A Bernard Malamud Reader

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A Bernard Malamud Reader

Seen against the crumbling of Yiddish culture, Bernard Malamud is the most enigmatic,

even mysterious, of American Jewish writes. Bernard Malamud is the author of four novels and two

volumes of short stories, he has received several National prizes. He has been appraised as a special sort of genre-

writer, dealing with the "laughter through tears," the habits of life, exotic to outsiders, of

immigrant Jews, an ethnic group considered to stand in a marginal relation to American

sciety at large. Bernard Malamuds "Jewishness" as he understands and above all feels it,

is one of teh principal sources of value in his work as it effects both his conception of

experience in general, and his conception of imaginative writing in particular. I recently

read a short story by Malamud called, "The Magic Barrel." A jewish trait I noticed while

reading Malamuds short story is how he demonstrates his feeling for human suffering on

the one hand and for a life of value, order, and dignity on the other. “The Magic Barrel”

cleary demonstrates Malamud’s style of writing.

Of all Malamud’s stories, surely the most masterful is “The Magic Barrel,” perhaps the

best story I have read written by an American writer in my recent years. It belongs among those

rare works in which meaning and composition are one and the same. Who can ever forget the the

matchmaker Salzman, “a commercial Cupid,” smelling “frankly of fish which he loved to eat,” who

looked as if her were about to expire but who somehow managed, by a trick of his facial muscles,

“to display a broad smile”? The pictures of prospective brides that the matchmaker shows the

rabbinical student Finkle, intent on marimony, prove very discouraging-all these girls turn out to be

either old maids or cripples. But Salzman contrives to leave one picture in Finkle’s room by which

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