[In the following essay, Aarons explores elements of Jewish ethics of compassion in Malamud's short stories.]

“You bastard, don't you understand what it means human?” With this challenge, Malamud's desperate character Mendel, in “Idiots First,” demands from Ginzburg, the anthropomorphized figure of death, a commitment to compassion and pity.¹ Mendel's defiance of death's merciless indifference reaffirms rachmones, the Yiddish term for compassion, a fundamental concern of Jewish ethics.²Rachmones is emphatically preoccupied with human motives and choices. It is the singular distinctive feature of Malamud's authorial voice. Moreover, this emphatic plea for compassion is nowhere more apparent than in his short stories, where formal constraints show his characters in the stark, unadorned, and precarious conditions that define and delimit their moral choices. As Mark Shechner points out with reference to Malamud, “the short story remains the purest distillation of his abiding leitmotif: the still, sad music of humanity.”³ In story after story, Malamud, like his character Mendel, demands that we “understand what it means to be human.” As Malamud himself put it, in a 1966 interview with Haskell Frankell: “My work, all of it, is an idea of dedication to the human. … I'm in defense of the human.”⁴

Mendel, whose point of view governs the ethical texture of “Idiots First,” confronts death with both outrage and desperate indignation. Death appears in the human form of the menacing, persistent Ginzburg. As the story opens, Mendel awakens in fright when “the thick ticking of the tin clock stopped” (p. 3), an alliteration that shapes and mirrors the character's inevitable movement toward death. The thickness of the clock's ticking suggests the heaviness, the weight of both living and dying for Mendel, whose love and compassion for his son preempts the not unwelcome surrender to death. Mendel is frightened, not because he has been summoned to death, but because he fears that he will die before he has fulfilled his responsibility to his son. This old sick man, “heavy hearted,” “trembling,” “wasted,” “his heart barely beating,” is empowered finally by his outrage in the face of death, “you bastard.” And it is this sense of utter indignity that moves him to insist upon performing one last act before he dies. Mendel must put Isaac, his son, on a train to his uncle in California, a son who cannot care for himself: “don't you understand what I went through in my life with this poor boy? Look at him. For thirty-nine years, since the day he was born, I wait for him to grow up, but he don't. Do you understand what this means in a father's heart?” (p. 14). And the obvious does not even matter here, that uncle Leo, whom Mendel imagines “under the sky, in California … drinking tea with lemon” (p. 10), is eighty-one years old, far too advanced in years to provide Isaac's permanent security. What matters most is that Mendel, despairing for his son, yields not to some arbitrary authority, but rather appeals to some kind of universal moral imperative, compassion.

Such pleas are not uncommon in the history of Jewish literature. Job pleads with God for some justification for his suffering. Sholom Aleichem's narrators characteristically beg their audiences to hear them out, hear their stories and complaints. Such demands by no means carry with them the fakery of the sentimental. They are, finally, no more but no less than appeals to a human moral conscience, without which there can be no meaning to suffering. In all cases, despite obvious differences in form, in readers, and in intention, narrators and speaking characters are able to tell their stories to someone else, to an internal addressee who, in their sense of just causes, cares. Like Job and the host of characters who people Sholom Aleichem's vignettes, Malamud's characters speak for vindication, for some proof of human compassion and mercy. In Job, the internal addressee is God, in the second the tales are typically addressed to the writer Sholom Aleichem; Malamud's characters, similarly, speak to others whom they believe to have some control over their fates, their suffering.

“Take my word for it, the story is worth hearing,” Tevye avows, as he begins a story to Sholom Aleichem.⁵ Yet the delight in hearing stories is always balanced by its darker side: “And would you like to hear the rest of the story?” the narrator asks in Sholom Aleichem's “On Account of a Hat”: “The rest isn't so nice.”⁶ It “isn't so nice” because, characteristically in Jewish literature, these are stories of suffering, of failed or denied compassion. Nonetheless, it is only in the telling that these characters hope to find some relief. Peretz's “Bontsha the Silent,” despite a lifetime of persecution, always remained silent on earth. He is finally rewarded in heaven, a reward undercut by the prosecuting angel's bitter laugh at the closure of the story. Offered anything he desires, Bontsha finally speaks. But his request, “every morning for breakfast, a hot roll with fresh butter,” is met with silence: “and it is more terrible than Bontsha's has ever been, and slowly the judge and the angels bend their heads in shame at this unending meekness they have created on earth.”⁷ Silence is not valued in Jewish literature because in it is a denial of the self, of choice, of moral agency in a world that far too often seems controlled by malice or indifference. Talk becomes a commitment, an admission even, to all that is human.

