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CHAPTER I

BERNARD MALAMUD AND JEWISH AMERICAN LITERARY

TRADITION

The present chapter contains the life and works of Bernard

Malamud and places him in the Jewish American literary tradition by

exploring his contemporary Jewish writers.

Life and Works of Bernard Malamud:

Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1914,

the son of Max and Bertha Fidelman Malamud. Like Saul Bellow and

Philip Roth, he is one of the great American Jewish authors of the

20th century. His parents had come from Russia in the early 1900s.

Max was a grocer who barely made a living for his family. Although

Bertha was a warm and loving mother, Max was a crude and caustic

husband and father. During Malamud’s childhood he moved from

neighbourhood to neighbourhood. At the age of nine Bernard

contracted pneumonia. When he was well, as a recovery gift, his

father bought the 20 volumes of the Book of Knowledge for him,

although the family could hardly afford it. It made the boy an

inveterate reader. Mother’s family of Malamud had Yiddish actors

and theatre folk in it, and he was taken to plays on the lower east.

Bernard’s Mother, Bertha, was unhappy with her marriage life;

as a result, she slowly became schizophrenic. When she tried to kill

herself by drinking a household disinfectant, she was rescued by

Malamud and the neighbourhood pharmacist, but she spent the rest of

her life in a mental institution and died in 1929. With his mother’s

death Malamud went to work in the grocery store after school and on

weekends. It was, then, he began to write.

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He attended Erasmus Hall High School, where his writing was

encouraged and his first stories and sketches appeared in the high

school Magazine. Some night he used to stay in the back room of the

store when it was closed, working on stories. In 1932 Malamud

entered City College of New York and in 1936 he received his

bachelor’s degree at the age of twenty-two. While working in high

school at Erasmus Hall and in Harlem as a night school teacher, he

produced M.A. thesis, “The Reception of Thomas Hardy’s Poetry in

America” at Columbia University. He received his M.A. degree in

1942.

Malamud married Ann De Chiara in 1945 and they had two

children: Paul and Janna. In 1949, Malamud moved the family to

Corvallis, Oregon, where he taught English at Oregon State College.

More significantly, during his 12 years, he published his first four

long works of fiction-three novels and a short story collection- and

made his reputation as a major American writer. In 1961, Malamud

left Oregon to move back east and teach at Bennington College in

Vermont. He also obtained an apartment in New York City. In 1965,

Malamud travelled in the Soviet Union, France, and Spain.

Bernard Malamud grew up during the great depression period

and started his prolific literary carrier recognized primarily as a

novelist and finest short stories writer. Throughout his life, Malamud

wrote seven novels—The Natural (1952), The Assistant (1957), The

New Life (1961), The Fixer (1966), The Tenants (1971), Dubin’s

Lives (1979), and God’s Grace (1982), and five collections of short

stories—The Magic Barrel (1958), Idiot First ( 1963 ), Pictures of

Fidelman; An Exhibition ( 1969 ), Rembrandt’s Hat ( 1973 ) and The

People and Uncollected Stories of Bernard Malamud ( 1989).

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Malamud’s first novel The Natural (1952), his baseball novel,

was adapted into a 1984 film starring by Robert Redford. The novel

traces the life of Roy Hobbs, an American baseball player. The novel

underlies mythic elements and explores themes, like initiation and

isolation. There are mythic evidences of ‘Arthurian legend’, ‘the Holy

Grail’, and T. S. Eliot’s “Wasteland” in the novel. A Jewish

immigrant Morris Bober’s life is portrayed in the second novel of

Malamud’s The Assistant (1957). It is a realistic story of the sad life

and trials of a poor Jewish grocer. The novel is widely considered as

Malamud’s one of the masterpieces. His third novel A New Life

(1961) is a semi-autobiographical campus novel. It explores

Malamud’s treatment of the search for self-definition. As a picaresque

novel it explores the struggles of S. Levin, a young professor from

New York, who hopes to use what he perceives as a failed life by

moving to a technical college in the Northwest. The novel locums the

mythic placelessness of Malamud’s earlier novels with a Stendhalian

realism supplied with topical allusions to the Cold War and

McCarthyism.

