[In the following essay, Bilik explores the ways in which Malamud diverges from the conventions of the majority of post-Holocaust Jewish fiction.]

No contemporary American writer has written about immigrants and survivors more frequently or more imaginatively than has Bernard Malamud. His fictional world is peopled with Diasporans of all kinds but, unlike Cahan's assimilated Levinsky, Malamud's characters embody significant fragments of the Jewish past. Most frequently Malamud portrays remnants of the earlier generation of immigrants, unwilling refugees from American Jewish affluence, survivors of an older Jewish community who retain unassimilated Jewish values and who do not relinquish their accents and their anachronistic occupations. Although Malamud includes some survivors of the Holocaust in his fictional Ellis Island, he has not yet directly portrayed a survivor as central figure. In The Fixer, however, Malamud depicts an earlier survivor of anti-Semitic persecution and this work is cited by Terrence Des Pres as an example of a survivor novel along with Albert Camus' The Plague (1948) and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch (1963).

With the exception of The Fixer, which is historically distanced from the Nazi period, Malamud's allusive, indirect, parablelike tales of Jewish life do not confront the Holocaust experience. Nevertheless, Malamud's immigrant characters, even when they are not survivors, frequently have the insubstantiality of remnants or of dream figures. Insofar as they embody the modern sense of dream-made-real, Malamud's immigrants resemble the European survivors discussed by Lawrence Langer. However, only in The Fixer, where the dream is a nightmare indeed, does Malamud's world contain the horrors that Langer includes in the aesthetics of atrocity. In Malamud's other fictions the grotesque elements are countered with the possibility of realizing the Diaspora dream of earthly redemption. In addition, Malamud's modern adaptation of the traditionally ironic tone of the Yiddish story teller distances and ameliorates some of the grimmer implications of his fiction.

The dreamlike insubstantiality, the redemptive vision, and the irony are frequently manifested in Malamud's modern counterparts to the East European Hasidic rebes and tsadikim. Malamud's modern tsadikim are considerably less saintly than their historic predecessors, but their very susceptibility to the modern world allows them to be more effective as teachers—the essential task of a rebe. Fictional antecedents for Malamud's rebes are Henry Roth's Reb Yidel Pankower and Isaac Rosenfeld's Reb Feldman. In Rosenfeld's novel the relationship of the rebe to the young seeker is shown as anachronistic. In the writings of Malamud, the teacher is both more ambiguous and more effective, yet the ancient Jewish paradigm is discernible. The pupil-teacher relationship may be of a younger, assimilated Jew to an older, more traditional Jew; sometimes the relationship is between Jew and gentile; usually the relationship is between a more callow seeker and one more experienced in suffering. Frequently Malamud develops the quester and the teacher as dual protagonists or Doppelgänger (The Assistant, “The Magic Barrel,” “The Last Mohican” [1958]). The immigrant figure is the keeper of the Jewish past, a past that is transmitted in much the same way that the Hasidic masters passed on wisdom and lore to their pupils. Indirectly by means of parable, sometimes fragmentarily, sometimes inadvertently, unlikely modern Hasidim like Morris Bober, Pinye Salzman, Shimen Susskind, and others pass on meaningful fragments of Jewish ethics and collective Jewish history to questers and novices who are even more unlikely and unaware than their teachers.

The Malamud novice or quester is frequently in error at the beginning of his quest. Sometimes he attempts to make a new life free of his past (Pictures of Fidelman [1969], “Lady of the Lake” [1958]) or attempts to live a life in terms of false goals (The Assistant, “The Magic Barrel”). Through his encounter with an immigrant or exile, the quester once more confronts his own historic past or reforms his goals and sometimes, in classic style, achieves recognition and reversal. The contact between quester and immigrant Doppelgänger at times results in the quester's seeming to incorporate the older figure. The older figure may wane, even die, but some of his spirit or knowledge lives on in the now-changed quester. Three of Malamud's most widely known works are examples of this pattern—the novel The Assistant and the short stories “The Magic Barrel” and “The Last Mohican.”

Frank Alpine, the assistant in the novel, is a climber, a man clearly destined for higher things. Unlike many of Malamud's protagonists (Fidelman, Levin, Freeman, Lesser, Bok), Frank is not Jewish, at least not at the beginning of the novel. Although an American, Frank feels alienated because he is an orphan, a Catholic, a drifter. What he learns from Morris Bober is how to be a Jew, which in Malamud's terms means how to be a human being.

It has been common to stress the ecumenicalism of Malamud's concept of Jewishness. But to stress the universality and Christianity of Malamud's “conversions” and reversals is to ignore the concrete Jewish particulars in which those universals are grounded. Bober's Judaism, particularly in its unorthodoxy, in its flawed state, is thereby more relevant to the flawed seeker. Of all Malamud's immigrant rebes, Bober comes closest to secular sainthood. Morris is a Jobian sufferer as well as a Sabbath-breaking, ham-eating sage. In his insistence on scrupulous honesty in a dishonest world, Morris Bober is a true follower of the Torah in modern dress. Malamud evokes with loving irony, older, folkloric Jewish themes transformed by the passage of time. This occurs in the oft-quoted passage where Morris, self-conscious and under stress, explains to Frank that to be a Jew one must suffer for the Law. For Morris this does not mean Sabbath observance, or adherence to Leviticus, but rather “this means to do what is right, to be honest, to be good. This means to other people.” Some have been offended by the simplicity of the reductivism; others have noted the resemblance to the Sermon on the Mount. But the steadfastness is Jobian and talmudic.

Malamud is reaching back to a well-known Jewish anecdote about the great Rabbi Hillel (first century B.C.E.). The rabbi was challenged by a heathen who said he would become a Jew if the wisdom of the Torah could be expressed while standing on one foot. Hillel had no difficulty in replying, “That which is hurtful to thee do not do to thy neighbors! This is the entire Torah, all the rest is commentary. Go and study it.” The sources do not tell us whether the conversion took place; but in Malamud's novel the seeker, perhaps more sincere than his ancient predecessor, by action, experience, and precept does indeed become Jewish. Somewhat vulgarized by an immigrant accent (of which more later), an ancient Jewish truth is transmitted.