At the conclusion of “Idiots First,” Mendel can finally accept death, but on his own terms, terms that define his responsibility as a human being. He wants not for himself but for his son, Isaac. In Mendel's plea for time, enough time to put his retarded son on a train to California—“‘For myself,’ the old man begged, ‘I don't ask a thing. But what will happen to my boy?’” (p. 13)—lies a declaration of love as compassion, for Malamud, a human necessity. Mendel's plea is for rachmones, for pity: “With my whole heart I beg you this little favor” (p. 13), he entreats Ginzburg. The plea recalls Abraham's willing sacrifice of his beloved son Isaac. In Malamud's revision of scripture, Mendel's act of compassion suggests the redemption of Abraham, a man whose selfless devotion insures the safety of his son. The difference in the interpretation of the two stories is all the difference for Malamud. Compassionate and merciful acts come not from God, but from human beings. For Malamud, it is human compassion that can bring about redemption. Mendel's victory in “Idiots First” is a victory of love that saves his son, in the same way that Albert Gans' failure of love, in “The Silver Crown,” results in his father's death, through a mysterious and ironic series of cosmic connections. For Malamud, the failure of love is a failure of the imagination, a failure to envision one's capacity for compassion. It is a lack of moral vision.

Malamud poses, in story after story, conditions under which his characters must prove their charity and selflessness, must demonstrate their willingness and capacity for love. He puts his characters to tests in which their failures of love make all the more imperative its necessity. Malamud does not romanticize the compassion and empathy that for him arise from loneliness and estrangement. With characteristically understated irony, he views them, rather, as qualities integral to the human condition, exigencies we must face in order to challenge moral indifference, as does Morris the grocer at the conclusion of the short story “Armistice,” who remains vigilant, imagining himself in Paris fighting the Nazis: “He knew that if he relaxed the picture would fade.”⁸ This kind of vigilance, naively futile though it may be, strongly suggests the way in which Malamud's characters see themselves in relation to others. His characters are often motivated by the tacit belief that their individual watchfulness, an alertness to the presence of peril, will give them minimal control over their lives.⁹ They are determined characters, willfully hanging on to their sense of what is just. Such an achievement, precarious as it is, involves, to one extent or another, the necessity of suffering.

In this way, Malamud constructs scenarios in which human suffering is abetted or abated by the actions of others. Typically, Malamud fashions Job-like characters who must suffer before possible redemption. Characters like Morris Bober in The Assistant, Abramowitz in “Talking Horse,” Manischevitz, the tailor, in “Angel Levine,” and the displaced Oskar Gassner, “The German Refugee,” all, like Mendel in “Idiots First,” suffer trials that only acts of charity and compassion can hope to assuage. Echoing the condition of Peretz's “Bontsha the Silent,” Malamud's Mendel itemizes his suffering to the personified figure of death:

“All my life,” Mendel cried, his body trembling, “what did I have? I was poor. I suffered from my health. When I worked I worked too hard. When I didn't work was worse. My wife died a young woman. But I didn't ask from anybody nothing. Now I ask a small favor. Be so kind, Mr. Ginzburg.”

(p. 14)

It is important here that death is portrayed in human terms, “picking his teeth with a matchstick” (p. 14), for it is finally only other human beings (even if clothed in the guise of birds, death, talking horses, or “disincarnated” angels) who can show redemptive acts of charity. Redemption, in Malamud's terms, comes not from the direct hand of God, but rather from people who, often in faltering and inadvertent ways, are given the chance to help others. For Malamud redemption is only possible through acts of conscience, deliberate acts of choice, which is why Malamud constructs situations in which his characters are forced either to act or to deny their moral obligations to others. Compassion is thus an active term for Malamud and, in this way, as in others, he seems a particularly Jewish writer. Asked in a 1974 interview with Curt Leviant what makes his characters Jewish, Malamud responded: “Their Jewish qualities, the breadth of their vision, their kind of fate, their morality, their life; their awareness, responsibility, intellectuality, and ethicality. Their love of people and God.”¹⁰ More than anything else, “their kind of fate” coupled with “their love of people” defines Malamud's heroes. Compassion can only be shown in merciful acts of conscience. It is a belief in oneself as much as a belief in the healing powers of others. As Robert Solotaroff observes, in Bernard Malamud: A Study of the Short Fiction, Malamud's characters “eventually realize that the ethical and spiritual exist only through human efforts.”¹¹ The beleaguered Manischevitz in “Angel Levine,” whose trials were “in sheer quantity of woe, incomprehensible,”¹² finds last hope in the form of a black Jewish angel, Levine, who ironically “cannot perform either miracles or near-miracles, due to the fact that I am in a condition of probation” (p. 47). Manischevitz, however, apparently can. His choice to believe in the angel not only redeems himself, and restores health to his dying wife, but also redeems the angel, whose reinstated wings bear him aloft at the story's end. While the angel Levine by his own admission cannot perform miracles, we are asked by Malamud to believe that the “miracle” of Fanny's restored health comes from Manischevitz's conscious choice to believe: “‘I think you are an angel from God.’ He said it in a broken voice, thinking, If you said it it was said. If you believed it you must say it. If you believed, you believed” (p. 55).

