SOURCE: Kellman, Steven G. “Tenants, Tenets, and Tensions: Bernard Malamud's Blacks and Jews.” In American Literary Dimensions: Poems and Essays in Honor of Melvin J. Friedman, edited by Ben Siegel and Jay L. Halio, pp. 118-27. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Kellman discusses the uneasy relationship between African Americans and Jews in Bernard Malamud's The Tenants.]

Each, thought the writer, feels the anguish of the other.

—The Tenants

The most controversial cover in the history of The New Yorker offers an apocalyptic vision of amity between two mutually wary American minorities. For its 15 February 1993 issue, the magazine reproduced a painting, Valentine's Day by Art Spiegelman, that depicts a Hasidic man and an African-American woman locked in a lusty embrace. In an extraordinary editorial note explicating the image, Spiegelman wrote: “This metaphoric embrace is my Valentine card to New York, a wish for the reconciliation of seemingly unbridgeable differences in the form of a symbolic kiss.”¹

Differences between blacks and Jews, erstwhile allies in civil rights and progressive politics, did not always seem unbridgeable: in 1992, when the Jewish Museum of New York, in collaboration with the NAACP, organized an ambitious exhibition tracing their intricate ties, it offered it under the ambivalent title Bridges and Boundaries: African Americans and American Jews. After the Crown Heights riots and the polarizing rhetoric of Louis Farrakhan, Leonard Jeffries, and Michael Levin, boundaries have been more prominent than bridges. Yet despite a divergence of interests and experiences, blacks and Jews in the United States share a complex fate. “It is painful when images meant to marry repel each other,”² wrote Bernard Malamud, and the statement might be a posthumous gloss on Spiegelman's New Yorker cover, as it is on the tensions between American Jews and African Americans. Spiegelman's miscegenous fantasy could serve as totem for Malamud, whose fiction is often driven by taboos against exogamy, fear of and fascination with the Other. “Every man is a Jew though he may not know it,” declared Malamud,³ whose circumcised schlemiels pose for a portrait of the modern Everyman, someone born to pain and pathos. If the synecdoche is effective, the Gentile, even from a different race or even different species, offers another version of the self, what the Malamud Jew eagerly or grudgingly recognizes as mon semblable, mon frère.

Malamud died in 1986, but his career coincided with the postwar rise of authors—including Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Philip Roth—who were, like Malamud, esteemed because of, not despite their ethnicity. During his most productive years, Jews and blacks made common cause against American apartheid, leading the struggle for integration in education and public accommodations and for universal voter registration. But Malamud also lived to see, in 1968, the bitter confrontation in New York's Ocean Hill-Brownsville schools between black parents and Jewish teachers. He witnessed the rise of militant black separatism and the erosion of consensus in the old ethnic coalition over affirmative action, Israel, and an American civic education. His fictions provide an inventory of the bridges and boundaries between American Jews and blacks in the second half of the twentieth century.

Only three of Malamud's works—the short stories “Angel Levine” and “Black Is My Favorite Color” and the novel The Tenants—deal centrally and explicitly with Jewish-black tensions. However, most of Malamud's fiction focuses on the confrontation between a Jew and an Other, and whether the latter is black, Italian, Russian, American Indian, or even chimpanzee, Jewish-black relations are the author's paradigm for the strained encounters of the self with its doppelgänger. That self is almost always Jewish, but so, too, if covertly or symbolically, is its secret sharer. In “Jewbird,” a feathered visitor disturbs the peace of Harry Cohen when he flies into the frozen-foods salesman's First Avenue apartment and takes up residence there. Not only does the avian intruder speak, but he speaks Yiddish, eats pickled herring, and reads The Jewish Morning Journal. The familiar stranger identifies his species as “Jewbird,” his name as Schwartz, and his natural enemies as “Anti-Semeets.” Schwartz, of course, means black, which also happens to be the color of the winged kibitzer. Anticipating the violent confrontation between Harry Lesser and Willie Spearmint that concludes The Tenants, Malamud ends the story with the black bird's murder at the hands of Cohen, a Jew loath to extend the claims of kinship to his swarthy victim. In the end, who in fact killed Schwartz? “Anti-Semeets,” concludes Cohen's wife, Edie, echoing the Jewbird's pronunciation and indicting her husband's want of self-awareness and excess of self-hatred.

