Ann DeChiara Malamud, wife of the novelist Bernard Malamud, died of kidney failure Tuesday in Cambridge, Mass. She was 89. DeChiara helped her husband type and review his manuscripts and offered other clerical assistance and familial support. Malamud, who died in 1986, once said that his marriage to the non-Jewish DeChiara in 1945 and his disgust with World War II inspired him to write about his Jewish culture and traditions. DeChiara, a native of New Rochelle, N.Y., met Malamud in 1942; both sets of parents were against the marriage.
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