But this is a very human choice; it is an act of faith in defiance of Ginzburg's “cosmic, universal law, goddamn it, the one I got to follow myself” (“Idiots First,” p. 13). But Manischevitz's acceptance of the black Jewish angel is not so simple, for Manischevitz recognizes “a wonderful thing, Fanny … Believe me, there are Jews everywhere” (p. 56). It is a recognition of compassion, to be sure, but also, inextricably so, of suffering. These two attributes of the human condition, one a given, the other a possibility, characterize for Malamud the “law” that Ginzburg in “Idiots First” invokes. And relief eludes most of Malamud's characters because of their inability to affirm their common humanity in their shared suffering. To borrow Shechner's term, it is exactly this “commitment to otherness”¹³ that is the fabric and framework of morality for Malamud. He thus makes it clear that transcending estrangement and loneliness comes in caring for others, in sacrificing oneself for others, in what the younger Gans, the equivocating son in “The Silver Crown,” refuses to do as he haggles with the rabbi Lifschitz over the cost of the crown that will purportedly save his father's life. Far too often, Malamud's characters remain isolated, unable to imagine themselves as more than they are. In this lies the pathos of his moral sensibility.

In “The Silver Crown,” a story typically balanced by both understated humor and pathos, Albert Gans is given the opportunity, for the first time in his life, to do something for his father who lies in a hospital bed dying at the story's opening. The son recognizes not only his current helplessness, but his past betrayals of his father: “To be able to do nothing for him made him frantic. He had done nothing for him all his life.”¹⁴ Walking the streets in misery, Albert considers a faith healer as a last resort: “If specialists disagree, who do you agree with? If you've tried everything, what else can you try?” (p. 4). Albert, “easily irritated; angered by the war, atom bomb, pollution, death, obviously the strain of worrying about his father's illness” (p. 4), thus finds an opportunity to demonstrate his love for his father, an opportunity that comes to Albert in the form of a very peculiar girl, the daughter of the rabbi, who bears a card that reads, “Heal the Sick, Save The Dying. Make a Silver Crown” (p. 5). Immediately Albert feels relief in the thought that he can place the burden of his own responsibility in the hands of another, the elusive Rabbi Lifschitz. Albert is torn, however, between believing in Rabbi Lifschitz's magical healing powers and his own secular assumptions about rationality and the empirical. After considerable deliberation, Albert finally solicits the rabbi to make a silver crown, “even though it goes against the grain of some of my strongest convictions” (p. 12). Faith is the ironic answer to the younger Gans' realization of the failure of secular knowledge, but whether it is faith in God or in the human spirit (indeed, whether they ultimately even differ) is the ambiguity Malamud wants the reader to face.

The crown, a metaphor for the unconditional and absolute belief in the miracle of love, will save the elder Gans' life. But the success of the crown ultimately depends upon Albert's love for his father, as the rabbi constantly reminds the dying man's son. “Doubts we all got,” the rabbi cryptically reassures the young Gans, “we doubt God and God doubts us. This is natural on account of the nature of existence. Of this kind doubts I am not afraid so long as you love your father” (p. 11). For Malamud, such mutual doubting keeps things in balance, since most of his characters find the implicit demands of faith paradoxical, ambiguous, and troublesome.

In one form or another, Malamud's short fiction implicitly asks the question: in what should human beings believe? The suspicious Manischevitz in “Angel Levine” is asked to believe that the black man reading a newspaper in his living room is “a bona fide angel of God, within prescribed limitations … not to be confused with the members of any particular sect, order, or organization here on earth operating under a similar name” (p. 46). Manischevitz can only wonder “what sort of mockery was it … of a faithful servant who had from childhood lived in the synagogues, concerned with the word of God?” (pp. 46-7). He finally, resignedly, believes, not in God per se, but in a black Jewish angel, hanging out in a honky-tonk in Harlem. And so, too, Albert Gans in “The Silver Crown,” “annoyed with himself” (p. 6) for succumbing to the lure of a faith healer, nonetheless seeks the rabbi's assistance in making a miracle that will save his dying father. As he does so, he confronts the rabbi Lifschitz with his apparent defection: “Suppose I am a non-believer? Will the crown work if it's ordered by a person who has his doubts?” (p. 11). But demonstrable belief in God seems to beg the question in both of these stories. It is, finally, beside the point. Like Mendel's selfless love for his retarded son in “Idiots First,” the central concern in stories such as “Angel Levine” and “The Silver Crown” is not how much one has suffered, but very simply how much one loves.

To rely on love, however, for the empirical, rational Albert, who demands proof of the crown's potency (proof he gets from the rabbi in the humorous form of testimonials from satisfied customers), suggests the sentimentality he has spent his life avoiding. Albert is thus torn between abandoning what seems to be an increasingly ludicrous plan and bargaining for a cheaper, but no less effective, crown. (The crown, the rabbi Lifschitz tells him, comes in two models, one for $986 and a significantly cheaper one for $401). But Albert's protestations are nothing but self-serving rationalizations, since it becomes increasingly clear that he is far less concerned with his father's health than he is interested in his own self-image; he does not want it thought that he would not go to any lengths to save his father:

He fought gloom, irritation, felt flashes of hot and cold anger. It's throwing money away, pure and simple. I'm dealing with a clever confidence man, that's plain to me, but for some reason I am not resisting strongly. Maybe my subconscious is telling me to go along with a blowing wind and have the crown made. After that we'll see what happens. … Not much will happen, I suppose, but whatever does, my conscience will be in the clear.