The most complex of Malamud’s novels, The Fixer (1966) is

based on the actual case of Mendel Beilies a Russian Jew wrongly

accused of the ritual murder of a Christian boy in Kiev, Ukraine, in

1913. In 1967 it won the U.S. ‘National Book Award’ and the

‘Pulitzer Prize’ for Fiction. The novel depicts the similar trial of a

poor Jewish man, Yokav Bok. The rest of the book deals with the

anti-Semitic investigation and trial of a philosophical man who will

not confess despite torture and humiliation.

The Tenants (1971) is a flawed novel that illustrates the agony

of creative activity of two writers—one is a black and the other is a

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Jew. They live in a condemned tenement on manhattans east side.

They have good will and respect to territorial, literary and sexual

conflict. In the novel Malamud blends gritty realism, absurd comedy,

and fantasy to uncover the social issues and the nature of the creative

writing process.

Dublins Lives (1979) is a sixth novel that tells the story of 56-

year-old professional biographer William Dubin of Vermont, who

lives the lives of others by writing them. He on a life of D. H. Lawrence.,

While working the biography of D. H. Lawrence, he meets twenty-

three year old Fanny and begins an affair with her. The affair disturbs

Dubin’s life which is parallels with similar events in the lives of the

writers on whom he is working on.

Bernard Malamud’s last novel God’s Grace (1982) is a modern-

day dystopian fantasy. It set in a time after a nuclear war prompts a

second flood-a radical departure from Malamud's previous fiction.

Calvin Cohn, paleolosist, is a protagonist of the novel, who had been

attending to his work at the bottom of the ocean when the Devastation

struck, and who alone survived. The novel contains the pervasive

humour, narrative ingenuity, and tragic sense of the human condition

that makes the novel one of Malamud’s most extraordinary books.

The first short story collection of Malamud, The Magic Barrel

(1958), contains thirteen short stories written. It won the 1959 U.S.

‘National Book Award’ for Fiction. Idiots First (1963) was

Malamud’s second collection of short stories. His third short story

collection, Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition (1969) contains six

stories brought together as a picturesque novel that portrays the

adventures of an American art student in Italy. His Rembrandts Hat

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(1973) contains eight stories in which, Malamud expresses

compassionate concern about how external bonds can tie two people

together even though they continually fail to communicate with each

other.

Malamud’s short stories reveal the inner spiritual strength of

characters comes out of their realism and own identity. Malamud’s

fiction traces the mythic elements and explores thematic aspects like

isolation, class, and the conflict between bourgeois and artistic

values. It seems that as a writer of the second half of the twentieth

century, Malamud has handled social problems of his days in his

works. Contemporary Social Problems such as rootlessness, infidelity,

abuse, divorce, love as redemptive and sacrifice etc. are the major

issues depicted in his novels and short stories.

He has received of many prestigious awards and honorary

including: the ‘National Book Award’ for fiction to The Magic Barrel

in 1959 and to The Fixer in 1967. In 1967 his novel The Fixer won

the ‘Pulitzer Prize’ for Fiction and the ‘O. Henry Award’ in 1969 to

his Man in the Drawer.

JEWISH AMERICAN LITERATURE:

In the literary history of the United States Jewish American

literature has an immense importance. English writing traditions and

also the writing in other languages are the part of the Jewish

American literature, among its most important is Yiddish writing.

Jewish writing was begun during the mid-17th

century in

America by the Sephardic immigrants’ memoirs and petitions.

However, more mature expression of Jewish American writing

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emerged in the 20th century with more glorious “Jewish American

novels” of Henry Roth, Saul Bellow, J. D. Salinger, Norman Mailer,

Bernard Malamud, Chaim Potok, and Philip Roth. Writing of these

writers explores the conflict between secular society and Jewish

tradition. To establish themselves in America as an American was not

an easy task for them, they experience there with a distinctively

different religious belief, but they persisted and succeeded in

maintaining their faith in America. Jews have produced a great

literature which is their one importance endure to establish and

maintain their unique identity as American Jews. Their experiences in

America and their Jewish heritage have been easily explored through

their literature and one of these writers is Bernard Malamud, who

gave the true voice of Jews to the literature by exploring ethnic

identity of Jews.

It is generally observed throughout Jewish history that there is a

strong sense of community and the importance of family and

relationships among its people. Jews in early America strove to

maintain their unique identity as a culturally active group. That

cultural tendency exists today. Becoming American gave them the

opportunity to express their lives without the threat of expulsion,

though this did not mean they would not experience prejudice in their

quest to establish themselves as Jews in America.

