I will admit to a deep love of all things American. Whether it’s music, food, art, or literature, I love and favor the styles and practitioners of distinctly American art forms and styles. At our best, we don’t just appropriate, we blend and extend, we incorporate the experience of a country and culture that uniquely takes in and assimilates the best and strongest and produces alloys of vibrancy and depth. Only America could produce a Duke Ellington or a Mark Twain or a Grant Wood.
Part of the American literary alloy is the remarkable blossoming of Jewish literary art in the 20th century and the manner in which it helped shaped our common culture, rather than confining itself to a Ghetto incomprehensible to outsiders as was the case for Jewish letters in Europe or the Middle East. As usual, I’m going to be a bit self-indulgent and talk about my favorite American Jewish (lack of hyphen deliberate) writer, who would probably count as my favorite fiction writer, period. And although there’s much love for (((literati))) like Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, not to mention Ayn Rand (whom I think is highly overrated), in my mind, the quintessential American Jew writer was Bernard Malamud. Malamud did not have the prolific output of a Roth or Bellow, nor the ostentatious profundity of Rand, but what he crafted was perfectly cut and polished literary gems, where every word carried impact and meaning.
There was no contrived uplift or optimism in his work- Malamud explored the dark side of personal struggle, the difficulty of transformation, the futility of escape. Perhaps that’s why his work is becoming increasingly unfamiliar in this increasingly unserious century. And perhaps his oeuvre will be rediscovered a hundred years from now with astonishment that it was allowed to languish. I can only hope.
Malamud’s best known novels, The Fixer and The Natural were certainly brilliant and deserve the fame that they achieved. I should note that if you saw the execrable movie version of the latter, you have no idea of what the novel was about, and you need to read it- in true Hollywood style, the thrust of the book, “you can never redeem yourself” transmuted to “you can always redeem yourself,” and the wonderful surrealism of the novel is totally lost.
But in my mind, his very best novel was the semi-autobiographical and fairly obscure A New Life, whose nominal plot involves a young man with an almost stereotypical New York background moving to Oregon to take an academic position at the fictional Cascadia College, a thinly-disguised version of Oregon State. The protagonist, Sy Levin, discards (or tries to) the baggage of his life in an attempt at freedom- and that is really what the book is about, liberty and personal transformation. It is not a “Jewish” novel in any sense beyond the ethnicity of Levin- his Jewishness is incidental, not integral. And escape and transformation happen, but in ways that the protagonist (and the reader) might not expect. The ending is at once ambiguous and hopeful. This theme of transformation and liberty, to me, elevates it beyond its genre and into the ranks of great American novels. Part of the reason it spoke to me was that I first read it in my 20s, when I was an instructor at a very goyish western university, shortly after escaping the East Coast and in the process of my own transformation. I felt very much like I *was* Sy Levin; nonetheless, coming back to it later in life, the novel had lost none of its punch or power, and I was able to see things in it that had escaped me as a younger man.
Many novelists are shitty short-story writers and vice versa; Malamud was superb at both. His most famous collection of short stories, The Magic Barrel, won the National Book Award in 1959, sandwiched between John Cheever’s Wapshot Chronicles and Philip Roth’s Goodbye Columbus. But again, for me, there was better: Idiots First, from 1963. Undeservedly obscure, not even meriting its own Wikipedia entry.
So, let me throw two samples out there which, to me, perfectly encapsulate Malamud’s brilliance and prose style. First, a short excerpt from A New Life, highlighting Malamud’s craftsman approach and delightfully bitter humor:
And a link to a short story which is more typical Malamud in theme, surrealism, and insightful depression, The Jewbird. Take ten minutes to read it, then go slit your wrists.
