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Review by Roger Miller
In Bernard Malamud's short story, "The Cost of Living," the protagonist, Sam Tomashevsky, silently cries out to an uncaring universe, "My God, and where is my life now? Who will save me now, and where will I go, where?" Sam Tomashevsky's cry of aloneness is a dominant theme in Malamud's fiction. In a new collection, "The Complete Stories," edited and introduced by Robert Giroux, nearly all of the characters express this plaintive wail, either by the words of their mouths (a couple of times in nearly the same words) or by the living of their lives. In his introduction, Robert Giroux quotes another writer, Daniel Stern, quoting Malamud: "All men are Jews." If Malamud says it in any of these 55 stories, somehow I have overlooked it, but nevertheless it is true. Stern puts it succinctly: Malamud took "the Jew as his starting point for what was most human in humankind."
So it doesn't matter if you are a redneck from Appalachia or a Southern Californian sun worshipper or an airman in North Dakota, these stories about impoverished Jewish merchants living cramped lives in Brooklyn or the Bronx or Jewish intellectuals trying to appreciate the wonders of Italian culture -- these stories are for and about you. From the particular we get the general.
But we must have the particular. You can't gas on about human suffering in the abstract and expect to produce art, much less an interesting story. It is precisely because Malamud's stories are so thoroughly grounded in Jewish life that they can mean so much to us who aren't. I don't know whether God is in the details, but believable and meaningful fiction usually is.
Some of these stories are so well known and respected that they would be in the canon of American literature, if we still had such an animal. "Idiots First," for example, is about an aged father desperately trying to procure enough money in the hours before he dies to put his grown, mentally deficient son on a train to a relative in California.
"Idiots First" is classic Malamud, exhibiting most of his trademark elements. It begins in medias res: "The thick ticking of the tin clock stopped." Its descriptive details approach perfection ("thick ticking," "tin clock"). There is a hopeless innocent caught in a wicked world and faced with a moral crisis. There is, despite the squalor and cruelty of this world, the possibility of redemption because of human love. And, not least, there is, in the form of a presumed Angel of Death, the intersection of the real and the fantastic.
But nowhere do the real and the fantastic intersect more tightly than in "The Jewbird." A skinny crow flies into the apartment of the Harry Cohen family and announces that he is a Jewbird named Schwartz. Ultimately, after causing much consternation in the family, Schwartz is found dead, presumably the victim, as the bird had always feared, of "anti-Semeets." It is a neat moral tale, the anti-Semite being Harry Cohen for rejecting the Jewish heritage that the Jewbird represents.
Then again, appearance and reality also clash rather strongly in "Angel Levine," in which Manischevitz, a fiftyish tailor who has lost everything, is visited by a black angel named Levine. It is a wonderful story of the irrationality of faith. Only when Manischevitz truly believes that Levine is an angel does his life improve, and only then does Levine truly become an angel. Some people say "The Jewbird" is Malamud's best story. They may be right, but I prefer "The German Refugee," about a refugee German intellectual in the United States in 1939 who commits suicide. A rare first-person story, it is completely devoid of fantasy and is utterly convincing in its sympathetic understanding of the way grand forces of history can crush a helpless individual.
Well, so many stories, so little space. They range from 1940 to the 1980s, the early ones nearly as well developed as the last, and throughout we can detect the influence of Yiddish folktales and Malamud's beloved Isaac Bashevis Singer and Isaac Babel. None is overtly comical, save possibly "The Literary Life of Laban Goldman" from 1943, with its echoes of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, but several have an unforced wit or humor. ("Gevalt a pogrom," says the Jewbird.)
I've heard it said that Malamud's stories are depressing. To me, after multiple readings of many of them over the years, they don't seem so. I think, when all is said and done, they tell us to lift up our hearts. Because that's all we can do.
Roger Miller is a freelance writer in Lopez, Pennsylvania. He can be reached at roger_miller@bookpage.com.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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