Bober himself survives in a depressionlike atmosphere that has been noted for its timelessness. Yet the time of the novel is more easily set than seems apparent. Malamud is careful to show that although time stands still for the unsuccessful Bobers, history relentlessly moves forward. The time is that of late thirties to early forties—after the rise of Hitler and just before America's entry into the war. Much of the novel is formed by the Holocaust in a peripheral, nonfrontal manner. The Assistant, although it refers back to the late thirties, was published in 1957 and reflects Malamud's awareness of the horror.

There is, for example, the omnipresence of anti-Semitism in the work. Frank Alpine, despite his potential for spiritual growth, acquiesces in robbing Morris, in part because Morris is a Jew. The instigator of the robbery, Ward Minogue, is full of generalized hatred for Jews. He mouths stereotypes about Jewish wealth while robbing the pauper Bober. He attempts to rape Bober's daughter because he heard “those Jew girls make nice ripe lays [p. 74].” The Bobers feel isolated among their predominantly gentile neighbors as do the other Jews in the neighborhood. Thus Otto, the German butcher, who has sold Morris meat for years and who knows what kind of economic misery he suffers, nevertheless warns Frank, “‘Don't work for a Yid, Kiddo. They will steal your ass while you are sitting on it’ [p. 60].” Morris strains to pay cash to Otto because “from a German he wanted no favors [p. 6].” Even the new grocery, which is such a devastating threat to Morris, is owned by a German. And Morris's decent Italian tenants buy their groceries at the new store to “be waited on by Heinrich Schmitz, an energetic German dressed like a doctor, in a white duck jacket [p. 12].”

The highly unlikely prospective buyer of Morris's miserable business is a “refugee.” That he has escaped some as yet unknown horror is the only glimpse we are given of this man who is still refugee, not yet survivor: “He wore a small foreign-looking hat and carried a loose umbrella. His face was innocent and his eyes glistened with good will [p. 203].” Morris was “overwhelmed by pity for the poor refugee, at what he had in all probability lived through, a man who had sweated blood to save a few brutal dollars [p. 203].” But Morris and the refugee are innocent also in that neither yet knows of the totality of the European catastrophe that is dimly perceived in the background. Yet with care Malamud presents the imminence of war to the reader. At the end of the work, after Morris's death, his wife supplements her meager income “sewing epaulets for military uniforms [p. 233].”

The presence of history is more dramatically rendered in the form of the novel. Frank Alpine is converted from a conventional Jew-hater, who admits that he “didn't have use for the Jews [p. 125],” into a definite Jew-lover, who first craves Morris's daughter carnally and then loves Morris filially. The ultimate action, almost a ritualized punishment for lust, is Frank's circumcision, which “enraged and inspired him [p. 192].” Significantly it is spring when Frank becomes a Jew. Though the Easter story of death and resurrection is surely part of Malamud's rich allusiveness, Malamud's text says “Passover,” which celebrates redemption from pagan bondage and anticipates the giving of the Law. In addition, the ironist in Malamud should never be dismissed. Passover is the traditional time for anti-Semitic blood-libels and persecutions of Jews in Eastern Europe, a theme Malamud pursues pointedly in The Fixer. Spring renewal with its pogroms and suffering often has a bitter taste in Yiddish literature. Morris has been sacrificed and Frank has metonymously taken part in his sacrifice through the ritual of circumcision.

Far more self-serving than the saintly grocer is the ephemeral Pinye Salzman, the matchmaker of the title story in the collection The Magic Barrel. He is even more a survivor of the earlier pre-Holocaust European culture: as a matchmaker his occupation is more anachronistic than that of the “Ma and Pa” grocery store owner. Yet because of Pinye, whether by intention or not, Leo Finkle changes his quest from an opportunistic search for a proper bride for a rabbi to a spiritual journey in search of redemption for himself and for Pinye's wayward daughter. The matchmaker appears and disappears like some orthodox-unorthodox fairy godfather; but he is a materialist nonetheless. Leo's oxymoron for him is “commercial cupid.”

Pinye is literally a luftmentsh; his wife says his office is “in the air” and “in his socks [MB [Magic Barrel,] p. 189].” Pinye's measure of a successful match is the traditional one: it should join piety and learning to money and status. Leo at first is as practical as Pinye: he seeks a bride to acquire a congregation. Of course, Leo's learning and piety are shown to be shallow and his eventual bride may be nothing but a poor prostitute. In the end Pinye remains with feet in both worlds, while Leo has perceived that he can now love everyone and that redemption can come through love and suffering. In the final tableau Leo, with flowers in outstretched arms, runs to meet his love, who stands under a street lamp, smoking. Pinye waits around the corner, chanting the prayer for the dead. Leo has already been “afflicted by the tormenting suspicion that Salzman had planned it all to happen this way [MB, p. 213].” But what of the reader's suspicions? For whom, ask critic and reader, does Pinye pray? Sidney Richman, who describes Pinye as half criminal, half messenger of God, offers a range of possibilities:

It is impossible to tell for whom Pinye chants—for himself and his guilt … for Finkle's past or Finkle's future, or for all these reasons … that Salzman chants for everything seems only proper; for if Leo has graduated into saint and rabbi, it is only by succumbing to the terrors which the role prescribes. What better reason to chant when to win means to lose.

In the Malamudian world the “evil” of an orthodox rabbi married to a reformed prostitute would only be mourned by a practical luftmentsh like Salzman. It is surely too cynical and literal to suggest that Pinye is mourning his matchmaking fee, yet it is not too far-fetched to feel that he may be mourning his own loss of integrity or Leo's loss of success. The reversal has taken place: Pinye, now ascetic, dignified, and orthodox, stands motionless while a flower-bedecked Leo runs, lured by visions of violins and lighted candles. No explication suffices or seems really called for—it is a bravely ambiguous ending. Pinye now shares with Leo the suffering his daughter has previously inflicted on him alone. Malamud's critics may not have recognized his unique brand of negative capability.

Malamud exhibits courage in the ease with which he treats sacrosanct subjects in his fictional use of holocaust survivors. Few of his contemporaries have been so casual or so comic, although Wallant and I. B. Singer have presented unpleasant and opportunistic Holocaust survivors. But only Malamud, with his fabulist's license, has created such a comic survivor as the artful Susskind of “The Last Mohican.”

