Malamud's second novel, The Assistant , portrays the life of Morris Bober, a Jewish immigrant who owns a grocery store in Brooklyn. Although he is struggling to survive financially, Bober hires a cynical anti-Semitic youth, Frank Alpine, after learning that the man is homeless and on the verge of starvation.
Through this contact Frank learns to find grace and dignity in his own identity. Described as a naturalistic fable, this novel affirms the redemptive value of maintaining faith in the goodness of the human soul.
Malamud's first collection of short stories, The Magic Barrel , was awarded the National Book award in Like The Assistant, most of the stories in this collection depict the search for hope and meaning within the grim entrapment of poor urban settings and were influenced by Yiddish folktales and Hasidic traditions.
A New Life , considered one of Malamud's most realistic novels, is based in part on Malamud's teaching career at Oregon State University. This work focuses on an ex-alcoholic Jew from New York City who, in order to escape his reputation as a drunkard, becomes a professor at an agricultural and technical college in the Pacific Northwest.
Interweaving the protagonist's quest for significance and self-respect with a satiric mockery of academia, Malamud explores the destructive nature of idealism, how love can lead to deception, and the pain of loneliness. Malamud's next novel, The Fixer , is considered one of his most powerful works. The winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, this book is derived from the historical account of Mendel Beiliss, a Russian Jew who was accused of murdering a Christian child.
Drawing upon Eastern European Jewish mysticism, The Fixer turns this terrifying story of torture and humiliation into a parable of human triumph. With The Tenants , Malamud returns to a New York City setting, where the theme of self-exploration is developed through the contrast between two writers, one Jewish and the other black, struggling to survive in an urban ghetto.
Within the context of their confrontations about artistic standards, Malamud also explores how race informs cultural identity, the purpose of literature, and the conflict between art and life. Alvin B. Kernan commented: "[ The Tenants ] is extraordinarily powerful and compelling in its realization of the view that is central to the conception of literature as a social institution: that literature and the arts are an inescapable part of society.
Malamud further addresses the nature of literature and the role of the artist in Dubin's Lives Levin faces a painful future with this woman, her adopted children, and Levin's own child which she carries in her womb, but he accepts the necessity of suffering for others and of laboring to love this woman. The fact of Levin's Jewishness has little significance to the novel, but the Jewishness of the hero of Malamud's fourth novel, The Fixer , is of major importance. In this novel, Malamud deserts familiar grounds and plunges into early twentieth-century Czarist Russia.
The hero of this novel is Yakov Bok, a dispossessed, ordinary, unfortunate, intelligent but uneducated Jewish workman, who breaks out of the ghetto to pose as a gentile so that he may work in areas forbidden to Jews.
Falsely accused of the ritual murder of a Christian boy, Bok becomes the center of a massive search for a Jewish scapegoat for the ills of Russia. The plot unfolds two basic and related themes: the self-deception of the persecutors and the ritual projection of their terrors upon the Jews; and Bok's gradual awareness of what it means to be a Jew.
Still very much a religious skeptic, in prison Bok finds his Jewish heritage and identity ever more precious, for his persecutors demand that he confess to a crime he did not commit so they may use his confession for political and anti-Semitic persecutions. His heroic refusal to win freedom through a false confession makes his responsibilities as a Jew equal to his responsibilities as a man. At the novel's end, though Bok remains like the heroes of The Assistant and A New Life in a trapped situation, he has asserted the value of his own life and human life by accepting suffering.
Along with The Assistant , The Fixer demonstrates Malamud's effective use of the Jew as both an Everyman and as the kind of saint that the unextraordinary man can become. Malamud has declared that in writing The Fixer he wished to call attention to such.
In The Tenants , Malamud returned to New York City, this time using the setting of the s, employing a poetic fervor and a wry humor like those in The Assistant and in his New York short stories. The Tenants is a tale about two American writers: one, a Jewish novelist blocked in his creative work and lovelessly detached in his personal life; the other, an aspiring black writer, talented and warm hearted, who derives too much of his creative energy from his own hostility and bigotry.
As always, Malamud's fiction pleads for a loving recognition of the limitations and promises of human life which can help bridge the manifold alienations within and between men.
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His parents, whom he described as "gentle, honest, kindly people," had come to the United States from Russia in the early s and ran their own grocery store.
They were not highly educated and knew very little about literature or the arts. Malamud liked to read and to attend a local Yiddish the language spoken by Jews in Europe theater.
He began to try to write stories of his own. Malamud attended high school in Brooklyn and received his bachelor's degree from the City College of New York in After graduation he worked in a factory and as a clerk at the Census Bureau in Washington, D. Although he wrote in his spare time, Malamud did not begin writing seriously until hearing of the horrors of the Holocaust, when the Germans, led by Adolf Hitler — , put six million Jewish people to death during World War II —45; a war in which Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States battled Germany, Italy, and Japan.
Malamud also began reading about Jewish tradition and history. In he started teaching at Oregon State University. He left this post in to teach creative writing at Bennington College in Vermont, where he remained until shortly before his death.
The book has mythic elements and explores such themes as initiation and isolation. Malamud's second novel, The Assistant , tells the story of Morris Bober, a Jewish immigrant who owns a grocery store in Brooklyn. Although he is struggling to make ends meet, Bober hires an anti-Semitic prejudiced against Jewish people youth, whom he learns is homeless and Bernard Malamud.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress. This novel shows the value of maintaining faith in the goodness of the human soul.
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