in 1936. Soon he earned a master’s degree in English from Columbia University. Between graduation and marriage, he worked various jobs, including clerking, taking the census, and teaching night school. In each position he carved out time to write and submit works for publication. In 1945, he married Italian Catholic Ann DeChiara and began a family. Their lives were improved when in 1949 he was engaged to teach freshman writing at Oregon State College, in Corvallis, Oregon, a position that provided money, time for regular writing and material for another of his novels.

Life’s Work

After moving to Oregon, Malamud began The Natural (1952). He would then publish short stories every year and a new novel about every three years for the rest of his life. Drawing on stories from the Bible, myths and legends, and utilizing irony, paradox, satire, allegories, fables, parables, and symbol, Malamud describes his characters’ crucial decisions and implies their consequences. Constructing the plot ofThe Natural around the heroics of the Knights of the Round Table, Malamud creates a protagonist, baseball player Roy Dobbs, who, with his handcrafted bat, Wonder Boy, is tested. Choosing to throw a crucial game and rejecting the woman who offers redemptive love, Dobbs fails the test.

In his next novel, The Assistant (1957), Malamud creates a parable, drawing on personal experiences and elucidating the growth-producing potential of suffering. Frank Alpine, a drifter from the West, who comes to a Brooklyn grocery store, robs a Jew, Morris Bober. Alpine then finds in the person of the grocer a father figure who demonstrates and explains the ways suffering and poverty can direct the mind to what is important. In an implicit condemnation of materialism, this story, whose model character considers himself unfavorably judged by society, presents an emblem of a moral person who does what is right and influences others. His words and example provoke the self-centered Alpine to change his goals and values. In this novel, Malamud perfected his style and demonstrated his ability to depict a moment of revelation. Malamud won the Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the Daroff Memorial Fiction Award of the Jewish Book Council of America for The Assistant in 1958. In 1959, he won the National Book Award for his stories collected in The Magic Barrel.

A New Life (1961) followed The Assistant. Here an English teacher at a small Western college hopes to forget his sad past and start anew, taking advantage, he thinks, of new opportunities in the West. While the change he envisions does not take place, he accepts what is offered; in so doing, he effects a positive, beneficial transformation of his life.

The Fixer (1966) established Malamud’s reputation. The novel enlarges on the theme of personal salvation achieved through suffering, in this case the imprisonment of Russian Jew Yakov Bok, who spends two and a half years in prison when unjustly accused of murdering a Gentile. In his isolation and humiliation, Bok accesses hidden strength and dignity and develops compassion for all other people as well, recasting himself, like Bober, as a Christlike figure. Malamud won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for this novel in 1967, becoming affluent when it was made into a film. He continued his teaching career at Bennington College in Vermont.

In Dubin’s Lives (1979) Malamud shows how an aging biographer renews and transforms his life, infusing it with fresh love and moral energy. Malamud explored different compelling themes in other stories and novels, including Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition (1969), The Tenants (1971), God’s Grace (1982). In 1983 he won the gold medal for fiction from the American Academy and Institute for Arts and Sciences. He died of heart disease in 1986.

Significance

Malamud is today recognized as one of the great Jewish American writers of the twentieth century and one of America’s moral writers of the first order. Though he would not have identified himself as a Jewish American writer, he did assert that all people are Jews.

For him the Jew represented the struggling human, a person working within a variety of limitations, trying to overcome physical and/or metaphorical imprisonment. His stories detail, often with humor and pathos, the many ways a person’s direction comes to be understood. Though his characters are often Jews, or representative Jews, they move toward a Christian redemption and express the transformation of an ordinary life. Malamud asserted that a story should include a revelation, and in his fiction, characters earn a revelation, one that enables them to overcome their circumstances. Through plot and story, dialogue and image, he creates characters and situations that explicate human life and present its surprising beauty.

Bibliography

Abramson, Edward. Bernard Malamud Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1993. A close analysis of themes and style of Malamud’s novels and stories.

Astro, Richard, and Jackson J. Benson, eds. The Fiction of Bernard Malamud. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1977. Critical essays on fiction and heroes in the works of Malamud, including a bibliographic checklist.

Davis, Philip. Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2007. Draws on personal papers, interviews, and works to create a comprehensive study of the man and his accomplishment.

Field, Leslie A., and Joyce W. Field, eds. Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1975. A collection of essays exploring various themes in Malamud’s works.

Smith, Janna Malamud. My Father Is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Presents an intimate picture of Malamud based on private papers and his daughter’s memories.