Susskind, the quintessential shnorer (‘clever beggar’), can also be a teacher, even a Virgilian spiritual leader. He is truly a remnant of remnants, a survivor of survivors, and the last of his tribe. He has survived the death camps and is a “refugee” from Israel. His reasons for leaving Israel are an indication of his incorrigible marginality: “‘Too much heavy labor for a man of my modest health. Also I couldn't stand the suspense’ [MB, p. 143].” So this remnant looks for shady deals, quick profits, and Jews to sponge on in Rome. Fidelman is the comic Dante to Susskind's Virgil.

Fidelman, at the beginning, is involved in a pretentious and alien occupation, that of academic art critic writing a study of the fourteenth-century Florentine artist Giotto, a painter of Christian subjects. In one of the most patent of Malamudian rebirths, Fidelman is literally led through his Jewish past in a search for Susskind, who has stolen the first and only chapter of the manuscript. Significantly on a Friday night, Fidelman goes from synagogue to ghetto, symbolically traversing two thousand years of Jewish history in Europe, a history that culminates for him in the old Jewish cemetery with its memorial to Auschwitz. Previously Italian Renaissance history, aesthetic and Christian, had “exalted” him (MB, p. 141); European-Jewish history oppressed him, attached him to a past he had tried to ignore, “although, he joked to himself, it added years to his life [MB, p. 159].”

The usual reversal completes the story. Fidelman, now resembling his shabby quarry, sees Susskind engaged in what appears to be an alien occupation, that of selling beads and rosaries in front of the Vatican. Malamud has done his ironic homework, for the selling of Christian religious objects has long been a traditional occupation among Rome's Jews. Even in this, the surface shnorer Susskind has more integrity than the secret shnorer Fidelman. But Fidelman is worthy of regeneration, for he has a moment of “triumphant insight” in which he recognizes that Susskind was right to burn Fidelman's Giotto chapter. Susskind has said that “the words were there but the spirit was missing [MB, p. 164].” What endows the unlikely Susskind with exemplary artistic integrity in a world of pretentious sham is his superiority in suffering, his experience of Jewish history. And what finally gives the pretender, Fidelman, his insight is his own condensed, removed recapitulation of that experience heightened by his own sense of loss. For Fidelman has been the parasite—living off his sister and, as dilettante, poaching on Roman history, Italian art, and Christian subject matter. In a dream Susskind asks Fidelman if he has read Tolstoy, and then enquires, “‘Why is art?’ [MB, p. 164].” The morality is Tolstoyan. Art must illuminate the human; the human takes precedence over the aesthetic. The human is the way toward the aesthetic.

The Magic Barrel contains other stories of survivors and immigrants. Frequently Malamud presents a learning situation. In “The First Seven Years” the immigrant Feld learns from his younger helper, Sobel. Sobel's superiority in suffering, his experience as a survivor, give him the moral advantage and it is Feld who ends with material aspirations subsumed by insight. The dreary setting is alleviated not only by the book culture that surrounds Sobel but also by the biblical overtones that Malamud invokes. Sobel has labored for five years for his modern Laban; but he must “pound leather for his love” for two years more to conform to the biblical seven. One can only hope that the title does not suggest that Sobel, like Jacob, will have to labor an additional seven years for his Rachel.

Two more stories, “Take Pity” and “The Loan,” directly involve immigrants and survivors and in neither story is there redemption or resurrection. Eva, the refugee widow of “Take Pity,” has learned only one thing, to refuse pity, and has gained in fierce pride. This bleak tale pits Rosen's need to give against Eva's inability to take. Not all the characters in Malamud's universe are capable of transcending suffering: the sufferer is not necessarily ennobled.

In “The Loan,” however, Malamud's imaginative boldness asserts itself. The immigrant baker Lieb (from the verb “to love”) sells the “bread of affliction,” which is the designation for the unleavened bread of the Passover service. Lieb's bread is leavened with his own tears. It is extremely popular; all come to buy where the body of the world's ills is shared as in communion. An old friend appears in the bakery to request a loan. Lieb's second wife, suspicious, possessive, self-conscious of her status as second wife, refuses to leave them alone, yet by the pervasive Malamudian pattern of reversal—epiphanylike in this story—Bessie is seen as the superior sufferer despite her apparent selfishness and lack of charity. Kobotsky, the friend, despite his Job-like afflictions (he even suffers from boils), is not as pitiable. He appears to have been Lieb's betrayer, and he is self-pitying. Yet, honorably, he is seeking money to buy a headstone for his wife's grave, and his tale makes even Bessie weep.

Kobotsky's sad tale is given perspective by the weight of Bessie's suffering. Her recital of twentieth-century Jewish woes is authorially and soberly presented:

But Bessie, though weeping, shook her head and before they could guess what, had blurted out the story of her afflictions: how the Bolsheviki came … and dragged her beloved father into snowy fields without his shoes; the shots scattered the blackbirds in the trees and the snow oozed blood; … how she, … years later found sanctuary in the home of an older brother in Germany, who sacrificed his own chances to send her, before the war, to America, and himself ended, with wife and daughter, in one of Hitler's incinerators.

(MB, p. 172)

The passage has dignity, yet in the placement of modifiers (before the war, himself ended) there is a foreshadowing of Bessie's own voice, which speaks out in the subsequent paragraph:

“Working day and night, I fixed up for him his piece of business and we make now, after twelve years, a little living. But Lieb is not a healthy man, also with his eyes that he needs an operation, and this is not yet everything.”

(MB, p. 172)

The differences in tone and diction are obvious, but even more striking are the similarities in rhythm and structure. And, in Malamud's story, “this is not yet everything.” For, during Bessie's dramatic recital, Lieb's tear-moistened loaves are burning. The unmarked grave of Kobotsky's wife is seen in the context of millions of unmarked graves: “The loaves in the trays were blackened bricks—charred corpses [MB, p. 173].” The diction is deliberate and the parallels point to no easy morality. It would be beyond the boundaries of this study to analyze all Malamud's short stories in which immigrant characters figure. It should be noted, however, that of the thirteen stories in the 1958 collection, The Magic Barrel, seven directly focus on immigrants and an eighth has a Holocaust survivor as heroine.

