AMERICAN

veiled account of the life of
Bellow’s friend Alan Bloom, the
best-selling author of The Closing
of the American Mind (1987), a
conservative attack on the academy
for a perceived erosion of standards
in American cultural life.
Bellow’s Seize the Day (1956) is
a brilliant novella centered on a
failed businessman, Tommy
Wilhelm, who is so consumed by
feelings of inadequacy that he
becomes totally inadequate — a
failure with women, jobs,
machines, and the commodities
market, where he loses all his
money. Wilhelm is an example of
the schlemiel of Jewish folklore —
one to whom unlucky things
inevitably happen.
Bernard Malamud
(1914-1986)
Bernard Malamud was born in
New York City to Russian-Jewish
immigrant parents. In his second
novel, The Assistant (1957),
Malamud found his characteristic
themes — man’s struggle to survive
against all odds, and the ethical
underpinnings of recent Jewish
immigrants.
Malamud’s first published
work was The Natural
(1952), a combination of
realism and fantasy set in the mythic
world of professional baseball.
Other novels include A New Life
(1961), The Fixer (1966), Pictures
of Fidelman (1969), and The
Tenants (1971).
Malamud also was a prolific master
of short fiction. Through his
BERNARD MALAMUD
Photo © Nancy Crampton
stories in collections such as The
Magic Barrel (1958), Idiots First
(1963), and Rembrandt’s Hat
(1973), he conveyed — more than
any other American-born writer —
a sense of the Jewish present and
past, the real and the surreal, fact
and legend.
Malamud’s monumental work —
for which he was awarded the
Pulitzer Prize and National Book
Award — is The Fixer. Set in Russia
around the turn of the 20th century,
it is a thinly veiled look at an actual
case of blood libel — the infamous
1913 trial of Mendel Beiliss, a dark,
anti-Semitic blotch on modern history.
As in many of his writings,
Malamud underscores the suffering
of his hero, Yakob Bok, and the
struggle against all odds to endure.
Isaac Bashevis Singer
(1904-1991)
Nobel Prize-winning novelist and
short story master Isaac Bashevis
Singer — a native of Poland who
immigrated to the United States in
1935 — was the son of the prominent
head of a rabbinical court in
Warsaw. Writing in Yiddish all his
life, he dealt in mythic and realistic
terms with two specific groups of
Jews — the denizens of the Old
World shtetls (small villages) and
the ocean-tossed 20th-century emigrés
of the pre-World War II and
postwar eras.
Singer’s writings served as bookends
for the Holocaust. On the one
hand, he described — in novels such
as The Manor (1967) and The Estate
(1969), set in 19th-century Russia,
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