(pp. 14-15)

In other words, Albert does not want to face up to his habitual neglect and resentment of his father. He wants to cover all his bases, as it were, and thus free himself from his responsibility to sacrifice for his father. After all, rachmones comes not without sacrifice, a turning from the self, an embracing of another's suffering. Albert's pretense is transparent to both the rabbi and his grotesque daughter, whose closeness foils the distance between the dying father and son. Albert's veiled attempts to justify his actions to himself, his requests to the rabbi for tangible proof of the crown's healing powers, his demand to see a sample “crown-in-progress,” his questions regarding the “mechanism” and explicit “function” of the crown (“Who wears it, for instance? Does he? Do you? Or do I have to? … And if you wouldn't mind saying, what's the principle, or rationale behind it?” [p. 9]), his insistence on a receipt in order to “prove I paid you if something goes wrong” (p. 21), all serve as avoidances of the inevitable question from the rabbi, a question that becomes a refrain throughout the story: “‘Mr. Gans,’ replied the rabbi, ‘this is not a showcase business. You are not buying from me a new Chevrolet automobile. Your father lays now dying in the hospital. Do you love him?’” (p. 16).

Albert's professed devotion to his father is finally as illusory as the crown itself. All of this finally comes down to the simple question of how much the young Gans is willing to pay for his father's life. And the cost of his love for his father is finally too high for Albert. When implored by the rabbi at the conclusion of the story to “‘think of your father who loves you’,” Albert responds with rage: “‘He hates me, the son of a bitch, I hope he croaks’” (p. 29). This flippant denial of love, not surprisingly, becomes a virtual death sentence: “An hour later the elder Gans shut his eyes and expired” (p. 29). But it also, and much more essentially to Malamud, makes culpable the son, makes him more than an accomplice to his father's demise. “‘Murderer,’” cries “the wild-eyed rabbi, pointing a finger at God in heaven” (p. 29). While the rabbi's final judgment could be taken as directed at a God who could be considered responsible for such an act of betrayal and ultimate transgression on the part of a son toward his father, it makes better sense to conclude that the rabbi, in collusion with God (and, indeed, with the father), sees into the son's motives, has seen into them all along, and recognizes the limiting denial of love and, thus, of life. When told by a doctor that he has cancer, the dying Gans bitterly responds, “‘of the heart’” (p. 3). The younger Gans' doubts and prevarications about the effectiveness of the crown are finally displacements of his own diminished capacity to love. Just as Manischevitz in “Angel Levine” inadvertently comes “to discover something about himself” (p. 45), Albert Gans finally admits what the rabbi and the father already know, that his actions, his choices, are not motivated by love. Most, if not all, of Malamud's characters discover something about themselves, either a reaffirmation of what they already suspect, or an illumination that far too often results in grief and, metaphorically, in the death of the human spirit. After all, as the black Jews davening in the synagogue in “Angel Levine” vow, the substance is the spirit.

This theme of death by failures of love, suggested metaphorically in “The Silver Crown,” is made explicit in the title of Malamud's deceptively simple short story “My Son The Murderer.” Ironically, while in “The Silver Crown” the son is accused by the rabbi of murdering his father because of his failure to love, in “My Son the Murderer” the father does not die, but grieves, as if for the death of his son and for the failure of his own love to break through the son's murderous silence. What is made literal in “The Silver Crown” takes on a metaphorical intensity in “My Son the Murderer,” a story in which the outcome of the severance between the characters is made all the more ambiguous and thus all the more tragic.

In “My Son the Murderer” the gulf between father and son is dramatized by shifting narrative perspectives. The story is narrated from two distinct but interchangeable points of view, that of the father and that of the son. But the narrative perspectives are blurred by shifting pronoun references, and Malamud moves us from one perspective to the other with suggestive rapidity. The story opens with terse, stark language in a simple and abrupt description of the dramatic situation:

He wakes feeling his father is in the hallway, listening. He listens to him sleep and dream. Listening to him get up and fumble for his pants. He won't put on his shoes. To him not going to the kitchen to eat. Staring with shut eyes in the mirror. Sitting an hour on the toilet. Flipping the pages of a book he can't read. To his anguish, loneliness. The father stands in the hall. The son hears him listen.¹⁵

This typical paragraph first presents the son's perspective, shifts to the father's in the second sentence, and concludes in the final two lines with the author's minimal assessment of both positions. Interestingly enough, the ambiguity of reference to “he” both exposes the estrangement between father and son and emphasizes their similarity; they are inseparably linked by the blurring of perspectives and the initial confusion regarding perspective. This tightly controlled language sharply contrasts with the dreamlike qualities of the controlling perspective through which the rupture between father and son is initially seen. It is never entirely clear who listens to whom, who watches whom, because they both do so, both father and son on guard, watchful of the other. And so the abrupt shifts in perspective—“My son the stranger, he won't tell me anything”; “My father listens in the kitchen” (pp. 165, 167)—seem disjunctions, switching back and forth from one mind to another. The shifting of pronoun reference creates an unyielding tension that permeates the story's movement.

