Refiner’s Fire: Malamud’s Vision for Humanity

Universalizing the Jewish experience.

All of Bernard Malamud’s fiction has been remarkably similar in design and theme. No matter what the changes, he reworks the same “idea.”

The atmosphere in Malamud’s fiction is always one of hard times, gloom, and enclosure. The heroes, usually Jewish, recall by their actions the lives of Samson, Job, Joseph, Ephraim, Hosea, and other Old Testament characters. The pattern of their response to life, moreover, suggests the timelessness of the Arthurian Grail myth and its predecessor, the myth of the Fisher-king. And the imagery and symbols within the novels and stories are consistent with the universal archetypes of Jungian psychology.

Malamud’s plots are also of a piece. The protagonist, insulated from his true self, seeks a new life or a substitute existence. In the process, the new knowledge is sometimes repressed and hidden, with catastrophic results. At other times, the individual incorporates his new awareness into his life, bringing a form of redemption.

Malamud’s characters can also be generalized. Tormented as we first see them (a catalogue of the opening lines of Malamud’s works is a pessimistic melange indeed), Malamud’s heroes despair, rebel, bumble, curse, submit, and seek escape. Critics have noted that Malamud’s major characters often resemble the Schlemiel—“struggling, striving, always en route, but destined never quite to arrive.” The heroines in Malamud’s novels are all like Iris Lemon in The Natural, at once both sweet and sour. Moreover, each is, in the Grailmyth imagery, a “lady of the lake” who protects and nurses orphans and teaches knights. The temptresses, or antiheroines, by contrast, seek to corrupt, reflecting in their actions their own diseased breasts and sexual inadequacies.

In tone Malamud’s writings demonstrate the greatest variety and perhaps inconsistency. The Natural, a novel about a baseball hero that is patterned after Greek mythology, is narrated by what one critic has labeled “equal parts Mel Allen and James Joyce.” A New Life, a novel about a liberal, Eastern English professor who moves West to Cascadia College to begin anew, has a tone that is now comical, then touching, now using pat characterizations, now fresh and alive. In The Tenants, the story of two writers, one Jewish and one black, who live in an otherwise deserted tenement, a reader wants to laugh and cry simultaneously. Malamud’s tone works well in The Fixer, an account of a Russian Jew who is wrongly imprisoned, The Assistant, the story of a young man who robs a poor Jewish store owner, and two works of short stories, in The Magic Barrel and Rembrandt’s Hat.

Malamud creates the events and characters to explain his view of life.

The fiction depends on morality nurtured by Judaism. Throughout his works, Malamud reiterates that the fullness of life is not to be discovered through deception or greed, but only through compassion. His characters learn that lesson through suffering and failure.

In “The Lady of the Lake” Malamud tells the story of Henry Levin, who, as Henry R. Freeman, goes to live a new life in Europe. He meets his “lady of the lake,” but he hides his true identity. When she asks him if he is Jewish, he tells her “no” three times. She shows Henry her tattoo from Buchenwald. Her heritage, she says, is too important to marry a non-Jew.

In The Fixer, Yakov Bok, a handyman, flees his Jewish Shtetl or ghetto for freedom and opportunity. He, too, pretends to be a Gentile. But though he finds a job and a place to live with an anti-Semite, he is wrongly accused of murdering an innocent Christian child and using the blood to make matzos for Passover. Most of the book takes place in prison. As he waits for his trial, he asks “Why me? Why did it have to happen to a poor, half-ignorant fixer?” Bok realizes eventually that “being a Jew meant being vulnerable to history, including its worst errors.”

It is not through the simple exchange of one life for another, but through the offering of compassion to one’s fellow sufferers that a new life is ultimately achieved, Malamud believes. In The Assistant, Malamud’s finest novel, Frank Alpine initially believed that “at crime he would change his luck, make adventure, live like a prince.” But he is drawn back to the prison-tomb of Morris Bober’s grocery, the place he has just robbed. He becomes Bober’s assistant. Frank at first despises Bober’s self-chosen poverty, but as the novel proceeds he takes Bober’s place both figuratively and literally. At the end of the novel, Frank is working the store, providing Bober’s daughter Helen with money for her education, hoping she will return his love. Frank converts to Judaism. To become truly a Jew means for Malamud to become a man.

Seeking to protest what he believes to be a false devaluation of man in our day, Malamud has provided a moral vision of man and his possibilities. With his tough, bittersweet portrayals, he has sought to remind man of what humanity means. The Jew is a prime example of the real possibilities for all mankind. Bernard Malamud has found in the Jewish experience a paradigm for the human. He has universalized the Jewish drama.

But isn’t Judaism more than this? Isn’t Judaism, first of all, an encounter with Yahweh? Yes. And orthodox Jewish and Christian readers will find Malamud’s vision incomplete therefore. But don’t too quickly dismiss his insight into the reality of life. Malamud enfleshes themes central to the Old Testament wisdom literature of Job, Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs. He sets before his readers life and death, but admonishes us to choose life. The writer of Proverbs put it this way: “Does not wisdom call, Does not understanding raise her voice?… Happy is the man who listens to me, watching daily at my gates, waiting beside my doors. For he who finds me finds life and obtains favor from the Lord; But he who misses me injures himself; all who hate me love death” (Prov. 8:34–36).

Robert K. Johnston teaches religion at Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Kentucky.

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