Steven R. Serafin and Alfred Bendixen in their book, The

Continuum Encyclopaedia of American Literature (2005) observe that

over the past hundred years, with the gradual liberalization of

American culture and the decline of overt anti –Semitism after the

holocaust, Jewish American literature has become a major current in

the mainstream of 20th

Century American letters. Two Nobel prizes in

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literature and numerous other book awards have been awarded to

Jewish American authors. Although fiction predominates, these

authors have published in all major genres. Howard Nemerov became

poet laureate of the U.S., and plays by Clifford Odets and Arthur

miller have long been standards in the theatre repertoire. (589)

During the Marxist period of the 1930s and afterwards into the

1960s Jewish American literature played a major role in the broad

field of literary and cultural criticism. Nevertheless, fiction has

steadily prevailed, especially after World War II, with the works of

Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud,

Grace Palely, Cynthia Ozick, Chaim Potok and many others.

Although all of these authors have lived for many years in the U.S.,

not all were American born, and despite their Jewish roots, they

depicts American life in his or her unique manner.

After the World War II achievements in Jewish American

literature, especially fiction, reached a peak. Certainly holocaustic

sympathy and curiosity among gentiles about Jews has been

generated. It affected Jewish literature a lot. Whatever the reasons

behind the rapid acceptance of Jewish authors writing about Jewish

people in the U.S., a major new force in American literature was

evolved.

Since 1945 American Jewish writers have set out a new

direction to the American literature, as they respond to the changing

landscape of both Jewish and American identities in their writing. a

chronology of political shifts in American thought and culture, place

and identity are the major thematic aspects of American Jewish

writing in the second half of the twentieth century.

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At the same time the work of some American Jewish writers

such as Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), Saul Bellow (1915-2005),

and Philip Roth (1933) primarily represent Post-World War II

American Jewish literary culture. What Andrew Furman refers to as

“the golden age of Jewish American fiction” (131) from the 1950s

through the 1980s Malamud, Bellow, and Roth made up the

hegemonic trio of American Jewish writers. Their formative influence

paved the way for the American Jewish voices that have since

emerged. Indeed, although distinct from one another both stylistically

and in their construction of character and conceit the literary destinies

of Bellow, Malamud, and Roth have been inextricably connected. But

for the accidents of birth these three formative American writers

might not have been linked, for they bring to post-war American

fiction predominantly different literary structures, narrative textures,

and designs. Since the publication of Bellow’s Dangling Man (1944),

Malamud’s The Natural (1952), and Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus and

Five Short Stories (1959), these three writers changed the direction

not only of Jewish literature, but of American fiction as well. Along

with writers such as Henry Roth and Cynthia Ozick, Bellow,

Malamud and Roth constitute, as Teresa Grauer suggests, “the Jewish

American literary Conon”. (132)

David S. Goldstein and Audrey B. Thacker in their book,

Complicating Constructions: Race, Ethnicity, and Hybridity in

American Texts (2008) say, Jewish American fiction holds a curious

place in contemporary literary studies. During the 1950s and 1960s it

established a dominant position not only within ethnic literary studies,

but within post-war American literature as a whole. Much as

Americans in the post-war period were migrating from the cities to

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the suburbs, many Jewish American writers were shifting their focus

from the confines of their ethnic communities to the larger realms of

the national culture. (252)

According to Raymond Mazurek, in his survey during the late

1980s of contemporary literature courses taught throughout the

country, Bellow, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and

Bernard Malamud all ranked within the top fifteen of the most

significant or the most taught novelists. Twentieth-century Jewish

American writers had definitely established a formidable canonical

presence. (253)

Since the 1940s, Jewish writers like Bellow, Mailer, Salinger,

Malamud, Miller, Freedmen, Roth, Heller, Ozick, Rosen, Schwartz,

Trilling, Potok , Singer wrote in Yiddish, Wiesel in French and

Mailer, Salinger and trilling dealt only peripherally with Jews. But

Bellow, Malamud, Roth and the others are in every sense American–

Jewish writers because their novels and short stories reflect their

concerns.