But these disconcerting shifts in perspective share a consistent voice. It is a voice shared by both characters, a voice of despair, loneliness, helplessness, and obsession. That they cannot communicate their fear to each other makes their alienation all the more powerful. But the abrupt, unpredictable shifts in perspective, from the father's point of view and then the son's, then back again, repeatedly, serve to dramatize the estrangement between them, an estrangement and silence so profound that the father can only wish that “maybe someday he will write me a letter, My dear father …” (p. 166). This emblem of distance, a letter to a father from a son living under the same roof, reveals tangibly the father's sense of loss and helplessness. His need to communicate with his son is so deeply felt that the imagined letter for him becomes real:

Leo took out his small key and opened the mailbox. There were three letters. He looked to see if one of them was, by any chance, from his son to him. My dear father, let me explain myself. The reason I act as I do … There was no such letter.

(p. 170)

This is a letter the father will never receive. The deliberateness with which Malamud describes Leo's actions reveals an obsessive desperation just barely held in check by the texture of the passage. And Leo wants more than a simple, rational explanation for his son's behavior. He wants tangible proof, in the form of a letter, of his son's affection, “my dear father.” While the “dear,” of course, refers to a letter's conventional salutation, it also accentuates Leo's need for some validation, however minimal, of his son's love.

Letters are clearly an important device for Malamud. Elsewhere he depicts letters as metonymies of communication hoped for but denied. In a story simply titled “The Letter,” the rejection of a letter is finally a rejection of love and compassion. The story takes place inside the gates of a mental institution, where Newman makes his Sunday visits to his barely sentient father, whose brief remarks nevertheless on occasion seem uncannily perceptive. It is clear that the Sunday visits are a burden to Newman, who leaves as soon as possible and whose persistent question to his father, “‘Do you want to have next Sunday off?’” fails to hide his real intention.¹⁶ He finally discloses it: “‘I want a Sunday off myself’” (p. 100). Passing through the gate each Sunday, however, he meets Teddy, an inmate of the institution, who stands at the gate holding his letter, a letter with blank pages, unstamped, addressed to no one. Nevertheless, he wants Newman to mail his letter; just outside the gate there is a mailbox.

Teddy's hold on the letter, chiasmatically rendered—“he held it as he always held it, as though he had held it always” (p. 101)—reveals at once the immediacy of his presence at the gate with the letter and, at the same time, the duration of his vigil. When the rational Newman (not unlike the empirical Albert Gans) refuses to mail the letter on the grounds that there is nothing in it, Teddy tells him, “‘That's what you say. … It's not that kind of a letter’” (pp. 101-2). Instead it is a letter that represents a silent but no less compelling connection between Teddy and his father, Ralph, who, to Newman's apprehension, is also an inmate of the institution. The letter, Ralph tells Newman, is Teddy's attempt to communicate with his father. Newman is uneasy because the letter, now the bequest of both father and son, clearly symbolizes their closeness. Ralph and Teddy are, metaphorically and literally, gatekeepers at the story's conclusion, maintaining a vigilance that is critical for them, as well as for Malamud. Their very presence there functions as an unsettling reminder to Newman of his intentional emotional obliviousness. Their obvious intimacy reveals all the more powerfully Newman's inability to communicate with his father, a failure that goes beyond the father's impaired faculties. But Ralph and Teddy, connected by craziness, also stand in contrastive and analogy to Newman and his father: “‘Why don't you come back here and hang around with the rest of us?’” (p. 106), Ralph demands of Newman. Newman's lack of compassion, his insistence on the rationality of the outside world, makes him a likely candidate for the psychiatric ward. He has no reason to insist on the letter's meaninglessness, when he could simply take the letter from either of the two men and toss it in the mailbox. To do so, however, would be to commit himself. Mailing the letter demands that Newman admit his connection, his obligations and responsibilities, to others. Mailing the letter, on Newman's part, demands compassion, not just to his father, but to Ralph and Teddy, mock paradigms of a closeness that Newman rejects just as he rejects the letter. And the letter itself, ironically, calls attention to its unmistakable superfluity. Teddy's voice may be unwritten: it is not, however, unspoken.

In “My Son the Murderer,” on the other hand, the letter is no more than a longed-for message of hope. Leo remains locked in a silence so impenetrable that he is forced to stalk his son, obsessively but ineffectually trying to pry from him the words that will explain the rupture between them. While Leo remains in the dark regarding his son's strange behavior—“Since he graduated college last summer he is alone, nervous, in his own thoughts. If you talk to him, half the time he yells if he answers you” (p. 166)—the story gives evidence of the son's disaffection with his life, indeed with the world. He fears the draft notice that he expects each day and can't get on with a life that is, for him, “temporary.”

But Harry does not reveal such fears to his father. And the dramatic irony and tension are caused in large part because the reader has knowledge that the father does not about the cause of the son's despair:

I'm twenty-two since December, a college graduate, and you know where you can stick that. At night I watch the news programs. I watch the war from day to day. It's a big burning war on a small screen. It rains bombs and the flames roar higher. Sometimes I lean over and touch the war with the flat of my hand. I wait for my hand to die.

