Bernard Malamud Dies at 71; Chronicled Human Struggle
By MERVYN ROTHSTEIN
Bernard Malamud, the novelist and short story writer who won two National Book Awards and the
Pulitzer Prize for his chronicles of human struggle, died yesterday at his Manhattan apartment. He was 71
Mr. Malamud's work showed a regard for Jewish tradition and the plight of ordinary men, and was
imbued with the theme of moral wisdom gained through suffering.
Mr. Malamud was considered by many critics to be one of the finest contemporary American writers.
The critic Robert Alter said that stories like ''The First Seven Years,'' ''The Magic Barrel,'' ''The Last
Mohican,'' ''Idiots First'' and ''Angel Levine'' will be read ''as long as anyone continues to care about
American fiction written in the 20th century.''
The author once described himself as a chronicler of ''simple people struggling to make their lives better in
a world of bad luck.'' One of his last appearances was at the PEN Congress in New York in January
where he read from his works.
In his work, Mr. Malamud often combined fantasy and reality to create a world that was both the same
and different from the one we live in.
In ''Angel Levine,'' a black, rather seedy-looking angel appears to a retired Jewish tailor; in ''The
Jewbird,'' a Yiddish-accented vagabond makes his way into an urban Jewish household in the form of a
crow; in ''Idiots First,'' the Angel of Death, alias Ginzburg, pursues a desperate Jew trying to scrape
together money to send his idiot son to California on the midnight train.
''Malamud has been in the fable business, so to speak,'' the critic Alan Lelchuk wrote.
Mr. Malamud's first novel, ''The Natural,'' an allegory about the rise and fall of a baseball player, was
published in 1952. It is different from most of his work in that there are no Jewish characters. After the
book was made into a movie starring Robert Redford in 1984, Mr. Malamud said in an interview that
he was grateful for the film because it allowed him ''to be recognized once more as an American writer''
as opposed to a Jewish writer. But ''The Natural'' is similar to his later novels and stories in that it lies in
the realm of a morality play.
''Malamud has always had a fondness for telling tales arranged for the purpose of a specific moral
lesson,'' Mr. Lelchuk wrote. ''Neither realism nor surrealism has been his forte through the years,'' he
continued, ''but the fable, the parable, the allegory, the ancient art of basic storytelling in a modern voice;
through this special mode he has earned his high place in contemporary letters.''
''The Assistant,'' his second novel, and the one many critics consider his best, was published in 1957. Set
in the Depression, it tells of a Jewish grocery store owner and his Italian assistant, and it, too, is much like
a morality play.
''The Fixer'' (1966) was inspired by the ordeal of Mendel Beiliss, a Jew tried and acquitted of ritual
murder in Kiev in czarist Russia of 1913. ''The Magic Barrel,'' the author's first collection of short stories,
was given the National Book Award in 1959.
On the basis of ''The Assistant'' and ''The Fixer,'' critics began to think of Mr. Malamud as a ''Jewish
writer'' along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.
Mr. Malamud, however, said that he found the label of ''Jewish writer'' inadequate. He said that the
three writers shared more differences than similarities, and that, in his case, Jewishness was more a
spiritual than a cultural or a religious quality.
''I was concerned with what Jews stood for,'' he said, ''with their getting down to the bare bones of
things. I was concerned with their ethicality - how Jews felt they had to live in order to go on living.''
And at another time he commented: ''Jewishness is important to me, but I don't consider myself only a
Jewish writer. I have interests beyond that, and I feel I'm writing for all men.''
Mr. Roth agreed with Mr. Malamud. ''The Jews of 'The Magic Barrel' and the Jews of 'The Assistant'
are not the Jews of New York City or Chicago,'' Mr. Roth wrote. ''They are Malamud's invention, a
metaphor of sorts to stand for certain possibilities and promises.''
Later Works Criticized
Mr. Malamud's later works - ''Pictures of Fidelman,'' ''The Tenants,'' ''God's Grace'' and to a lesser
extent, ''Dubin's Lives'' - got mixed reviews. Many critics cited a growing bleakness in his work, saying
that as he left his Jewish milieu for academic and other settings his work took on a flinty emptiness
without the poignance and meaning that characterized his earlier novels. His argument with God, they
said, seemed to wither into a seminar.
Others, however, saw a growth in these works - his handling in ''The Tenants'' of the cultural and
psychological upheaval among blacks caused by the rise of nationalism, separatism and racial pride; the
powerful presence of nature in ''Dubin's Lives,'' something new for an author whose works for the most
part had urban settings, and the concern with man's survival in the nuclear age in ''God's Grace.''
Bernard Malamud was born April 26, 1914, in Brooklyn, the eldest of two sons of Russian Jewish
immigrants, Max Malamud and the former Bertha Fidelman.
