The Magic Worlds of Bernard Malamud (review)

Abstract

edited by Evelyn Avery. Albany: SUNY, 2001. 219 pp. $20.95. Evelyn Avery has assembled an extraordinary collection of critical articles, reactions, and personal recollections dealing with the life and works of Bernard Malamud. accumulated articles separate Malamud from the commonly designated triumvirate of Jewish-American writers (Bellow, Malamud, Philip Roth) who share not much more than ethnicity and talent. Instead, Avery and the contributing writers place Malamud as a forerunner of inter-racial, multi-ethnic, magical realist, humanist, universal fiction. Author of Rebels and Victims: Fiction of Richard Wright and Bernard Malamud, founder of the Bernard Malamud Society, and co-editor of the Malamud Newsletter, Evelyn Avery is an expert in the field. In addition, she had a long-standing friendship with the great writer. Her admiration and affection for Malamud are evident in the care with which she has edited and organized this important text. Part I, Author, includes wonderful reminiscences by son Paul Malamud, Daniel Stem, Nicholas Delbanco, Alan Cheuse, Chester Garrison, and Warren Hovland; a presentation of the correspondence between Rosemarie Beck and Malamud by Joel Salzberg; and a touching eulogy by Cynthia Ozick. Part II, dealing with individual works, features readings on A New Life by Sanford Pinsker, Dubin's Lives by Walter Shear, Assistant by Evelyn Avery, The Last Mohican by Karen Polster, and God's Grace by David Mesher. In the third section, Thematic Threads: Patterns in Malamud's Fiction, S. Lillian Kremer deals with Yiddish archetypes in Malamud's fiction; Eileen H. Watts speaks of the Holocaust legacy; Avery compares the kindred neshamas of Malamud and Ozick; Dan Walden asserts that Malamud was both a universal and an ethical writer; and Victoria Aarons studies Malamud's syntactical use of chiasmus. An annotated bibliography follows. Although diverse, the essays in this text converge on a few common points: Bernard Malamud, one of our greatest Jewish-American writers, was also a universal literary artist dealing with the important themes of evil, suffering, atonement, spiritual transformation, and hopeful forgiveness. Whether writing about the shtetl or the American university, the baseball field or antisemitism in Russia, humans or animals, Malamud struggles with the yeytser hore [evil inclination] in his characters, who, almost always, end up embracing the yeytser tov, the force for good. His variegated characters, though differing in education, class, gender, age, sensibilities, and environment, are touched by the author's magic, offered a `new life' in the guise of the old, and transformed emotionally or spiritually into different, usually better people, Avery explains. …