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 56year-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 twentythree 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 modernday 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 20 th 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 19 th 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
experienced by the main character.
through
conflict(s)
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/jsalinger/)
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
29
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
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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 conflicting
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.
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