Word: malamud
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...LITERARY WORLD that loves to pin labels on its writers, Bernard Malamud has often been called the America-Jewish writer par excellence, a "celebrator of the Jew in America," a man who "universalizes" Jews and the Jewish way of life. Malamud, although conceding these traits in much of his work, does not see the Sixties as some bygone era of American-Jewish writing, nor does he regard that supposedly ethnic Spirit as now dead. For Malamud, "there is no such thing as a particularly Jewish sensibility in literature," and he dislikes the chronological and ethnic limitations critics try to apply...
...Malamud's own response has always been personal--"the Jewish experience compelled me to look to my own past." What moved him initially was not Jewish theology or philosophy, although over the years he would study Jewish civilization and history and acquaint himself with many facets of Jewish culture. "It was the people I knew from the time I was a small kid;" neighborhood store keepers like Malamud's own father, who may have served as models for Morris Bober in The Assistant, the old and young of the urban population in New York City, who appear in some...
Despite critical interpretations, Malamud would prefer not to see his book as a symbol of a contest in the literary world, or a failure of nerve on the part of the white writer in America today. He sees contrasts on the current scene between generations, not between races, a shift in shared experiences, rather than the triumph of wholly new subject-matter. "It's setting up false categories to say that 'Jewish writing' has had its day, and that 'black writing' or something else is taking over. History moves on. The dominant place of American-Jewish writing has abated. People...
...Despite Malamud's careful portrayal of the young black writer, Willie Spearmint, and his intuition for the kind of stories Willie would invent and the plots he would pick, most blacks would probably still say that only a black writer could describe this experience. Malamud disagrees. "Anyone with imagination and a strong sense of involvement with the black experience can write about some aspect of it which in fiction will speak the truth about that experience. The key to all writing is imagination. All writers write about what they know. Even a revolutionary black writer, if he's good writer...
According to Janna E. Malamud '73, one of the guests at the dinner, a speech by Timothy S. Mayer '66 had prompted Rich's protest. In his speech, Mayer recounted a visit to a burlesque bar that he had made with the Society's steward, Archie Gibbon...