In Idiots First (1963), Malamud continues to write about the lives of European-born Jews. In one story in the collection, “The German Refugee,” he depicts an actual refugee. Malamud here writes of an educated immigrant like the secular and intellectual Jews favored in the fiction of Bellow. The narrator is a “dangling man” who teaches English to refugees. It is 1939 and the narrator says, “‘Here I was palpitating to get going, and across the ocean Adolf Hitler, in black boots and a square mustache, was tearing up and spitting out all the flowers’ [IF [Idiots First,] p. 175].” The irony, the innocence, and the brutality are American.

The story gives Malamud the opportunity to use accent in varying ways. The refugee, Oskar Gassner, despondent over his lack of progress, asks his tutor, “‘do you sink I will succezz?’” and immediately the stage German is followed by a sensitive analysis of what loss of language means for the refugee. Here were cultivated European intellectuals who felt “you had some subtle thought and it comes out like a piece of broken bottle,” who expressed their loss of linguistic identity with despair: “‘What I know, indeed, what I am, becomes to me a burden. My tongue hangs useless.’” In contrast to the articulate older exile, Oskar is comic but moving: “‘If I do not this legture prepare, I will take my life’ [IF, p. 181].”

But, for all the pity Oskar evokes, he is in error and must learn a bitter lesson. He is self-concerned and, like Kobotsky, self-pitying. He does not listen to news broadcasts. Instead, “in tormented English he conveyed his intense and everlasting hatred of the Nazis for destroying his career, uprooting his life after half a century, and flinging him like a piece of bleeding meat to the hawks [IF, p. 182].” Oskar is shown as insufficiently compassionate, despite his suffering. Thus, after twenty-seven years of marriage and despite her protestations of faithfulness, he left his gentile wife behind in Germany.

Oskar does not think about his wife. Indeed it is despair about his lecture that causes him to attempt suicide. Finally, with the narrator's help, he prepares his lecture on Whitman. He shows that the Whitmanesque idea of brotherhood influenced German poets but, he adds ironically, not for long. Yet a greater irony is revealed in the dénouement: the idea of brotherhood survived in Oskar's abandoned wife who converted to Judaism in outrage and despair after he left Germany. For this romantic gesture she is arrested, “she is shot in the head and topples into an open tank ditch, with the naked Jewish men, their wives and children, some Polish soldiers and a handful of Gypsies [IF, p. 191].” When Oskar learns of his wife's death, he once more attempts suicide and this time succeeds.

The Fixer (1966) is relevant to the discussion of postwar immigrant fiction because of the novel's evocation of the Holocaust in the oblique manner of some Jewish American writers. Malamud says that the story of Mendl Beilis, the history upon which the fiction is based, was paradigmatic for him: “Somewhere along the line, what had happened in Nazi Germany began to be important to me in terms of the book, and that too is part of Yakov's story.” To include the Jewish catastrophe, Malamud confronts it indirectly, in microcosm, in the past. For what actually happened to Mendl Beilis is far less important than what the fixer and the reader experience of the condition of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. In addition, Malamud avails himself of the reader's knowledge of the contemporary Jewish tragedy to illuminate both past and recent history. The fact that there was a Beilis case allows Malamud to ignore its historic particulars and thereby create an imaginative truth that is more effective than fictionalized history.

The Fixer is the only one of Malamud's novels that is completely set in the European past and it is both distinctly European and Jewish. Yakov Bok, an unsuccessful husband and handyman, leaves the traditional shtetl for the city (Kiev), doffs his Jewish identity, and rises economically for a short time only to find himself unjustly accused of ritual murder. His imprisonment and its accompanying torture, cruelty, and humiliation are the concrete manifestations of a virulent and irrational anti-Semitism exploited by a corrupt and frightened Czarist government. Yakov comes to realize that “being born a Jew meant being vulnerable to history, including its worst errors [p. 128].” Although Yakov is in some measure responsible for his plight, he recognizes that his parents, humble shtetl dwellers all their lives, were not therefore safe when “the historical evil had galloped in to murder them there [p. 255].” The future of Jews in Europe is succinctly stated by the lawyer Ostrovsky: “Rich or poor, those of our brethren who can run out of here are running. Some who can't are already mourning. They sniff at the air and it stinks of pogrom [p. 247].”

The desperation of the European Jewish condition is skillfully underscored by the Dostoyevskian motifs in the novel. Kogin, the prison guard, sorrows over his son who kills “a harmless old man” for “no particular reason” and is tried and sentenced to twenty years in Siberia (pp. 219-20). In terms of “crime and punishment” Kogin's son was treated justly and properly. Such procedures are not available to the Jew Bok. That Yakov is not completely innocent is allusively shown when he, like Raskolnikov, dreams of beating a poor, bloody horse. The horse was given to Yakov by his tsadik father-in-law, but Yakov condemns the horse to death by trading the animal to a Charon-like vicious anti-Semite in exchange for transportation to the non-Jewish world. Yakov betrays the horse, the symbol of his Jewish identity, at the same time that his prayer sack falls into the Dnieper (p. 29).

Yakov is guilty of refusing the burden of his Jewish heritage but ultimately he endures because of his acceptance of the responsibility of Jewish identity. In this he may be seen to resemble other Malamudian heroes who learn to relinquish personal advancement in exchange for spiritual growth. Yakov's final recognition, however, has naught to do with the power of love. On the contrary, he triumphs when he fears less and hates more (p. 259). In a perception unique in the Malamud canon, Yakov endorses revolution and political activism:

As for history, Yakov thought, there are ways to reverse it. What the Tsar deserves is a bullet in the gut. Better him than us. … One thing I've learned, he thought, there's no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew. You can't be one without the other, that's clear enough. You can't sit still and see yourself destroyed.

(p. 271)

The role of the victim and the importance of personal redemption through suffering (whether in Dostoyevsky or Malamud himself) are here rejected in favor of collective commitment and political violence. Whether Yakov's perception is historically correct or not, there is no question that his own extreme but historically valid experience of Jewish life in Europe justifies his conclusion. Malamud's highly selective use of history and his detailed portrayal of the growth of Yakov's perception result in a highly individual hero who also has collective identity and universality. But the historic particulars of the Holocaust are overwhelming in quantity and kind and therefore present a far more difficult problem in selection than Malamud's. That Malamud has not attempted a more direct rendering of the Holocaust experience despite his obvious interest is perhaps indicative of his recognition of the difficulty.

