ONCE UPON A TIME, SOME 60 OR 70 YEARS AGO, JEWISH American writing constituted a significant genre in our national literature. The experience of being Jewish in America became metaphorical in the hands of a multitude of writers endowed with talents both small and large. So great was the influence of this writing at that time that it changed the American language and galvanized imaginative storytelling around a postwar world badly in need of newly invigorating voices. Two of its pathbreaking stars were Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, both of whose work was characterized by a compulsive brilliance, an exuberant nastiness, and a take-no-prisoners humor edged in self-laceration. However, a third Jewish American writer of major importance also emerged in the 1950s: Bernard Malamud. His voice sounded nothing at all like Bellow’s or Roth’s—it was neither electrifying nor savvy—but it too endowed the experience of being Jewish in America with transformative powers. Whereas Bellow and Roth took as their subjects the lives of educated Jews emerging into full assimilation, Malamud took for his the homegrown shtetl Jews living in Brooklyn and the Bronx, those paralyzed by poverty and ignorance, and touched them with a kind of literary magic that sent the metaphor diving into depths hitherto unreached. As Bellow said of Malamud after his death, he was an “original of the first rank” in whose work one always heard the “accent of a hard-won…emotional truth.”
Born in Brooklyn in 1914, Malamud was the son of impoverished Russian Jewish immigrants burdened by more than their fair share of