More than any other Jewish writer, it was Bernard Malamud

(1914-1986) who gave the required direction and thrust. He also

brings the Jewish-American writers to the centre stage of American

literary writing. Without persisting Jews essential difference,

Malamud struck a healthy balance between aloofness and assimilation

of Jews in the society, which Americans desire. While sharing the

deep concern of other Jewish novelists or short stories for the

predicament of modern man, Bernard Malamud goes further and

asserts that only social issues and Jewish identity can redeem modern

man. While considering social realism and ethnic identity, his

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characters mellow under its cathartic effect. Society is not just a strain

as in other Jewish writers, but is the core of Malamud’s honest vision.

The twenties and thirties of Jewish American Literature brought

writers like Meyer Levin, Ludwnig lewishn, Samuel Ornitz, Myron

brining, Michael gold, Henry Roth, Albert Halper, Daniel Fuchs and

Anzia Yezurska. The forties produced Saul Bellow, Delmore

Schwartz. Isaac Rosenfeld, Leslie fielder, Alfred Kazin, Iwing Howe

and Norman mailer. The fifties saw Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud,

Chain Potok Cynthia Ozick, Hugh Nissenson, Norma Rosen, Curt

Leviant, Elie Wiesel, I. B. Singer and many others.

Short Story as a Literary Genre:

A short story is a literary genre, usually written in narrative

prose and presents a single significant event or a scene involving a

limited number of characters. It frequently depicts only few

characters and concentrates on a ‘single effect’ or mood. Unlike in a

novel, characters in a short story are not developed to their logical

conclusions. A short story may be defined as short prose fiction,

having a few characters and aiming at unity of effect. Despite its

relatively limited scope, though, a short story is often judged by its

ability to provide a “complete” or satisfying treatment of its

characters and subject. The short story is more focused on a slice of

life of a character than as they are portrayed in a novella or novel.

The length of the short story varies from writer to writer. The basic

form of the early short story can be found in oral story-telling

traditions and the prose anecdotes. However, unlike in a novel, the

short story is noted for its focused nature and its swift narrative style

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with pre-conceived ending. Often the ending could be abrupt and

inconclusive.

Origin of the Short Story

The origin of the short story can be traced back to the oral

story-telling tradition. Encyclopaedia Britannica gives origin of short

story as, “Perhaps, the oldest form of short story is the anecdote

which was popular in the Roman Empire. At the time, the anecdote

functioned as a kind of parables in the Roman Empire.” (1) From the

early 14th century, the story-telling tradition began to change into

written stories and its fine example is Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury

Tales and Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron. These books represent

of individual short stories ranging from farce, humorous anecdotes to

well-crafted fictions.

Before the 19th century the short story was not generally

regarded as a distinct literary form. But although in this sense it may

seem to be a uniquely modern genre, the fact is that short prose

fiction is nearly as old as language itself. It was in the 19th

century

that the short story emerged as a distinct literary genre in literary

works by writers such as E.T.A. Hoffmann, Heinrich Kleist, Edgar

Allan Poe, Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov and others.

Defining Short Story:

The short story does not have one definition. It has dozens.

Some are more entertaining than others. For instance: a short piece of

prose fiction, having few characters and aiming at unity of effect; a

prose narrative shorter than a novel, etc. Collins’ English Dictionary

defines Short Story as “a prose narrative of shorter length than the

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novel, esp. one that concentrates on a single theme” Cambridge

Online Dictionary defines “an invented story which is no more than

about 10 000 words in length” Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it

as “a short story of more than average length: a prose narrative

intermediate between a short story and a short novel”. Thus all the

definitions have same view about the short story that it has average

length, single theme than the novel.

Salient characteristics:

Some characteristics of short story can be summarized, given by

Richard Leise, as follows:

1. One of the principal characteristics of the short story is that it is

less complex than the protagonists appearing in a novel. If a

novel portrays life or some instances, entire generations with a

host of characters, the short story contains a limited number of

characters focusing on a single incident, thought process,

setting and portrays a limited span of time.

Short stories do not have a great number of characters. In

fact, many great short stories only have one character. This is

simply a result of the scale of the story. Contemporary novelist

and short story writer Charles Baxter speaks of characterization

in his short fiction. He suggests that you take two characters

who, know one another and simply add a third; the idea is that

something is bound to happen. The point is also to convey the

“simplicity” of short fiction.