The existence of a Jewish blackbird, like that of Ethiopian Jews and African-American Jews such as Julius Lester, is a reminder that “Jew” and “black” are overlapping, not mutually exclusive, categories. In “Angel Levine,” when a stranger materializes in the meager apartment of a fifty-one-year-old tailor named Manischevitz, he is not exactly a blackbird named Schwartz, merely a Negro named Alexander Levine who verifies his claim to be Jewish by reciting the Hebrew blessing for bread. The dark Levine also contends that he is a novice angel sent to redeem Manischevitz from his Jobian misfortunes. However, Levine is incapable of performing his mission unless the wretched tailor—“a man of comfortable means, he overnight lost all he had”⁴—acknowledges the visitor's identity as a black Jewish angel. Manischevitz at first denies Levine but, desperate for relief from hardship, finally seeks him out in Harlem. After wandering into a congregation of pious black Jews, he finds Levine across the street in a bar. The only white face in the room, Manischevitz ignores anti-Semitic insults directed at him and approaches Levine. “You are Jewish. This I am sure,” proclaims the tailor. “I think you are an angel from God” (55). Like a loathely lady transformed into a nubile maiden through the power of a wayward knight's belief, Levine becomes what Manischevitz says he is. “A wonderful thing, Fanny,” says the grateful tailor to his wife in the story's famous final line. “Believe me, there are Jews everywhere” (56). Everyone is a Jew, suggests Malamud, if only you believe it. And if you believe it, your faith in universal Jewish kinship has the power to mitigate the feature that defines Jewishness for Malamud's metaphor: unmerited misfortune.

In a letter to Evelyn Avery,⁵ Malamud noted that, while teaching evening classes at a New York City high school early in his career, he once had a student named Alexander Levine who was both black and Jewish. Similarly, a twelve-year-old childhood friend named Buster is the origin of the young black pauper named Buster who, in “Black Is My Favorite Color,” responds to the narrator's charity by punching him in the mouth and telling his sanctimonious benefactor: “Take your Jew movies and your Jew candy and shove them up your Jew ass.”⁶ According to Malamud, an inadvertent racial slur rather than condescending philanthropy caused the historical Buster to break with him. “My feeling for Buster,” he explained to Avery, “had in it affection and compassion; I empathized with victims of misfortune. I felt for poor Jews and poor blacks and unfortunate people generally. However, since I was only a child, I was capable of a foolish, unthinking remark about watermelon which earned me a punch from Buster and ended the relationship.”⁷ In the language of contemporary multicultural politics, the young Malamud, like the ten-year-old Nat Lime who narrates “Black Is My Favorite Color” at the age of forty-four, just did not get it. The antecedent of “it” is what the Other genuinely thinks and feels. A smug Jewish liberal is naturally resented for his presumption of empathy with a destitute black.

When he tells his sour story, Lime, who owns a liquor store in Harlem, is bewildered by the refusal of Ornita Harris, a black customer he has dated, to marry him. Nor can he comprehend why his black cleaning woman refuses to eat her lunch at the kitchen table while he is also sitting there. Wary of her employer's condescending gestures of egalitarianism, the ironically named Charity Sweetness retreats to the bathroom to consume her hardboiled eggs alone. “I give my heart and they kick me in my teeth” (30), complains Lime about the blacks who refuse his sweet charity, precisely because it is charity and not compassion or love. Evelyn Avery and Cynthia Ozick⁸ have commented on the imbalance of power between blacks and Jews in Malamud's two stories, but that is surely the point, one that is missed by both Lime and Manischevitz. Neither black nor Jew yet feels the anguish of the other, though the Jew believes he does.

