Malamud, Bernard (Vol. 1) | Malamud, Bernard 1914–
Malamud, Bernard 1914–
A Jewish-American novelist and short story writer, Malamud is the author of The Assistant, The Magic Barrel, and Idiots First. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 5-8, rev. ed.)
Of all [the] new writers, Bernard Malamud seems to me the most unnecessarily tempted by symbolism. For he is the most compassionate, the most concerned and involved of them all, and … [from his work] I get something of the same deep satisfaction that I do from the great realistic masters of Yiddish literature.
Malamud's world has its own haunting archetypes: the desperate and sickly storekeeper, the refugee who turns up in Rome or New York to accuse his fellow Jews of heartlessness, the lonely student with ovoid eyes in staring search of love, the American intellectual abroad who finds it impossible to escape his Jewish past…. Malamud has caught as one the guttural toughness of big-city speech and the classic...
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