(p. 167)

He feels out of control, severed from his own identity in the same way that his hand, surrealistically severed from his body, dies on the screen of the television. His hand here is a metonymy of the self, a self that he feels disconnected from, which is why we find him in the story's opening “staring with shut eyes in the mirror” (p. 166). Harry can't bear to see himself, because he feels himself “temporary,” robbed of a future.

But all he can tell his father is “that I feel bad. … I feel what I feel. I feel what is … Whatever it is I don't want to talk about it” (p. 167). And although Leo pleads with his son to talk to him, he only receives silence and murderous rage: “I ought to murder you the way you spy on me” (p. 172). The son directs his anger at his father because he has no other outlet; the war, the draft board, the government are all impervious to his protestations. Harry's outrage, like Mendel's in “Idiots First,” is against Ginzburg's “cosmic, universal law,” his outrage a response to the arbitrary, random nature of death that makes all things temporary. Harry feels robbed by his circumstances of a life guided by ethical parameters of his own making. And so he feels murderous himself, himself a harbinger of death. Any kind of human connection is a reminder to Harry of its inevitable absence, of the futility in acts of compassion in the face of the cold, indifferent law by which his life seems propelled.

As Harry withdraws increasingly from his father's embrace, the father becomes all the more frantic to hold on to his son, to bridge the ever-widening gap between them. Like Mendel in “Idiots First,” Leo's concern is entirely for his son. His anxiety, his need to connect with his son, is selfless. Finally, Leo cares less for his own grief and loss and more for his son's wasted life, a life, tragically, that he can only look on from a distance:

It's the worst kind of worry. If I worry about myself I know what the worry is. What I mean, there's no mystery. I can say to myself, Leo you're a big fool, stop worrying about nothing—over what, a few bucks? Over my health that has always stood up pretty good although I have my ups and downs? Over that I'm now close to sixty and not getting any younger? Everybody that don't die by age fifty-nine gets to be sixty. You can't beat time when it runs along with you. But if the worry is about somebody else, that's the worst kind. That's the real worry because if he won't tell you, you can't get inside of the other person and find out why. You don't know where's the switch to turn off. All you do is worry more.

So I wait out in the hall.

(p. 169)

Leo's character prefigures the kind of hero that Malamud's fiction depends upon. Leo's simplicity, his self-conscious wit and ironic self-assessment that turn abruptly into unsentimental anguish together shape the complex voice typical of Malamud's central characters. Leo here is motivated by an unswerving commitment to nothing less than the fundamental terms of his moral obligation as a human being. Not unlike Mendel in “Idiots First,” Leo fights for his right to moral agency and resolutely refuses to abandon his quest. Of course, the authorial irony that permeates Leo's self-claimed position calls attention to the limitations of Leo's ability to change his situation. But his simplicity and the obvious truth in his declaration of concern for his son give him the strength of character to remain vigilant.

Leo's waiting is the kind of vigilance often endured by Malamud's characters. His problem here, that “you can't get inside of the other person,” a condition he necessarily makes universal by his shift in pronoun (“you”), is, of course, exactly what Malamud ironically allows readers to do by so deftly switching references and perspectives throughout. The stories present multiple points of view simultaneously, multiple world views that merge, here, in a single voice of despair. While neither father nor son can “get inside” of the other, Malamud brings readers into both. Knowledge of their individual motives, knowledge that the characters do not share, makes their estrangement all the more searing. Helpless, the father can only profess his love for his son, a love the son wants to deny, for to do otherwise would, to the son's way of thinking, increase his vulnerability. But Leo can only return to the validation of his love for his son: “I remember when we weren't afraid to show we loved each other” (p. 170). Leo has resigned himself. He cannot change circumstance or condition. He can only make meaning of his life in his connection to his son. Malamud pits Leo's simple and literal views on life and death (“Everybody that don't die by age fifty-nine gets to be sixty” [p. 169]) against his son's demands of the world and expectations for his position in it. For Leo it is simple, it is the unsentimental need for rachmones.

And he expresses his love for his son in the only way he can, in a comically pathetic expression of unconditional love: “Let me cook you an egg” (p. 170). Harry's rejection of his father's love, “An egg is the last thing in the world I want” (p. 170), is his rejection of his minimal moral obligations in a world that he views as fundamentally and arbitrarily immoral. His father's unswerving presence alone is a nagging reminder to Harry of his moral obligations and of his responsibilities to others: “Harry, I'm frightened. Tell me what's the matter. My son, have mercy on me” (p. 173). Harry ignores his father's pleas for compassion, responding with a rigid silence that disguises to the father what the reader “hears” clearly: “I'm frightened of the world, Harry thought. It fills me with fright” (p. 173). Given the opportunity to redeem himself by showing some compassion for his father in the face of his own misery, Harry instead betrays his father's love, ignores his father's appeals to his conscience. Such a hardening of oneself against others typifies Malamud's characters. Mark Shechner argues that “in story after story coldness is returned for love, a warm heart is battered by a cold one. The word ‘no’ is the most powerful and bitter word in all of Malamud.”¹⁷ It is so because “no” enforces the persistence of suffering. It makes conditions finite and thus prevents redemption. “Yes” is the language of the future.