Two epigraphs—from Antiphon, champion of the high style of Athenian aristocracy, and from Bessie Smith, heroine of populist Negro blues—preface The Tenants (1971). More than any other Malamud work, this novel is a meditation on polarization. Between it and his two short stories, published in 1958 and 1961, respectively, intruded racial riots in Watts, Newark, Detroit, Cleveland, and other deteriorating urban areas as well as the birth of the Black Power movement. Set in Manhattan, in a ten-floor tenement on Thirty-First Street and Third Avenue that is crumbling and condemned, the novel is a response to the implosion of American cities and ethnic alliances. “In New York who needs an atom bomb?” asks Harry Lesser. “If you walked away from a place they tore it down” (8). Impetus for the novel came, according to Malamud, from his shock at reading Richard Gilman's review of Eldridge Cleaver in The New Republic. “I was so upset,” he told Avery, “I wrote the novel with a copy of Gilman's article in front of me.”⁹

Reading Malamud's novel beside a copy of Gilman's article—a discussion of Soul on Ice within the context of other recent books by black authors—one is struck by the Jewish critic's abandonment of literary universalism, at least when judging books about black experience. “The Negro doesn't feel the way whites do, nor does he think like whites,” declares Gilman. The manifest distinctiveness of African-American life leads Gilman to endorse a black aesthetic, a conviction that the dominant literary standards are not applicable to writers like Cleaver or Leroi Jones, though they are to Bellow, Malamud, and Roth. Black literature, argues Gilman, “is not something susceptible of being democratized and assimilated in the same way that writing by Jews has been.” For that reason, Gilman, then the literary editor of The New Republic, abjures his privilege to assess African-American books: “I will go on judging and elucidating novels and plays and poetry by Negroes according to what general powers I possess,” he concludes, “but the kind of Negro writing I have been talking about, the act of creation of the self in the face of that self's historic denial by our society, seems to me to be at this point beyond my right to intrude on.”¹⁰

“Black ain't white and never can be. It is once and for only black” (74), contends Willie Spearmint, the Cleaveresque figure who is one of the two antagonists in The Tenants. The other, Harry Lesser, is a published Jewish author who attempts to tutor the neophyte in how to shape his rage into lucid literary form. But Willie, a champion of Negritude, will have none of it; he insists to Lesser that if black experience is unique so, too, must its expression be. The black aesthetic that Willie advocates is a variation on Gilman's essay, even as it anticipates later claims for Afrocentrism: “Art is O.K. when it helps you to say what you got to, but I don't want to turn into a halfass white writer or an ass-kissing Neegro who imitates ofays because he is ashamed or afraid to be black. I write because I am black and what I got to say means something different to black people than it does to whites, if you dig. We think different than you do, Lesser. We do and we are, and we write different. If some white prick tears a piece of black skin off your ass every day, when somebody says, ‘Sit down,’ it's gonna mean two different things to me and you, and that's why black fiction has got to be different than white. The words make it different because the experience does” (82).

In Harry Lesser, author of two published novels, Malamud has created a portrait of the artist as Jewish Flaubert, a literary perfectionist so dedicated to creating a flawless third book that he chooses to sequester himself day after day—for nine-and-a-half years so far—in a vacant, drafty tenement, tapping away at his typewriter. Though Levenspiel, the exasperated landlord who is anxious to raze the building, threatens and cajoles, Lesser refuses to abandon his apartment until the book—called, after King Lear, The Promised End—is concluded to his exacting standards. Willie, by contrast, is impatient with literary niceties and contemptuous of the renunciation that Lesser's ascetic regime demands. In the conflict between the stereotypes that Willie Spearmint and Harry Lesser represent, Malamud offers a dialectic of raw and cooked, redskin and paleface, body and mind, emotion and reason, truth and beauty, content and form. However, as with any dialectic, the opposing forces collide in order to converge. Though Willie's early attempts at writing include anti-Semitic fantasies titled “Goldberg Exits Harlem” and “The First Pogrom in the U.S. of A.,” the black separatist gradually takes on the demeanor and dialect of a Jewish intellectual. The reversal is underscored when Willie announces to Lesser: “You young bloods have got it all over us alter cockers” (156)—when it is the Jew who starts to venture out at night in pursuit of erotic encounters and the black who foregoes carnal pleasure to labor over his lonely art.