His father ran a small grocery, working 16 hours a day - he served as a model for the Jewish grocer in
''The Assistant.'' Looking back on his childhood, Mr. Malamud would recall that there were no books in
his home, no cultural nourishment at all except that on Sundays he would listen to someone else's piano
through the living room window.
He attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, and in 1936 he received his B.A. from the City
College of New York. After graduation, he worked in a factory, in various stores and as a clerk in the
Census Bureau in Washington, writing in his spare time.
Began Teaching High School
In 1940, he got a job teaching at Erasmus Hall Evening High School, and he would continue to teach in
New York City evening high schools until 1949. While he was teaching, he earned an M.A. at Columbia
University in 1942.
Mr. Malamud often said that the advent of World War II and the Holocaust first made him sure that he
had something to say as a writer. Until then, he said, he had not given much thought to what it meant to
be Jewish, but the horror of the war - as well as the fact that he had married a gentile woman, Ann de
Chiara, in 1945 - made him question his own identity as a Jew and compelled him to start reading about
Jewish tradition and history. He knew then, he said, that he really wanted to write.
''The suffering of the Jews is a distinct thing for me,'' he once explained. ''I for one believe that not enough
has been made of the tragedy of the destruction of six million Jews. Somebody has to cry - even if it's a
writer, 20 years later.''
In 1949, he got a job teaching English at Oregon state University, where he stayed until 1961, becoming
an associate professor. He wrote four books there - ''The Natural,'' ''The Assistant,'' ''The Magic Barrel''
and his third novel, ''A New Life'' (1961), which is set in the Pacific Northwest at a college not unlike
In 1961, he went to teach at Bennington College in Vermont, where he taught for more than 20 years,
with the exeception of two years he spent as a visiting lecturer at Harvard from 1966 to 1968.
In 1963, he published ''Idiots First,'' another story collection. That was followed by ''The Fixer'' (1966),
''Pictures of Fidelman,'' stories about one central character (1969); ''The Tenants,'' a novel about the
conflict between two writers, one Jewish and the other black (1971); ''Rembrandt's Hat,'' more stories
(1973); ''Dubin's Lives,'' a novel about a biographer in midlife that many critics consider one of his best
(1979); ''God's Grace,'' a novel (1982), and ''The Stories of Bernard Malamud'' (1983). 'Story, Story,
Mr. Malamud was a firm believer that a story should tell a story. ''With me, it's story, story, story,'' he
once said. ''Writers who can't invent stories often pursue other strategies, even substituting style for
narrative. I feel that story is the basic element of fiction though that ideal is not popular with disciples of
the 'new novel.' They remind me of the painter who couldn't paint people, so he painted chairs.
''The story will be with us as long as man is. You know that, in part, because of its effect on children. It's
through story they realize that mystery won't kill them. Through story they learn they have a future.''
He did not find writing an easy task. ''The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly,'' he said. ''Once you've
got some words looking back at you you can take two or three - or throw them away and look for other.
I go over and over a page. Either it bleeds and shows it's beginning to be human, or the form emits
shadows of itself and I'm off. I have a terrifying will that way.''
In his writing, he prized the idea of swift transition - changing a scene in one sentence between
paragraphs -and he thought he might have achieved that talent by studying intercutting in motion pictures.
''I was influenced very much by Charlie Chaplin movies,'' he said, ''by the rhythm and snap of his comedy
and his wonderful, wonderful mixture of comedy and sadness.''
He acknowledged that sadness was one of his prime topics. ''People say I write so much about misery,''
he said, but added, ''you write about what you write best.''
He described the essential Malamud character as ''someone who fears his fate, is caught up in it, yet
manages to outrun it; he's the subject and object of laughter and pity.''
In addition to the Pulitzer and the National Book Awards, Mr. Malamud won the Rosenthal Award of
the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Vermont's 1979 Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts
and the 1981 Brandeis Creative Arts Award. He was a member of the American Academy and institute
of Arts and Letters, which in 1983 presented him its Gold Medal in Fiction. From 1979 to 1981 he was
president of the PEN American Center.
For many years, Mr. Malamud did not become involved in social issues, arguing that for an author
writing was involvement enough. But as president of PEN, he protested the repression of writers in the
Soviet Union and South Africa and the curtailing of First Amendment rights.
Although he granted occasional interviews, Mr. Malamud led an intensely private life. In ''The Ghost
Writer,'' Philip Roth created a character named E. I. Lonoff, a novelist ''deeply skeptical of the public
world,'' whose ideas of work and esthetic purity obliged him to live a life of solitude. A number of critics
have suggested that Lonoff was a portrait of Mr. Malamud.
Mr. Roth was a good friend of Mr. Malamud, and it is perhaps he who best summed up Mr.
Malamud's work. Noting that Mr. Malamud was once supposed to have remarked that ''all men are
Jews,'' Mr. Roth said:
''What it is to be human, and to be humane, is his deepest concern.'
He is survived by his wife, and by his son Paul and his daughter Janna.