Bernard Malamud was an American author of Jewish heritage whose works often explore themes of identity, exile, and the search for meaning. His prose, marked by a blend of melancholic humor and sensitivity to human frailty, captures the complexities of modern life. He excelled at creating memorable characters navigating hardship while retaining their humanity and hope. Malamud's writing offers profound insights into the Jewish-American experience and the universal aspects of the human condition.
Fidelman, a "self-confessed failure as a painter", Salzman the marriage broker and Liev the baker are a few of the author's characters, mostly Jewish, who tend to start off friendly and end up not. All of them are torn between the desire to adapt to life in America and the need to remember.
When Rembrandt the bear loses his special lucky hat, he finds that neither a bird nor a clown hat can replace it.
A matchmaker finds love for a would-be rabbi; a shopkeeper dies because he cannot afford a doctor; a little girl steals candy; an angel visits a grieving tailor. Through Malamud's great gifts as a writer - humour and profound concern for the matter of human life - he transmutes the particular struggles of everyday sufferers into a strange poetry.
With a new introduction by Aleksandar Hemon In "The Tenants" (1971), Bernard Malamud brought his unerring sense of modern urban life to bear on the conflict between blacks and Jews then inflaming his native Brooklyn. The sole tenant in a rundown tenement, Henry Lesser is struggling to finish a novel, but his solitary pursuit of the sublime grows complicated when Willie Spearmint, a black writer ambivalent toward Jews, moves into the building. Henry and Willie are artistic rivals and unwilling neighbors, and their uneasy peace is disturbed by the presence of Willie's white girlfriend Irene and the landlord Levenspiel's attempts to evict both men and demolish the building. This novel's conflict, current then, is perennial now; it reveals the slippery nature of the human condition, and the human capacity for violence and undoing.
The classical novel (and basis for the acclaimed film) now in a new edition Introduction by Kevin Baker The Natural, Bernard Malamud's first novel, published in 1952, is also the first—and some would say still the best—novel ever written about baseball. In it Malamud, usually appreciated for his unerring portrayals of postwar Jewish life, took on very different material—the story of a superbly gifted "natural" at play in the fields of the old daylight baseball era—and invested it with the hardscrabble poetry, at once grand and altogether believable, that runs through all his best work. Four decades later, Alfred Kazin's comment still holds true: "Malamud has done something which—now that he has done it!—looks as if we have been waiting for it all our lives. He has really raised the whole passion and craziness and fanaticism of baseball as a popular spectacle to its ordained place in mythology."
Frank Alpine, a drifter fleeing from his past, runs straight into struggling Brooklyn grocer Morris Bober. Seeing a chance to atone for past sins, Frank becomes Bober's assistant and keeps shop when the owner takes ill. But it is Bober's daughter, Helen, who gives Frank a real reason to stay around, even as he begins to steal from the store. Widely considered as one of the great American-Jewish novels, 'The Assistant' is a classic look at the social and racial divides of a country still in its infancy, and a stunning evocation of the immigrant experience - of cramped circumstances and great expectations.
Arthur Fidelman, Bronx-born and raised, is a self-confessed failure as a painter. When he goes to Italy to prepare a critical study of Giotto, a zany adventure ensues. Pursued through the streets of Rome by the refugee Susskind, forced to abandon Giotto, feeling a reawakening desire to create art, falling into the hands of art thieves, hand-carving wooden Madonnas for sale, becoming a pimp, attempting to sculpt the perfect hole, Fidelman is a comic creation of genius.
A classic that won Malamud both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.The Fixer (1966) is Bernard Malamud's best-known and most acclaimed novel—one that makes manifest his roots in Russian fiction, especially that of Isaac Babel.Set in Kiev in 1911 during a period of heightened anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young Russian boy. Bok leaves his village to try his luck in Kiev, and after denying his Jewish identity, finds himself working for a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Society. When the boy is found nearly drained of blood in a cave, the Black Hundreds accuse the Jews of ritual murder. Arrested and imprisoned, Bok refuses to confess to a crime that he did not commit.