Leo's quest is set against the stark, desolate backdrop of Coney Island in winter, “wet, cold, and deserted”:

There were few cars on Surf Avenue and few people on the streets. It felt like snow. Leo walked on the boardwalk amid snow flurries, looking for his son. The gray sunless beaches were empty. The hot-dog stands, shooting galleries, and bathhouses were shuttered up. The gunmetal ocean, moving like melted lead, looked freezing. A wind blew in off the water and worked its way into his clothes so that he shivered as he walked. The wind white-capped the leaden waves and the slow surf broke on the empty beaches with a quiet roar.

(pp. 172-173)

This hostile landscape reflects the moral vacuity that frightens both father and son. It is here that they finally are able to meet, although it is a meeting that reflects their fracture. Harry, standing with his feet in the freezing ocean, watches his father frantically chase after his hat, arbitrarily blown along the surf. In their mutually crippling condition, both men recognize each other's loneliness and recognize, too, their powerlessness, their inability to console each other. But for the one man it is his choice, for the other it is forced upon him, and so they “meet at the edge of the water” (p. 174). It is a meeting that admits defeat, a defeat echoed in the fragments by which Leo, throughout the story, attempts to define and understand his son: “My son the stranger” (p. 165); “My son the prisoner” (p. 166); “My temporary son” (p. 167); “My son with the dead hand” (p. 167); “My son who made himself into a lonely man” (p. 174); “My son stands with his feet in the ocean” (p. 174). The emphatic repetition of “my” underscores Leo's desperate attempts to connect with his son. But the hollowness of these fragmented lines, virtual epitaphs to his son, reveal finally and reductively all one can ever know about another human being.

To this end the story simultaneously distances and reels in human ties, augmented by the subtle shifts from references to “the father/the son,” a simple naming of the relationship, to “my father/my son,” a feeling for the relationship. But the final arbiter of human connection, for Malamud, is not in knowing but in acting. Evelyn Avery, in “Pictures of Malamud,” argues that often Malamud's characters, “capable … [of] heroic actions,” when “weak and needy … are betrayed by those who fail the test of love.”¹⁸ When Leo returns to his son “at the edge of the water,” they are at a precipice: Leo's very presence there demands that his son choose whether to act, whether to affirm his love for his father and his moral responsibility to make something of his life that includes his obligation to those who love him. Harry, standing with his feet in the freezing ocean, is a picture of futility, the son failing to seek the possibility of redemption that water typically symbolizes. He seeks not redemption, but self-destruction, as his father, in a kind of slapstick comedy routine, chases after his hat. The one freezes in time, the other moves spasmodically, but no less futilely.

Malamud's characters arguably achieve tragic stature, despite their often farcical, parodic, and unselfconsciously humorous acts. Humor, for Malamud, reinforces his characters' humanity. In a 1975 interview with Daniel Stern, Malamud described his writing in much the same way as he describes his characters' unforeseen accomplishments: “With me humor comes unexpectedly, usually in defense of a character.”¹⁹ Like Mendel in “Idiots First,” and Manischevitz in “Angel Levine,” their victories take them by surprise—“small and astonished,” Cynthia Ozick has called them.²⁰ And here again we find Malamud's commitment to the “defense” of his characters, which is to say, of what is human. In this way, Jewish suffering in Malamud's fiction stands for human suffering, and what is expressively Jewish is linked to the universal in Malamud's insistence on compassion, on mercy. Heroic action, for Malamud, would seem to exist in the ordinary, in unselfconscious acts of compassion and selflessness. The moral choices typically put to his characters are hurdles by which they are given the chance to prove their humanity. Hab rachmones, Levenspiel pleads throughout The Tenants, have mercy, compassion. For Malamud “moral choice is considered to be momentous, where the constant, inner struggle known as conscience issues into dramatic illumination.”²¹ Choice for Malamud's characters is “momentous” exactly because in making a choice to affirm one's obligations to others, Malamud makes a claim for a remaking of moral authority. And morality is determined by love, the expression of love and human connection. His stories, as structures of perception, suggest again and again that without compassion is the void, as Leo reminds his son in “My Son the Murderer,” “nothing is nothing, it's better to live” (p. 174).

But to live well, for the host of Malamud's characters, involves a necessary struggle to break through the silence of human loneliness.²² The suffering that Malamud's characters confront becomes the measure by which they affirm their humanity. Like the angel Levine, who can only regain the moral authority of the angelic if he does a good turn for the Job-like Manischevitz, the proof of one's moral fortitude resides in the willingness to perform acts of compassion and, perhaps even more important, in the willingness to believe in their efficacy. Manischevitz, desperately trying to save his dying wife, wonders, “was ever man so tried? Should he say he believed a half-drunk Negro was an angel? … a wheel in his mind whirred: believe, do not, yes, no, yes, no. The pointer pointed to yes, to between yes and no, to no, no it was yes. He sighed. It moved but one still had to make a choice” (p. 55). For Malamud, it is only in choices, in actions, that love is proved, the necessity for human connection demonstrated, and moral being realized, in fighting human loneliness and indifference. This is perhaps what Malamud means when he suggests that “working alone to create stories … is not a bad way to live our human loneliness.”²³ Writing here becomes the necessary “equipment for living,” to borrow a suggestive term from Kenneth Burke. But the resonance of “alone” and “loneliness” suggests the inevitability of the final “measure” of humankind.