On another level entirely Malamud transmits past history and traditional values by his bold use of idiosyncratic language. It is language that creates discomfort given the seriousness of Malamud's subject matter, and it has discomfited a number of critics. Alfred Kazin feels that “Malamud's problem is to form a creative synthesis out of the Yiddish world of his childhood and his natural sophistication and heretical training as a modern writer.” Frank Kermode sees the problem of synthesis slightly differently and calls Malamud a writer of alien sensibility: “You have to know whether the occasional corruptness of style and invention is there because a dream is out of control or as a justifiable complexity of tone.” Neither Kazin nor Kermode has expanded his comments about Malamud's language. But the reader is aware of the conscious incongruity that Kermode stresses and that makes Kazin uneasy.

Malamud does not fuse his styles, he deliberately contains them. His bits and pieces of dialogue are startling, designed to pull the reader's attention to the incongruence of the language. He draws attention to comic possibilities in moments of pathos and tragedy, not with the intention of melding language, but rather with the idea of encapsulating these unassimilated, unmeltable, and unadaptable bits. These are remnants that correspond to the survivor aspects of the characters themselves. Failure to recognize unhomogenized “bone in the throat” quality of much of Malamud's language causes critical problems in analysis.

In discussing Pinye Salzman, one critic stresses the correlation between language and character, as evidenced in the following passage: “‘In what else will you be interested,’ Salzman went on, ‘if you not interested in this fine girl that she speaks four languages and has personally in the bank ten thousand dollars? Also her father guarantees further twelve thousand.’” It has been suggested that the passage presents in inferior language similarly inferior Jewish values (money, status) as though they were the ultimate goods in marriage. Yet it is the inferior Pinye who makes possible Leo's spiritual renewal, that same Pinye who conveys somber dignity in the final scene of the story.

More crucially, a key passage from The Assistant is also couched in this “reductive” dialect. Morris Bober is the speaker. Frank is challenging Morris's “Jewishness”: “‘Sometimes,’ Morris answered flushing, ‘to have to eat, you must keep open on holidays. … What I worry is to follow the Jewish Law.’” Frank, like any bright talmudic pupil, keeps on questioning:

“And don't the law say you can't eat pig, but I have seen you taste ham.”

“This is not important to me if I taste pig or if I don't. … Nobody will tell me that I am not Jewish because I put in my mouth once in a while, when my tongue is dry, a piece of ham. But they will tell me, and I will believe them, if I forget the Law. This means to do what is right, to be honest, to be good. … For everybody should be the best, not only for you or me. We ain't animals. This is why we need the Law. … If you live, you suffer. … But I think if a Jew don't suffer for the Law, he will suffer for nothing.”

(pp. 184-85)

When Frank responds to Morris's question about the reason for his interest, Frank admits that he once thought little of Jews. Morris responds in idiomatic “Yinglish”: “‘Happens like this many times’ [124-25].”

Here is another passage with parenthetical modifiers and verb disagreements, but the values described are superior. Typical Morris talk abounds in turns that would be comic in another context: “‘Frank, I think from now on till it comes summer I will raise your wages to straight fifteen dollars without any commission. I would like to pay you more, but you know how much we do here business’ [p. 129].”

There is no attempt here at phonetic realism. Malamud does not transcribe language as Henry Roth attempted to do in Call It Sleep. Morris Bober neither drops his final “g's” nor turns them into “k's.” He does not mispronounce “th” or “w.” But the rhythms of “Yinglish” are captured to assert that marginal luftmentshn like Pinye and Susskind, and the dull and plodding, like Morris, remain in some ways attached to other values. Although they are speaking an adopted language, their native language colors and conditions their speech. Aspects of language, like values from an older culture, stubbornly persist as anomalous remnants despite changes in time and circumstance. The language also establishes an incongruence between what is said and the way it is said. Truth, integrity, and feelings for the past are represented by uneducated, indecorous, and unintentionally (on the part of the speaker) comic speech. Other twentieth-century writers, among them John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison, have attempted to show that speakers of regional dialects are worthy of serious attention. But Malamud uses dialect and accent unrealistically to deliberately startle and unnerve.

In “Angel Levine” values are expressed by an unlikely black Jewish angel (a bizarrely modern Elijah) and a comic Job named Manischevitz. The point of view is that of the immigrant Manischevitz but the conversion pattern is the same. Manischevitz's imaginative act of faith, his belief in the black Jewish angel, redeems Levine and, at least temporarily, saves Manischevitz's wife. Manischevitz speaks to God both in his own words and through the narrator:

Throughout his trials Manischevitz had remained somewhat stoic, almost unbelieving that all this had descended upon his head, as if it were happening, let us say, to an acquaintance or some distant relative; it was in sheer quantity of woe incomprehensible. It was ridiculous, unjust, and because he had always been a religious man, it was in a way an affront to God. … When his burden had grown too crushingly heavy to be borne he prayed in his chair with shut hollow eyes. “My dear God, sweetheart, did I deserve that this should happen to me?” Then recognizing the worthlessness of it, he put aside the complaint and prayed dumbly for assistance: “Give Fanny back her health, and to me myself that I shouldn't feel pain in every step. Help now or tomorrow is too late. This I don't have to tell you.” And Manischevitz wept.

(MB, p. 48)

And what of the reader? Does he weep? The echoes from the Book of Job and the sober but ironic narrative tone mitigate the bathetic end of the prayer. Manischevitz retains his dignity, and his intimate relationship with God is manifest. Perhaps out of context the “Yinglish” might cause one to laugh, but in Malamud's work the laugh is a lament.

Critics have been aware of the complex and paradoxical effects of Malamud's style. Kazin calls it “tense expressiveness.” Hassan detects “a Hemingway cleanness in this dialogue, a kind of humility and courage, but also a softness Hemingway never strove to communicate.” The almost contradictory quality of the commentary suggests the uncertainty and tension that the style conveys. The style is unsynthesized and uneasy, like the lives of the characters. Perhaps the model is not Hemingway but rather the Joycean style in Dubliners (1916), which conveys tension and ambiguity with admirable economy. In Dubliners what is expressed is stasis and paralysis. Malamud's characters, Diaspora Men, are not static. Leo Finkle moves toward his ambiguous love while Pinye oddly chants; Fidelman, with newly acquired insight, runs toward a disappearing Susskind. Even Frank Alpine's tomblike grocery contains the possibility of rebirth through Helen Bober's redemptive love.