Malamud conceives of black and Jew largely in terms of male paradigms—Alexander Levine, Buster, and Willie Spearmint versus Manischevitz, Nat Lime, and Harry Lesser. The ethnic opposition is often fortified by sexual rivalry; consider the fierce resentment felt by a brave named Indian Head when his beloved One Blossom falls in love with a Jewish newcomer named Yozip Bloom in Malamud's final novel, The People. Nat Lime's relationship to Ornita Harris comes to an ugly end when, walking through Harlem after an evening together, they are accosted by three black thugs. Calling him a “Jewboy,” one pulls a knife on Nat and insists: “No more black pussy for you” (29). Though Manischevitz seems safely bound to his ailing Jewish wife Fanny, his quest for the Angel Levine obliges the Jewish tailor to march into a bar and pry the tipsy black man from the side of a woman named Bella. The contest between Willie and Harry is fought in part over the affections of Irene Bell née Belinsky, a Jewish woman who starts out as Willie's lover then transfers her affections to Harry before finally abandoning both men, realizing that the two writers have more in common than either will admit. Willie's fiction is an outraged cry of social concern, yet to be a writer he withdraws from society into the vacuum of an abandoned tenement. And Harry, who informs Irene that he is writing a book about love, must lead a singularly loveless life to do so. Both Harry and Willie withdraw from the world to embrace it.

In its final pages, The Tenants records a fantasy of apocalyptic combat and fusion between Jew and black. Lesser and Willie have at each other with ax and razor as well as ethnic taunts. “Blood-suckin Jew Niggerhater,” sneers Willie, and Lesser replies: “Anti-Semitic Ape” (229). And yet, the very moment of mutual destruction offers the promise of reconciliation through genuine empathy, through the mediation of the literary imagination: “Each, thought the writer, feels the anguish of the other” (230). The novel halts more than concludes, without a period and with 113 repetitions of the word “mercy.” Typographically, the long chain of identical words resembles an ellipsis, and it emphasizes the fact that The Tenants, like Harry Lesser's novel and like Jewish-black relations, remains achingly open-ended. In Shakespeare's use of a merchant Jew as metaphor, an emotionally constricted character is reminded that the quality of mercy is not strained but flows freely, as does the word itself on the last page of The Tenants. Mercy entails concern for someone else, an absolute denial of solipsism or separatism. Trailing off into a potentially endless series of mercys, the novel stops with a recognition of the insufficiency of the self and of black or Jew.

Though The Tenants proved prophetic of a widening rift between blacks and Jews in the United States, Malamud never revisited the subject quite so overtly. In Dubin's Lives,¹¹ protagonist William Dubin's distress is exacerbated when his daughter runs off with her former professor, who is both sixty years old and black. But that is a minor thread in the novel's total texture. However, though God's Grace,¹² Malamud's final completed novel, is set in a postnuclear world in which all blacks have perished, it transposes many of the ethnic tensions that animate The Tenants, “Angel Levine,” and “Black Is My Favorite Color” into interspecies rivalry. Paleologist Calvin né Seymour Cohn, the son and grandson of rabbis, is the solitary human survivor of a nuclear holocaust, and he finds himself sharing a tropical island—and the planet Earth—with a few other primates—chimpanzees, baboons, and gorillas. A Jewish Prospero, Cohn takes control, teaching the chimps to speak English and even to participate in a Passover seder. When he falls in love with a chimpanzee named Mary Madelyn, the two beget a hybrid baby girl they name Rebekah Islanda. However, the peaceable kingdom proves fragile and temporary, as some of the male apes, coveting Mary Madelyn for themselves, begin to resent the Jew's sexual transgression and his dominion, even if benevolent.

