Bernard Malamud Dead at 71

Bernard Malamud, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Jewish author, died in his Manhattan apartment Tuesday of what police described as natural causes. He was 71 years old.

Malamud was the author of eight novels and four collections of short stories, which, critics noted, showed the influence of both the 19th century Russian masters of fiction and the traditional Jewish story tellers. Permeating many of his works was the concept that human salvation came from adherence to a strict code of personal morality in the face of life’s overwhelming despair and oppression.

His best-known and most controversial novel, “The Fixer” (1966), was the story of a handyman, Yakov Bok, falsely accused by Czarist officials of a ritual murder. The story drew very loosely on the notorious Mendel Beilis case of 1911-1913, which ended in Beilis’ acquittal.

In Malamud’s book, Bok emerges from the Kafkaesque labyrinth of the degrading Czarist penal system with his integrity intact. He declares at the end of the novel that there is “no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew.”

RECEIVED NUMEROUS HONORS

Malamud won a Pulitzer Prize as well as his second National Book Award for “The Fixer,” in 1967. His first NBA was for “The Magic Barrel,” a collection of short stories, in 1958. Other honors included election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Malamud was born April 26, 1914 in Brooklyn, the elder of two sons of Max and Bertha Fidelman Malamud, poor immigrants from Czarist Russia who worked 16-hour days in their small grocery store.

The author later described the environment of his childhood as Jewish though non-religious. Yiddish was spoken at home, and some of his mother’s family performed on the Yiddish stage.

He graduated Erasmus Hall High School, where he was the editor of the school magazine, going on to receive a B.A. from City College in 1936, and–after stints working in the family store, factories, and the census bureau–his M.A. from Columbia University in 1942.

Teaching English at night in his old high school and others, Malamud continued in his spare time the short story writing he had begun as a boy in the back room of his family’s grocery store.

The rise of Nazism and Stalinism, the coming of World War II, and the Holocaust helped Malamud decide what he wanted to say as a writer and how he interpreted his Jewishness. He began reading Jewish history and literature and later said, “I for one believe that not enough has been made of the destruction of six million Jews. Somebody has to cry, even if it’s just a writer, 20 years later.”

INFLUENCED BY JEWISH BACKGROUND

Following his first novel, “The Natural” (1952), which is unique among his works in its absence of Jewish characters, Malamud began writing fiction that showed the strong influence of his Jewish background and identification. In a 1983 piece in The New York Times Book Review, he said of his early writing:

“…. almost without understanding why, I was thinking about my father’s immigrant life, how he earned his meager living, and what he paid for it, and about my mother’s, diminished by fear and suffering…. I had them in mind as I invented the characters who became their fictional counterparts.”

“The Assistant” (1957) drew heavily on the grocery story environment of Malamud’s childhood. The story is of a non-Jewish youth who atones for his robbery of an elderly Jewish grocer, and later converts to Judaism.

He was thinking of his father as he began writing “The Assistant,” Malamud noted in The Times article, and “felt I would often be writing about Jews, in celebration and expiation” for marrying a non-Jewish woman, Ann de Chiara, with whom he had a son and a daughter.

“The Assistant” marked Malamud’s emergence as a major writer of the American Jewish novel. He has often been linked with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth in the triumvirate that has dominated the genre.

The author divided his time between writing–his other novels included “The Tenants,” “Dubin’s Lives,” and “God’s Grace”–and teaching fiction, first at Oregon State College and, after 1961, Bennington. He also served as president of the American Center of PEN, the writers’ organization.