CYNTHIA OZICK
465
him on a public platform - he was standing before the historic lectern
at Cooper Union - he was reading from a work in progress, and
since this was not so long ago, I imagine a grieving table upon which
an unfinished chapter liturgically murmurs its loss. That meticulous
and original hand will not come to it again.
The reading at Cooper Union: a straight back, a straightfor–
ward voice, tricky cadences hidden in it, an audience intensely alert
to the significance of its own memory, taking in Presence and send–
ing back the hunger of its homage. Afterward, there was, as always,
the knot of admirers at his margins. But I fled him, afraid of so much
light .
Consequently, I never learned, or dared, to say "Bern." So I
settled on "Maestro," and it seemed just right, not merely because it
reflected the stories with Italian landscapes, but because he is, and
always will be, one of our Masters.
Is he an American Master? Of course. He not only wrote in the
American language, he augmented it with fresh plasticity, he shaped
our English into startling new configurations. Is he aJewish Master?
Of course. Some people appear to be confused by why he resisted be–
ing called aJewish writer. I think I have this figured out, and it may
be simple enough.
It
troubled him, and he was right to be troubled,
that the term
Jewish writer
sometimes carries with it the smudge of so–
called ethnicity, a cataloguing of traits or vulnerabilities in place of
meaning.
Jewish writer
is a usage that often enough smacks of
parochialism. And when it is put to that purpose it is a plain lie. The
Jewish spirit is the opposite of ethnicity or parochialism, and this cry
out of Sinai is all over the Maestro's work. It is everywhere.
"The important thing," Morris Bober says to Frank Alpine, "is
the Torah. This is the Law-a Jew must believe in the Law....
This means to do what is right, to be honest, to be good. This means
to other people. Our life is hard enough. Why should we hurt some–
body else? For everybody should be the best, not only for you and
me. We ain't animals. This is why we need the Law. This is what a
Jew believes." Artists are never equivalent to their own characters,
this goes without saying; but it is also true that to separate certain
characterological strains from the blood and lungs of their maker is
to do violence to the force of authorial conscience. Morris Bober is
the whole soul of Malamud's sacral knowledge; no one can gainsay
that. And in his own language, in the Preface to
The Stories
of
Bernard
Malamud,
he wrote: "And let me say this. Literature, since it values