A hostile ape ominously named Esau abducts and kills Rebekah and threatens her human father. “I will break every Jewbone in your head” (201), proclaims Esau, who, in his anti-Semitic attack on the only living human being, acknowledges the Malamudian precept that every man is a Jew. If Cohn's idyllic romance with his simian sweetheart recalls Harry Lesser's elaborate, gentle dream (Tenants, 206-17) of a double wedding in Africa between black and Jew, Jew and black (Willie and Irene, Lesser and Mary Kettlesmith), the final chapter of God's Grace, titled “God's Mercy,” recapitulates the climactic confrontation of black and Jew in The Tenants. Cohn is captured by the chimpanzees, and, while they prepare for his ritual slaughter in a fulfillment of Abraham's aborted sacrifice of Isaac, a gorilla named George says Kaddish for the doomed Jew. Despite the biological kinship and temporary camaraderie between Jew and Other, God's Grace, like The Tenants, offers a vision of primal enmity between them. Yet in the gorilla's incantation of the Jewish Prayer for the Dead, it also leaves open the possibility of reconciliation beyond violence.

It is of course demeaning to translate African Americans into apes. In a broadcast booth or on a college campus, the equation is an offense against contemporary speech codes. So is virtually any figurative use of ethnicity. Writing in the pages of the Jewish monthly Commentary, Robert Alter faulted Malamud for his appropriation of “Jewishness as Metaphor.” He noted that “The Jew as Everyman is a kind of literary symbol that is likely to wear thin very quickly.”¹³ When it does not wear thin in Malamud, it is because he is manifestly less interested in sociology or politics than in epistemology and ethics. His characters are figures in the human calculus of differentiation and integration. Malamud reconceives the Jews and blacks who populated the working-class New York neighborhood in which he grew up in order to explore the bonds and barriers among all people.

In The People, the work-in-progress left incomplete at the time of his death, Malamud again dramatizes interactions between a Jew and the Other. For a Biblical Hebrew, the quintessential Other is Ishmael, and that is the name of the horse we encounter on the opening page of The People. The year is 1870, and he is ridden by Yozip Bloom, a Jewish immigrant from Russia eager to make a new life in the American West. Unlike Abramovitz, the remarkably eloquent equine narrator of “Talking Horse” (in Rembrandt's Hat)¹⁴ who is paired with a man named Goldberg, Ishmael can merely whinny, but that does not deter Yozip in his attempts at interspecies communication. “You may be a horse to your mother,” says Yozip to Ishmael in Yiddish, “but to me nothing less than a friend.”¹⁵ Yozip is soon befriended by a tribe of Northwest Indians who call themselves the People and who recruit the greenhorn peddler to serve as their spokesman. He is their fluent Aaron appointed to persuade the Federal Pharaoh to let the People go about their lives in peace.

Like much of Malamud's other fiction, The People is constructed around a set of intercultural incongruities. It is obvious to any native speaker that Yozip's English is thickly accented, but the Indians, doubtful of their own rhetorical proficiency, dispatch him to Washington to plead their cause. A vegetarian, Yozip joins a community where buffalo slaughter is essential to diet, clothing, and ritual. A pacifist, he ends up doing battle against marauding American soldiers. A Jewish Indian chief is as outlandish as the inflections of Yiddish in Idaho, yet when the old chief dies, Yozip, renamed Jozip, is appointed to succeed him.