In Malamud's fictional world, with its emphasis on the unexpected, Jewish characters do not enjoy an innate moral superiority. Some, like Julius Karp and Nat Pearl in The Assistant, are demonstrably inferior, especially to the gentile Frank. But history, economics, circumstances, and the unsought experience of suffering are what define the Malamudian teachers and tsadikim, and Malamud's Jews qualify. Even among the less admirable, like Karp, Feld, and the appropriately named Harry Lesser of The Tenants, there is a potentiality for moral growth. The reader is induced to see embodied in the most unlikely spirit a spark of righteousness. Only the ambitious accountants and lawyers, those who follow the American Dream of worldly success, are refused Malamud's mercy and are denied possibilities for moral development.

The prime rhetorical manifestations of the potential for moral development lie in unexpected turns of inappropriate language and in unexpected, non-self-serving gestures like Susskind's theft of the manuscript, Pinye's recitation of the Kaddish, and, in “The Mourners,” the landlord's joining his pariah tenant in lamentation. In one of the bleakest of Malamud's novels, The Tenants, the stereotypical figure of the Jewish slum landlord is endowed with moral consciousness. He is the one who begs for mutual pity from the embattled Negro and Jew. What is stressed is not the integration of language and personality but rather the anomalous, the infinite variety of the good, the difficulty of rendering judgment on human character, the error of basing judgment on outward appearance and speech.

Malamud's use of dialect is varied. In “Angel Levine,” for example, he uses Negro minstrel dialect in a passage that satirizes Jewish talmudic disputation. His disregard for verisimilitude also gives him the freedom to use immigrant dialect where those who speak are not immigrants, for example, in the speech of Frank in The Assistant and of the protagonist in The Fixer. One would assume that in this Czarist Russian setting Malamud would dispense with Yiddish-American speech patterns and sentence structures. Yet the characters speak with that same “accent” no matter what language they are speaking. The opening dialogue between the fixer and his father-in-law is similar to other conversations in which an older Jew argues for a more spiritual life with a quester who is seeking a new life.

Both are presumably speaking Yiddish, yet the older man speaks with more of an “accent.” Yakov, the fixer, speaks first:

“What little I know I learned on my own—some history and geography, a little science, arithmetic, and a book or two of Spinoza's. Not much but better than nothing.”

“Though most is treyf [‘unclean’] I give you credit—” said Shmuel. …

“Opportunity here is born dead. I'm frankly in a foul mood.”

“Opportunity you don't have to tell me about. …”

“So please don't mention charity because I have no charity to give.”

“Charity you can give even when you haven't got. …”

(F [The Fixer,] pp. 11-12)

There is little to differentiate this dialogue from one between Frank and Morris except for the absence of usage errors and the presence of aphorisms and proverbs, which enrich Yiddish speech. As with Morris and Frank, Shmuel's speech contains more than Yakov's. Among Shmuel's proverbs are “cut off your beard and you no longer resemble your creator” and “He who gives us teeth will give us bread [F, p. 13].” Yakov's skepticism is established: “‘In this shtetl everything is falling apart—who bothers with leaks in his roof if he's peeking through the cracks to spy on God?’ [F, p. 12].” Yakov has a talent for talmudic wit. When he is approached by a beggar who reminds him that “charity saves from death,” he replies that “death is the last of my worries [F, p. 17].” But Shmuel may well win the battle of the aphorism with “for misery don't blame God. He gives the food but we cook it [F, p. 265].”

Unlike Saul Bellow's Machiavels, the aphorist in Malamud frequently has something valid to say. Thus the lawyer Ostrovsky visits Yakov in prison and supposedly in a Russian Jew's Yiddish discusses the Talmud and quotes the sages. He is a more secular tsadik than Shmuel. Ostrovsky speaks Yiddish-American although he is a Russian: “‘I'm sorry that your father-in-law, Shmuel Rabinovitch, who I had the pleasure to meet and talk to last summer—a gifted man—is now, I'm sorry to tell you, dead from diabetes. This your wife wrote me in a letter [F, p. 304].” Admittedly the delayed predications and hesitations illustrate the interaction of sound and sense. Ostrovsky is unwilling to break bad news. But the rhythms are Morris Bober's. Even in the fixer's grim world the use of comical locutions and mangled “Yinglish” does not detract from the seriousness or even the tragedy of the utterance.

In a one-act play based on his first published story, Malamud's artistic credo is placed in the mouth of an old Yiddish actor:

“A writer writes tragedy so people don't forget they are human. He organizes for us the meaning of our lives so it is clear to our eyes. … My best roles were tragic roles … though I was also marvelous in comedy. ‘Leid macht auch lachen.’”

(IF, p. 177)

This last may be translated as “suffering also causes laughter.” Distorted syntax does not imply a distorted soul. The voice of the immigrant is a fitting vehicle for Malamud's rhetorical purposes.

Like the language that conveys the sound and feeling of Yiddish-American but is not meant to be realistic, the works include much that is fantastic. The title story of the collection Idiots First demonstrates a virtuoso use of idiosyncratic language and fantasy. Mendel is the dying father of Isaac, a thirty-nine-year-old idiot. Mendel hopes to get Isaac off to California before Ginzburg, the absurdly named Angel of Death, “gets” Mendel. The story is anthropomorphic from the beginning as Mendel draws on “cold, embittered clothing.” When Mendel speaks of his death he does so in accents that would be comic in another context: “‘Look me in my face,’ said Mendel, ‘and tell me if I got time till tomorrow morning?’ [IF, p. 6].” “‘For what I got chicken won't cure it’ [IF, p. 8].”

