Malamud Saw Jew as Symbol of Universal Fate
Halperin, Irving
Malamud Saw Jew as Symbol of Universal Fate The People by Bernard Malamud Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989. 269 pp., S18.95 Reviewed by Irving Halperin The best art contains a marvelous...
...This is what a Jew believes...
...We are the People...
...This is why we need the Law...
...Yozip Bloom, the novel's hero, a Jewish-Russian emigre horse-and-wagon peddler, is a firm believer in man's essential goodness...
...What is especially memorable in this writer's work is his treatment of the theme of responsibility, the moral imperative for a person to respond responsibly to the humanity in another...
...troops are intent on ejecting the tribe from its land, Jozip willingly assumes the responsibility of being an advocate for his people...
...To which Yozip responds, "Amen...
...We ain't animals...
...he once declared that a work is never really completed—it is abandoned...
...He wrote about them because, in his own words, he admired their "awareness, reponsibility, intellectuality...
...To the tribe's chief, he describes himself as a Socialist who believes in justice and whose human obligation is "Not to hurt but to help people...
...Presently the chief of the tribe dies, and Yozip becomes its new leader...
...He is the author of Here I Am: A Jew in Today's Germany (Westminster, 1971...
...he unsuccessfully pleads with the U.S...
...Bober says to his employee, Frank Alpine: "Our life is hard enough...
...Literature, since it values man by describing him, tends toward morality....Art celebrates life and gives us our measure," Malamud has written...
...Not to hurt but to help people" evokes Morris Bober, the poor grocer protagonist of Malamud's greatest achievement, The Assistant, whose life exemplifies the Jewish ethic of mensch-lichkeit (honorable behavior...
...All men are Jews" is the epigraph in Idiots First (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1963...
...Where I feel myself gifted is to feel the moral act and to be moved by the moral imagination...
...he is renamed Chief Jozip...
...Irving Halperin is a professor of English and creative writing at San Francisco State University in California...
...And he saw Jewish history as emblematic of the fate of all men...
...When some predatory U.S...
...They illustrate Malamud's early uses of the moral imagination and testify to his belief in its primacy...
...At this point, chapter 16 of the first draft, the novel breaks off...
...the characters are caricatures...
...The People clearly lacks the energy, weight, resonance and texture of Malamud's best work...
...If he had lived (he was working on chapter 17 when he died of a heart attack) to rewrite the 20 or so chapters that he had planned for the novel, the results probably would have been different...
...Thereafter, he thinks of himself as a Jewish Indian (mysteriously, his hair turns a brownish red...
...It is no disrespect to the memory of Malamud to say that this unfinished novel has many more flaws than virtues...
...to a miserable reservation in Missouri...
...Commissioner of Indian Affairs for justice...
...These are our words too," says the chief...
...Malamud's reputation as an unusually painstaking writer is, after all, widely known...
...Some people suffer more, but not because they want...
...This theme is evident in the unfinished novel and in some of the 16 short stories that constitute The People...
...According to Robert Giroux, the book's editor, Malamud's notes for future chapters indicate that the story was to end on a redemptive note: Yozip would leave the reservation and become a lawyer so that he might help Indians "fight persecution and injustice...
...and the essential situation, despite some patches of narrative exuberance and witty wordplay, often reads like a fanciful cowboys-and-scalping-Indians comic fable which strains the reader's patience...
...When Malamud died in 1986, he was working on The People, which occupies 97 pages in this volume...
...For everybody should be the best, not only for you or me...
...But I think if a Jew don't suffer for the Law, he will suffer for nothing...
...Malamud's moral imagination was especially stimulated when he wrote about Jews...
...While traveling in the Pacific Northwest of the 1870s, he is captured and, after passing initiation tests, adopted by a tribe of Indians called the People...
...The 16 stories were written between 1940 and the early 1980s...
...And then Bober adds, "If you live, you suffer...
...269 pp., S18.95 Reviewed by Irving Halperin The best art contains a marvelous combination of the esthetic with the moral," Malamud once said...
...Then the tribe is provoked into defending itself in open warfare against an army of American soldiers...
...Vastly outnumbered, the People are defeated, rounded up and put into freight cars en route (echoes of Nazi concentration camp transports...
...Why should we hurt somebody else...
Vol. 15 • April 1990 • No. 2
