PARTISAN REV lEW
51
make him one of the quintessential writers of the fifties. "Re–
vised" is an odd word to apply to him since he is the most deeply
traditional of the Jewish novelists, traditional in his unrivaled
grasp of the Jewish
~magination
of disaster, traditional in his
authentic stock of immigrant and second-generation characters,
traditional above all in the very feel of his stories -- his prefer–
ence for moral fables and realistic storytelling over modernist
experiments in technique and narrative consciousness.
In
fact it is
Malamud's genius in
Th e Magic Barrel
and in his best novel,
The
Assistan t
(1957), to combine a distilled accuracy of urban Jewish
speech and scene with a mode of poetic parable reminiscent of
Hawthorne, or of his older Yiddish contemporary,
I.
B. Singer.
But this succeeds only within a narrow imaginative range. Mala–
mud's best work is built around a few obsessive metaphors and
situations. From the pathetic little grocery store in
The Assistant
to the actual prison in
The Fixer
to the abandoned tenement in
The Tenants
(1971) he sees the world in Pascal's terms as a
prisonhouse from which we are led off one by one to die. His
protagonists, whose names are as similar as his titles, are all rooted
in the
schlemiel
figure of the Jewish folk tradition: antiheroes
thwarted at every turn, sometimes comically, sometimes horrify–
ingly - - ordinary souls with a rare talent for catastrophe. To be a
Jew is to suffer -- this is the simple moral equation at the heart
of
Th e Assistant
- -
and the only proper response to suffering is
quiet stoicism and stubborn if hopeless decency. Morris Bober, the
grocer, is a Good Man, for
all
the good that does him.
If
the prisonhouse metaphor suggests the influence of ex–
isten tialism (or a parallel development), the theme of suffering and
endurance is more authentically Jewish, distilling as it does much
of the grimmest of Jewish historical experience, so apocalyptically
renewed in this century with the destruction of the European
communities. But it is one thing -- though perhaps too limited
-- to convey the experience of suffering, to capture the banal,
grinding agony of the small shopkeeper eking out a marginal living;
this is a heartrending achievement (though I feel that, intent on an
allegory of Man Alone, he screens out the compensatory joys of
religious, communal, or family life) . But it is quite another thing
to put a high moral valuation on this agony; there is a strain in