But the climax of the story is Mendel's debate with Ginzburg, now disguised as a ticket collector. The metaphysical discussion sounds like a vaudeville routine. Mendel wants Ginzburg to allow him to put Isaac on the train to California. He asks Ginzburg what his duties are and Ginzburg responds like a typical employer: “‘To create conditions. To make happen what happens. I ain't in the anthropomorphic business.’” Mendel's reply suggests that he does not know the meaning of “anthropomorphic”: “‘Whatever business you in, where is your pity?’” Ginzburg lowers his diction although his manner has never been elegant. “‘This ain't my commodity. The law is the law.’” (Note lower case.) Despite Mendel's pleading, Ginzburg, embodying the “cosmic universal law,” is obdurate. Mendel tells of his wretched life and begs:

“Now I ask you a small favor. Be so kind, Mr. Ginzburg.”

The ticket collector was picking his teeth with a match stick. “You ain't the only one, my friend, some got it worse than you. That's how it goes in this country.”

“You dog you.” Mendel lunged at Ginzburg's throat. …

“You bastard, don't you understand what it means human?”

(IF, pp. 20-21)

Mendel's question is as absurd as his attempt to murder the Angel of Death. But Mendel is also heroic because he is incapable of recognizing the inhuman even in the nonhuman. And the biblical tale of Abraham, Isaac, and a less colloquial Angel of Death adds another dimension to Mendel's struggle. The battle continues: “They struggled nose to nose, Ginzburg, though his astonished eyes bulged, began to laugh. ‘You pipsqueak nothing. I'll freeze you to pieces.’ His eyes lit in rage. …” Now Ginzburg makes a discovery; indeed, he is in “the anthropomorphic business”:

Clinging to Ginzburg in his last agony, Mendel saw reflected in the ticket collector's eyes the depth of his terror. But he saw that Ginzburg, staring at himself in Mendel's eyes, saw mirrored in them the extent of his own awful wrath. He beheld a shimmering starry, blinding light that produced darkness.

Ginzburg looked astonished. “Who me?”

His grip on the squirming old man slowly loosened, and Mendel, his heart barely beating, slumped to the ground. “Go.” Ginzburg muttered, “Take him to the train.”

(IF, pp. 20-21)

If there is terror and wrath why not pity as well? All are part of “what it means human” and even the Angel of Death is not excluded from the human. That all this superhuman effort is expended to send a thirty-nine-year-old idiot to his eighty-one-year-old uncle in California only emphasizes Malamud's stubborn insistence on salvation and survival, no matter how absurd.

Fittingly, unlike Abraham Cahan and Henry Roth, Malamud does not place his fabulous characters in a realistic urban setting. Unlike his contemporaries Bellow, Wallant, and I. B. Singer, he does not emphasize the concrete urban matrix, the subway station, the West Side cafeteria. Malamud's remnants are isolated among isolates, separated even from experiencing the city as wasteland, always unrooted, always threatening to move on.

Robert Alter, among others, complains of Malamud “that nowhere does he attempt to represent a Jewish milieu, that a Jewish community never enters into his books except as the shadow of a vestige of a specter.” Clearly it is not because Malamud cannot write realistic, socially and historically rooted fiction. The Tenants, The Fixer, and A New Life are all strongly rooted in history, event, and social milieu. But in the immigrant stories the particular strength of these Diaspora Men resides in their not being rooted in space, in their unassimilated, alien transcendence of milieu. Unlike the prewar immigrant, Malamud's Jews do not perceive of America as a “promised land.” Alfred Kazin complains of Malamud's “abstractness” and contrasts him to the Yiddish masters who “gave the earth of Russia, the old village, a solid reality, as if it were all the world they had to cherish.” But Malamud, although close to them in spirit according to Kazin, does not show “the world, but the spectral Jew in his beggarly clothes—always ready to take flight.” Is this not precisely what Malamud intends? The setting, like the language, attempts to capture that which is essential, that which can be distilled into something ultimately portable.

Malamud is not, as Kazin avers, abstract out of despair; rather, he attempts in language, setting, and character to preserve what is most ephemeral and yet what can best be preserved. That which an immigrant can carry with him may be nonmaterial, may suffer a sea change, may even be debased, but it is transmittable, capable of living under the most adverse conditions, and hence the only heritage worthy of transmission. It is ambiguously compounded of common suffering, common humanity, common responsibility, and common peril. And how well Kazin (still carping) sees what Malamud is trying to do with his surreal language: “He makes you think not that Jews really talk that way but how violent, fear fraught, always on edge, Jewish talk can be.”

Lawrence Langer's previously cited study of the “literature of atrocity” is, of course, concerned with European examples of Holocaust literature. It would be unseemly and incorrect to suggest that Malamud writes a “literature of atrocity.” The essentially comic form, albeit qualified, of Malamud's work points to the distance that separates America and Americans from much European experience of the Holocaust, although Malamud, like other Jewish American writers, is in the position of a “witness-through-the-imagination,” one who has “(merely) ‘heard the terrible news’.” And news of such magnitude has considerable effect as Malamud's prose shares with the “schizophrenic art” of the Holocaust a metaphoric language employed to “sustain the tensions that inspire it” rather than to resolve those tensions. Like the “literature of atrocity,” Malamud's works are characterized by “irrealism”—“a reality whose quality is unreal. The line between the comic and the tragic often becomes blurred as the authors struggle to express the inexpressible.”

In this context Frank Alpine's musing about Jews, “that there are more of them around than you think [p. 231],” and Manischevitz's perception that “there are Jews everywhere [MB, p. 58]” may be more somber than sanguine. Recently Malamud commented that his well-known statement, “all men are Jews,” was an “understandable statement and a metaphoric way of indicating how history, sooner or later, treats all men.” Langer points out that in the “literature of atrocity” the non-Jewish characters “read in the fate of the Jew a dramatic pantomime of their own destiny as men.” Jewish history then becomes a paradigm for the relationship of the individual to history, a corollary to Daniel Bell's previously cited analysis of the Jew as a symbol of twentieth-century alienation. Yet the emphasis on the Jew as the symbol of universal humanity should not obscure the increasing importance of the particulars of Jewish life in the fiction of Malamud and other more recent writers.

In contrast to such universalism is Irving Howe's stress on the particulars of Jewish life in the important Jewish American fiction that he saw emerging in the late forties. Howe here echoes the Yiddish writer Y. L. Peretz who, in an article entitled “Escaping Jewishness,” warns would-be universalists that “humanity must be the sum, the quintessence of national cultural forms and philosophies.” Malamud has integrated significant unassimilated linguistic, ethical, cultural, and historic Jewish elements into his fictional world as have other recent writers.