As Martin Goldberg, the narrator in “The German Refugee,” comes to understand, “all this can be a dreadfully boring business unless you think you have a future.”²⁴ And “all this” is tinged with the understated irony and humor so characteristic of Malamud's fiction. With few exceptions, in trying to make meaning out of their lives, to fend off their “human loneliness,” Malamud's characters stumble over each other. Like Sholom Aleichem's “little people,” they pathetically create conditions that insure their own misery, as does Albert Gans in “The Silver Crown,” or they end up miserably befuddled as does Rosen, the ex-coffee salesman currently residing in limbo, in “Take Pity.” In this way Malamud avoids sentimentality, opting rather for a comic realism that shows people to be, finally, no more than what they are: mildly pathetic, willfully myopic, humorously true to themselves.

Notes

1. Bernard Malamud, “Idiots First,” in Idiots First (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1963), p. 14. All further parenthetical references are taken from this edition.

2. Rachmones is derived from the Hebrew root rechem, a mother's womb. The implied analogy here, between the feelings a mother has for her child and the way in which a Jew should regard others, should make even more emphatic the quality of rachmones, fundamental to Jewish thought and ethics. The concept of rahamim, compassion, was often used by the writers of the Bible to convey the relation between God and the people of Israel. The entry in the Encyclopaedia Judaica points out that “the human response to the disclosure of divine compassion is to be found in man's behavior toward his fellows” (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 1971), Vol. 5, pp. 855-856. The Hebrew term denotes a biblical reading (God is characteristically referred to as the God of Mercy and Compassion), while the Yiddish rachmones would seem to emphasize the uniquely human imperative of compassion and mercy. Rachmones calls to mind the whole of Yiddishkeit. Malamud's concern is with the applications of compassion for human rather than divine terms.

3. Mark Shechner, “Sad Music” (Review of The Stories of Bernard Malamud), in Critical Essays on Bernard Malamud, ed. Joel Salzberg (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987), pp. 68-69.

4. Haskell Frankell, “Bernard Malamud,” Saturday Review, 49 (September 10, 1966), 40.

5. Sholom Aleichem, “Tevye Wins a Fortune,” in The Old Country, trans. Julius and Frances Butwin (New York: Crown Publishers, 1946), p. 21.

6. Sholom Aleichem, “On Account of a Hat,” in Selected Stories of Sholom Aleichem, ed. Alfred Kazin (New York: Modern Library, 1956), p. 10.

7. I. L. Peretz, “Bontsha the Silent,” in Selected Stories, eds. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), p. 77.

8. Bernard Malamud, “Armistice,” in The People and Uncollected Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), p. 109.

9. See S. Lillian Kremer's discussion of Malamud's fiction in her important work on Jewish American Holocaust literature, Witness Through the Imagination (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1989). Kremer argues that Malamud's “tales of postwar Jewish life are informed by Holocaust consciousness” (p. 82). This accounts in large part for the repetition of vigilance throughout these stories.

10. Curt Leviant, “Bernard Malamud: My Characters Are God Haunted.” Hadassah Magazine, 55, no. 10 (June 1974), 19.

11. Robert Solotaroff, Bernard Malamud: A Study of the Short Fiction (Boston: Twayne Pub., 1989), p. 70.

12. Bernard Malamud, “Angel Levine,” in The Magic Barrel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1958), p. 44. All further parenthetical references to this work are taken from this edition.

13. Shechner, p. 69.

14. Bernard Malamud, “The Silver Crown,” in Rembrandt's Hat (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), p. 4. All further parenthetical references to this work are taken from this edition.

15. Bernard Malamud, “My Son the Murderer,” in Rembrandt's Hat, p. 165. All further parenthetical references to this work are taken from this edition.

16. Bernard Malamud, “The Letter,” in Rembrandt's Hat, p. 99. All further parenthetical references are taken from this edition.

17. Shechner, p. 71.

18. Evelyn Avery, “Pictures of Malamud,” SAJL, 7 (1988), 225, 226.

19. Daniel Stern, “The Art of Fiction: Bernard Malamud,” Paris Review, 61 (Spring 1975), 55.

20. Cynthia Ozick, “Bernard Malamud,” PR, 53 (1986), 464.

21. Daniel Walden and Sanford Marovitz, “Bernard Malamud: In Memoriam—An Introduction,” SAJL, 7 (1988), 136.

22. As Morris Bober tells Frank Alpine in The Assistant, “I suffer for you. … I mean, you suffer for me” (New York: Dell, 1957), p. 150. Morris' correction is rendered chiasmatically, a characteristic device for Malamud, because it suggests the often unwitting inseparability of his characters, punctuating “what it means to be human.” Their suffering becomes interchangeable, because their lives are first circumstantially and then purposefully linked.

23. Bernard Malamud, The Stories of Bernard Malamud (New York: Plume, 1984), p. xiii.

24. Bernard Malamud, “The German Refugee,” in Idiots First, p. 210.