2. Short stories are generally written in prose. This is not to

suggest that short stories lack any lyrical elements, but as a

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general rule most authors write short stories using direct forms

of language as they are most ordinarily used.

3. Short story does not necessarily require a plot, or narrative

bend. Although narrative bends are quite common in short

story, some authors choose to create a specific feeling or mood

instead of telling a tale. The writers use various figures of

speech to create fiction that evokes, much like a poem, a certain

feeling.

4. Setting is usually confined to one basic area (a city, house,

room or street). Basically, short stories possess no wild shifts in

setting like one might find in a novel. Again, this is a testament

to the length of the story. An author simply does not have the

space to describe a variety of venues. Situations are usually

confined to one specific, generally small area. Quite often

setting plays the role of catalyst driving the narrative action of

the story, or functions in some way metaphorically.

Setting or the time and place of the action in a short story

have a definite impact on the character development and plot.

The setting is often found in the exposition of the plot and

readily establishes time and place. Frequently it plays an

important role in the conflict giving credence to the rising

action as a climax or turning point is approached. The element

of setting in a short story quite readily lends itself to writing

activities that focus on figurative language and effective use of

adjectives to create vivid, exact sense images and impressions.

5. Theme is that controlling idea or belief as to what is important

and unimportant in life. It gives a basic meaning to a literary

work. Generally, theme is inferred from the other elements in

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the short story and often evolves through conflict(s)

experienced by the main character.

A Brief Review of Major Jewish American Short Story Writers:

It would be better to have a brief review of Jewish American

short story writers, such as Isaac Bashevies Singer, Saul Bellow,

Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, J. D. Salinger, Tillie Olson, Grace

Paley, Cynthia Ozick, John Updike, Arthur Miller, Philip Roth and

others. These writers occupied significant place in the literary scene

in the early decades of twentieth century. Saul Bellow, Bernard

Malamud and Philip Roth emerged as leaders among a significant

group of Jewish American voices in literature, and also these are the

most highly praised fiction writers in American Jewish literature.

Martin Scofield in his book The Cambridge Introduction to the

American Short Story 2006, he gives one of the most persistent

functions of the American short story. For him the Jewish American

short story, from the last decades of the nineteenth century has been

acting, for new immigrant or older ‘marginalized’ sections of

American society, as a kind of advance guard for new voices. The

important Jewish American short story writers as follows:

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991)

Isaac Bashevis Singer is one of the most prominent and

prestigious Jewish American writer. He is a prolific author of novels,

short stories, essays and children books. Singer was winner of two

national books awards and also in 1978 ‘Nobel Prize’ for literature.

He published four notable short story collections Gimpel the Fool in

(1957), The Spinoza of Market Street in (1961) Short Friday in (1964)

and The Séance in 1968. Remarkable for their consistent high quality

stories from these collections appear in anthologies with increasing

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frequency, The Collected Stories was published in 1982. Isaac

Bashevis Singer writes prolifically until his death at age 87. Known

as a writer whose stories have Jewish roots but universal appeal

singer was the Yiddish writer of his generation who has most

successfully captured the American imagination. His work enjoyed a

wide and varied audience. He lived most of his life on the upper west

side of Manhattan, though he kept a house in Florida, as well. On July

24, 1991 he died in Surfside, Florida.

Saul Bellow (1915-2005)

Saul Bellow, the major Jewish American literary figure of the

second half of the twentieth century and a ‘backbone’ of American

literature wrote four collections of short stories, Mosby’s Memoirs

and Other Stories (1968) and Him with His Foot in His Mouth and

Other Stories (1989), Something to Remember Me By: Three Tales

(1991) and Collected Stories appeared in 2001. He is best known for

his work focus on the Jewish-American experience following the

World War II. His characters are branded with self-doubt, humour,

charm, disillusionment and neurosis that epitomize the modern

American way of life, and specifically the chaos that surrounds it. He

died at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, on April 5, 2005, at the

age of 89.

Jerome David Salinger (1919-2010)

J. D. Salinger, known as one of the most reclusive authors of

the 20th century was for a time, one of the most dependable short

story authors in America. (Abby H. P. Werlock2009:572) Born in

New York City on the first day of 1919, J.D. Salinger is the son of a

Jewish father and a Christian mother.