As exemplary twentieth-century Jewish characters, Malamud's personae are alienated, but not quite in the sense explored by Bell. They are not “sensitive sons” of the second generation but immigrant fathers. They are essentially homeless because they have never felt at ease in the world around them and they are not part of that world. Malamud's European-born remnants—those reminiscent of Sholem Aleichem's characters like Manischevitz, Mendel, and Morris—are fragments of a dead culture who live in the new world but cannot be said to interact with it. Yet these luftmentshn are capable of transmitting an important if fragmented heritage to younger protagonists. Like their immigrant mentors, these younger heroes do not enter into the mainstream of American life. Frank Alpine in his grocery, Fidelman divested of his dream of status as an art historian, Finkle, the ambitious rabbi, destined for a misalliance—none of these are “making it.” From the older immigrant each has learned to give up the dream of conventional success for failure in conventional terms. Some achieve moral ascendancy, not as rebels rejecting bourgeois society, but as former strivers who have sacrifice thrust upon them and who then accept it willingly.

The fluid, pluralistic American scene as depicted by Malamud, even at its bleakest, allows for such alternatives. Malamud's most consciously political book, The Fixer, describes a corrupt and brutal Czarist system that forces men like Bok into unaccustomed heroic roles. In his anti-Prometheanism Malamud again shows his similarity to Yiddish writers, especially Sholem Aleichem. Although both writers sometimes use subject matter that is somber indeed, neither writer chooses to confront the tragic directly. Always present are the possibilities of redemption and rebirth, however slim. Even in The Fixer, which Malamud presents as a metaphoric Holocaust novel, the ending is ambiguous. If the reader wishes to take comfort from the historic fact that Mendl Beilis, the historic Yakov Bok, was finally released from prison, the comfort lies well outside the fictional bounds of the novel.

Malamud's fictional world contains many immigrants and fewer refugees and survivors. Malamud embodies post-Holocaust sensibility in the very insubstantiality of his immigrant remnants. In Susskind and Salzmann, in Mendel and Manischevitz, in Yakov Bok, in Morris Bober, and in others Malamud commemorates the vanished world of East European Jewry. The primary means he uses is the nontechnical rendering of idiosyncratic speech that conveys the essence of Yiddish through rhythm, abrupt juxtaposition, and nonstandard word order, rather than through phonetic transcription. This stylized language is used by the immigrant father figures to convey parts of the Jewish heritage to metaphoric sons. Both father and son share the center of Malamud's fictional stage. In other post-Holocaust immigrant literature, the center of consciousness is the parent figure. The shift of attention to the parent figure makes possible some of the important differences between pre- and post-Holocaust immigrant fiction.

While Diasporal homelessness, language loss and replacement, and the relationship of the Jewish past to the American present are common themes in all immigrant literature, the significance of these concerns is different in pre- and post-Holocaust fiction. The homelessness that was a problem for David Levinsky and, according to Leslie Fiedler, ceased to be a problem in the Jewish American novel of assimilation is accepted as part of the human condition in the later novels. The experience of language loss is less significant in the immigrant-survivor novel than it is in the earlier novels and the emphasis is on retention rather than acculturation. Since the survivor is depicted as an adult when he emigrates to America, he is likely to retain former language patterns. Unlike earlier fictional immigrants, immigrant-survivors are not intent upon fulfilling the dream of American economic success. Age and their experience of suffering make them unlikely candidates for economic and social rise. The interaction of the survivor with the American present, while important, is less so than the survivor's interaction with the Jewish past, both ancient and traditional, historic and recent.

Most of all recent immigrant novels seek to commemorate the Holocaust. Accordingly the individual character's past is seen as representing or encompassing some part of the collective experience of the Jewish people. The protagonists are therefore placed in a fictional milieu of Jewish refugees that may include German Jews who escaped in the thirties, recent emigrés from Israel, former inmates of Soviet slave labor camps, and Nazi death-camp survivors. Through the sensibilities of their protagonists, to varying degrees these novels attempt the difficult task of rendering imaginatively the horrors of twentieth-century Jewish history.

The questions raised by the inclusion of the recent Jewish past in novels with an American context are treacherous and delicate. How does one who has lived through the unlivable integrate that tortured past into his consciousness? How does the survivor live with his past in manic, metropolitan New York (where immigrant-survivor novels are set)? What, if anything, from that past can be transmitted—given the hedonism of modern life? In these recent novels the question of the survival of the Jewish experience becomes crucial. It has already been shown that the transmission of aspects of Jewish heritage, no matter how secularized, is an important theme in the work of Bernard Malamud. Malamud has also suggested a hierarchy of suffering in some of his works (The Assistant, The Fixer, “The Last Mohican”). In works with immigrant-survivor protagonists the transmission of a heritage and the experience of suffering become even more important themes. The figure of Job, the archetypal sufferer, is frequently evoked along with the purposeful wanderer Elijah. Yet despite biblical evocations and traditional allusions and references, the protagonists of four of the novels under discussion are products of a secular Polish academic system rather than the kheyder (traditional shtetl Hebrew school) and yeshive (Talmudic academy), which formed part of the background of earlier immigrants.

Fittingly, all four fictional survivors, despite their different novelistic contexts, came out of the rich and varied urban Jewish life of pre-World War II Poland, whose Jews accounted for 10 percent of the population. By chance, but not without reason, three protagonists are presented as academically trained philosophers with degrees from Polish universities. The fourth survivor, a woman, is presented as a former medical student. It is understandable, of course, that the American-born novelists Edward Wallant, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, and Saul Bellow avoid the depiction of a traditionally educated shtetl-reared central character. But Isaac Bashevis Singer, of orthodox background and shtetl-reared, also chooses a modernist skeptic as representative survivor. These fictional immigrants differ from their prewar immigrant forebears in that they come to this country as secularly educated, assimilated European Jews. As youths, all three men typically rejected the traditional orthodoxy of their parents' generation. Anya, Schaeffer's heroine, came from a partially assimilated home where an accommodation between old and new had been accomplished. As middle-aged and elderly people and Holocaust survivors, they are in the process of attempting new syntheses that take into account the extremity of their experience as twentieth-century Jews.