BOOKS
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decade was
The Assistant,
his story of Jewish and Italian self–
immolation in a failing grocery store.
If
the Kennedy era and the
years of the counter-cultural revolution made any impression on his
mood, it is not visible in his stories of the sixties. One single note
sounds long and uninterrupted through the stories of three decades:
the note of mourning.
Collected Stories
is a book of mourning, an anthology, one might
say, of elegies. Even where there is no death, characters cloak them–
selves in talliths and recite Kaddishes for the living, as Salzman the
matchmaker does for his client, Leo Finkle, in "The Magic Barrel"
and Kessler the egg candler and Gruber the landlord do for them–
selves at the end of "The Mourners." Malamud has written stories of
other kinds but has selected these for reissue, as if to honor that
region of his imagination that is most accustomed to grief. The
singularity of this grieving marks the book as a testament, a memo–
rial, we may suppose, to the world that disappeared into the crema–
toria of Auschwitz, the memory hole of Russia, the suburbs of
America. This book, then, is an act of Yiskor, an admonition to
remember.
But such a reading leaves certain things unexplained: the
broken bonds between children and parents and the resounding NO
that frustrates every desire, every generous act. This sorrow, ap–
pended to history though it may be, is also unmistakably personal
and was planted in the heart before it ever found its image in the
world; we may be certain of that. But this heartache, whatever the
source, has led Malamud to a deep identification with the tears of
the Jewish past and an affection, to the point oflove, for a world that
his father's generation fled as best it could: the tenement, the candy
store, the hand-to-mouth hardships of immigrant life. All Jewish
writers respond in some degree to this undertow of ghetto misery–
but only Malamud has canonized it.
This steady allegiance to a single grief, despite all the vicissi–
tudes of personal fortune and historical change, calls to mind Isaac
Rosenfeld's words about Abraham Cahan's David Levinsky, a man
who in
The Rise of David Levinsky
courts a singular aridity of spirit
that he himself does not comprehend.
Because hunger is strong in him, he must always strive to relieve
it; but precisely because it is strong, it has to be preserved.
It
owes its strength to the fact that for so many years everything
that influenced Levinsky most deeply- say, piety and mother