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Some of his most notable stories include his first story for The

New Yorker, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (1948), which tells of

the suicide of a despairing war veteran, and “For Esmé--With Love

and Squalor” (1950), which describes a U.S. soldier's encounter with

two British children. Salinger has published a total of thirty-five short

stories in various publications, including many in The Saturday

Evening Post, Story, and Colliers between 1940 and 1948, and in The

New Yorker from 1948 to 1965. (http://www.gradesaver.com/author/j-

salinger/)

Salinger produced three dozen short stories in a twenty-five

year between 1940 and 1965. Of those, about a dozen were read by

millions of readers, and at least three have entered the modern

American literary canon. Salinger’s best stories deal with

protagonists, often younger protagonists, struggling to find personal

identity in an alienated world.

Grace Paley (1922-2007)

One remarkable exhibition of the American Jewish short-story

since 1950 has been the contribution of woman writers and an

involvement with feminist concerns. Grace Paley is very much in the

tradition of Malamud. Her short stories, poetry, essays, and speeches

should be read in the general context of post-World War II US

authors. She should also be read in the more specific context of

Jewish authors that includes Bernard Malamud, Tillie Olsen, and

Cynthia Ozick, who are similarly able to represent the particularities

of Jewish characters and Jewish voices.

Paley’s works published frequently in the magazines such as

Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, and the New Yorker and her reputation

rested primarily on her three short story collections, The Little

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Disturbances of Man, published in 1959, Enormous Changes at the

Last Minute in 1974 and Later the Same Day, in 1985 in 1994 all her

stories appeared The Collected Stories. In The Little Disturbances of

Man (1959) and Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) she

explores the dilemmas of modern middle –class New York Jews,

particularly woman. (Scofield 212)

Cynthia Ozick (1928-)

Cynthia was born on April 17, 1928, in New York City, to

religious Russian immigrant parents. Her characters include the

immigrant, the Holocaust survivor, the Zionist, and the religious Jew

who tries to avoid the seduction of annihilation into the American

mainstream (Perkins and Perkins 487). She is also concerned with the

slight nature of fiction as it relates to truth and reality. She has

published four collections of short story; her stories were first

appeared in the magazines such as Commentary, Esquire, and the New

Yorker. (Abby H. P. Werlock 509) Her first collection of stories,

The Pagan Rabbi and Other stories, published in 1971, reflects

Ozick’s theme of Jews experiencing religious and social conflicts.

Tillie Olsen (Lerner) (1912 -2007)

Tillie (Lerner) Olsen was born in 1912 or 1913 (Olsen is unsure

of the year, her exact birthdates and year remain unknown, as her

birth certificate was lost) in Omaha, Nebraska, to Samuel and Ida

Lerner.

In compare to Paley, Tillie Olsen deals with tragedy directly in

her collection of four stories, Tell Me a Riddle (1961). The first story,

‘I Stand here Ironing’, is the monologue of a woman whose teenage

daughter is in trouble at school. Looking back over her life, she is

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aware of the reasons for her difficult relation with her daughter but is

also unable to see how they could have been different given her

economic circumstances. The story is open –ended, but there seems

no way out of her dilemma. In the title story, the last and longest of

the four, there is the finality of death: a dying woman tries to find

some respite from the loving but oppressive attentions of her

cantankerous socialist husband and well- meaning family. The sad,

comic, bitter struggle between competing claims– of love and society,

of human independence and freedom–is powerfully portrayed, and the

conclusion achieves a genuine tragic intensity.(Scofield 212-213)

Tillie Olsen has used her writing to highlight the plights of

those of her gender and of the underprivileged class. Although she has

published little in her lifetime, her work has left an enduring mark.

She has been considered both a radical and a modernist because of her

socialist upbringing, empathy for the powerless and innovative use of

language. Although Olsen published several widely admired pieces in

periodicals during the 1930s, she did not achieve full national

prominence until the 1960s with the appearance of her first book, Tell

Me a Riddle (1961), a collection of stories about working class

America. Olsen also wrote Silences (1978), which was considered a

benchmark of feminist criticism. It gives an account of the forces that

have silenced the voices of women and writers throughout history.

Olsen wrote one novel, Yonnondio (1974), over a period of 40 years.

In 1994, Tillie Olsen won the honoured Rea Award for the short

story.