In the final sentence of Chapter Sixteen, the last of the twenty-one projected chapters that Malamud lived to complete, Jozip and his defeated tribe are forced to board a train bound for a detention camp in Missouri. “The moaning of the Indians began as the freight cars were moving along the tracks” (97), we are told. This concluding image evokes not only the desolate prospects of consignment to a reservation, but also the freight cars that seven decades later would transport Jews to death camps in Nazi Europe. The wondrous thing for Malamud is that there are Jews everywhere someone suffers. Beneath the skin—red, black, or even furry—all the victims of history are basically mishpocheh or family. An author who persists in such sentimental camaraderie amid the increasing fragmentation of American society during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s demonstrates either stubborn naiveté or extraordinary empathy.

To the end, though, Malamud continued to place his Jewish characters, for all their fecklessness, in a stronger position than their dark-skinned alter egos. It is the benevolent patron's plea for equity. Like the Jewish liberals who founded the NAACP and attempted to guide the labor and civil rights movements, Malamud's Jews offer themselves as senior partners in an egalitarian utopia. In a universe in which every sufferer is a generic Jew, Malamud's genetic Jews are primus inter pares. Just as Harry Lesser is a more established writer—and tenant—than the interloper Willie Spearmint, and Nat Lime pays the wages of charwoman Charity Sweetness, Jozip leads the People as their chief. Perhaps it is a deficiency of sympathetic imagination that prevents Malamud from projecting what it would be like for a solitary member of the Nez Percé tribe to travel to Tsarist Russia and preside as chief rabbi of a shtetl or for an uncouth Jew to vie with a sophisticated African American author for literary preeminence. Nevertheless, his stories continue to provide a critique of a civilization that is fissuring from a failure of empathy. “The purpose of the writer,” Malamud told an interviewer in 1958, “is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”¹⁶

In 1972, disparaging Malamud's ethnic condescension, Cynthia Ozick dismissed the healing reconciliation of black and Jew that concluded “Angel Levine” as “not merely out of date, it is illusion.”¹⁷ All fiction is, of course, illusion. When Malamud's fictional Lesser rejects Willie's proud insistence on literary parochialism, he argues: “But if the experience is about being human and moves me then you've made it my experience” (75). The survival of a pluralistic community demands that Malamud's moving illusions of overlapping and collapsing categories not be dismissed as delusion.

Notes

1. Art Spiegelman, “Valentine's Day” and Note, The New Yorker, 15 February 1993, 6.

2. Bernard Malamud, The Tenants (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971), 184. References hereafter cited in-text.

3. Jerusalem Post (weekly overseas edition), 1 April 1968, 13. Quoted in Leslie A. Field and Joyce W. Field, ed. Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1975), 7.

4. Bernard Malamud, The Magic Barrel (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1958), 43. References hereafter cited in-text.

5. Evelyn Avery, “Pictures of Malamud,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 2 (Fall 1988): 228.

6. Bernard Malamud, Idiots First (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1963), 22. References hereafter cited in-text.

7. Avery, “Pictures of Malamud,” 227.

8. See Evelyn Avery, Rebels and Victims: The Fiction of Richard Wright and Bernard Malamud (Port Washington, NY: Okerni Kat, 1979) and Cynthia Ozick, “Literary Blacks and Jews” in Bernard Malamud, 80-98.

9. Avery, “Pictures of Malamud,” 227.

10. Richard Gilman, “White Standards and Negro Writing,” The New Republic, 9 March 1968, 25, 30.

11. Bernard Malamud, Dubin's Lives (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979).

12. Bernard Malamud, God's Grace (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982). References hereafter cited in-text.

13. Robert Alter, “Jewishness as Metaphors,” in Bernard Malamud, 42.

14. Bernard Malamud, Rembrandt's Hat (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973).

15. Bernard Malamud, The People and Uncollected Stories, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989), 40. References hereafter cited in-text.

16. Field, “Introduction: Malamud, Mercy and Menschlichkeit,” 7.

17. Ozick, “Literary Blacks and Jews,” 97.