Bernard Malamud revisited

Despite the fact that Bernard Malamud (1914-1986) wrote about selflessness and love as they applied to all human beings, he has long been referred to first and foremost as a Jewish-American writer, a term he disliked. Malamud's most significant works, including The Assistant (1957), The Magic Barrel (1958), The Fixer (1966), and The Tenants (1971) dealt with aspects of Jewish experience in both the Old World and the New. He felt, however, that his characters should be understood not for their Jewishness, but rather as symbolic of the human condition, as sufferers. Furthermore, such well-known novels as The Natural (1952) and A New Life (1961) are about men who either are not Jewish or do not practice their Judaism. Bernard Malamud Revisited is the first comprehensive study of the author and all of his works, including the posthumous 1989 publication of The People and Uncollected Stories. Edward A. Abramson follows the development of Malamud's themes and techniques through a chronological study of his eight novels and a thematic discussion of his short stories. Abramson's analysis of the writer's impact proves that Malamud deserves a place in the American tradition alongside Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, and Hemingway - writers whose fiction is moralistic and frequently uses a particular type of allegory. Malamud is not simply a chronicler of Jewish life, but a universal artist, whose characters grow to a moral maturity that many other American fictional protagonists never reach.