He was born in New York in 1914 to immigrants from a Jewish shtetl in Ukraine. He all but hermetically sealed himself off from the outside world to dedicate his life to writing. To read him now is to experience something that feels new, in large part because its inspirations come from the very bedrock of all storytelling.Īs innovators go, Malamud’s life was interior and modest. Imitators of that strategy will inevitably be rare, but it gives him a unique standing in American letters. Malamud, to the contrary, stuck with Yiddish folklore and continued to bear witness to its strange magic. Bellow and Roth sought to balance their Jewish backgrounds with a commitment to the larger American scene. In truth, he was always an uneasy fit with those two.
Still, his reputation lacks the towering height of Roth’s or Bellow’s. Today, one hundred years after his birth, Malamud’s name endures in the Pen/Malamud Award, given annually to a distinguished short story collection, and now the Library of America has brought out a second volume of his novels and stories covering the 1960s. For this, Malamud received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award (twice), and was installed in a triumvirate with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, what Bellow called the Hart, Schaffner, and Marx of literature. Who writes stories like this anymore? Who aspires to? In the fifties and sixties, Malamud’s talent for giving workaday sufferings and shortcomings the cast of a fable made him the quintessential postwar American writer his work was a reminder that the degradations of the past, particularly for Jews, were not long past. Closed, you’re out and that’s your fate.” “That’s how it goes,” he writes early in the story. The arrival of a talking black bird in “The Jewbird” conveys both a sense of wonderment and a caution that reality is about to come crashing down. They remind us of life’s strangeness and the inexplicability of God’s will. The conclusions of Malamud stories are often spiritual but rarely redemptive. Consider the graduate student whose efforts to research art in Rome are stymied by his inability to find a suitable apartment in “Behold the Key,” or the young man trapped in his room by his promise to consume a stack of books in “A Summer’s Reading,” or the ballplayer shot and disabled on the cusp of fame in The Natural, or the man exasperated by a faith healer’s evasions in “The Silver Crown.” Malamud protagonists are forever being held back, locked out, or stifled. There’s a tendency, if not a formula, in Malamud’s fiction to invest humanity with a spiritual melancholy. “Not for the first time I was seeing a Malamud story unfold,” the critic Alfred Kazin observed.
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