Her works have been translated into eleven languages and her

short stories have appeared in more than hundred anthologies. For

many years she lived in a third-floor walk-up apartment in San

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Francisco, a city that designated May 18, 1981, as “Tillie Olsen

Day”(Carol Kort 2007:237). A writer, teacher activist, and mother

Olsen encouraged young women writers to explore and exploit their

creativity and talent

Despite Olsen’s lack of formal education, she has received

more than a dozen honorary degrees, as well as several awards,

grants, and fellowships. She lives in Berkeley, California, where she

is an active lecturer, writer and activist. Olsen died, at 94, in Oakland,

California, on January 1, 2007. She was admired as a storyteller of the

working class and widely respected short story writer.

PHILIP ROTH (1933)

For the past three decade, Philip Roth has been one of the most

prolific and controversial figures in American- Jewish literature. He

was born in Newark, New Jersey, where he attended high school and

the Newark College of Rutgers. After a year at Newark, he transferred

to Bucknell, where he earned a Bachelor’s degree, and then went on

to receive his Master’s in English from the University of Chicago. He

has tough English and creative writing at Chicago, Iowa, Princeton,

State University of New York at Stony Brook, and the University of

Pennsylvania. He currently lives in Connecticut. (Rubin 1324)

Roth left the Ph. D. program to follow his rapidly increasing

career as a writer. At the age of 23, his story “The contest for Aaron

Gold” appeared in Best American short stories of 1956, edited by

Martha Foley, other short stories began appearing in magazine and

Journals such as the Paris Review the New Yorker, and Commentary.

In 1959 he published five of these works along with the title story in

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Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, which received numerous

awards, including the National Book Award in 1960. He also received

this award for Sabbath’s Theater in 1995, and most recently he was

awarded the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral (1997). (Abby H. P.

Werlock 568)

Roth’s first book, Goodbye Columbus (1958) a collection of

five short stories and the title Novella won the national book award

for fiction. An ironic, often critical portrayal of contemporary

American-Jewish life, the book provoked as much anger from Jewish

civic group’s as it did praise from the critics. (Rubin 324)

Throughout many of his novels and short stories, Roth Portrays

characters acutely aware of loss cultural, sexual, emotional, and

spiritual- who suffer from a debilitating sadness and frustration that

further isolate them from their families, communities and religion. As

Roth explained in an interview with Jonathan Brent, “the job was to

give pain its due… you generally wait in vain for the ennobling

effects” (Brent 140). For most of these characters, their inability to

achieve some level of personal fulfilment raises unanswered questions

about their identity as Jews in America with the exception of “You

Can’t Tell a Man by The Song He Sings”, for example all of the

stories in Goodbye, Columbus examine the ways assimilated Jews

relate to their cultural and religious heritage. (Abby H. P. Werlock

2009:568)

Philip Roth has sought to depict the impact of place on

American lives and has been one of the most prolific and successful

American writers of the late twentieth century. Roth has worked as a

teacher at Iowa State University, Princeton, the state university of

33

New York, and the University of Pennsylvania. He has also been

distinguished professor at Hunter College, New York. Roth has

received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1959), the National Book Award

(1960), a Rockefeller Fellowship (1966), the National Book Critics

Circle Award (1888.1992), and the PEN/ Faulkner Award (1963)

Finally, any discussion of the above Jewish American short

story writers mentioned here, a brief biographical review of the

significant Jewish short story writers will enable the researcher to

conceptualize the thematic concerns of the Jewish short story

tradition. It will also help to contextualize the significant place of

Bernard Malamud in the tradition. Malamud is a leading figure among

the Jewish writers who specialize in ambivalence, and his conflict ing

cultural perspectives have led to the creation of improbable words. He

has drawn heavily upon folkloric sources for his characters and

situations while at the same time keeping an eye on modern life.

These writers share a common exposure of the Jewish ideology and

well aware about the Jewish predicament. It is necessary to place this

study of American original in a wider historical viewpoint by taking

into account the Jewish literary traditions of the American literature.

As Jewish American authors do not share a common homeland, they

consequently do not have a common history either. Tough Singer was

born only ten years before Malamud the history Singer experienced in

Poland differs immensely from Malamud’s experiences in New York

City and his differs again from Saul Bellow’s Malamud in Lachine,

Quebec. In the late ninetieth and early twentieth century a large

number of Jewish writers have emerged in Jewish literary tradition.