Background
Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn, New York on April 26, 1914. He was the son of Bertha (née Fidelman) and Max Malamud, Russian Jewish immigrants.
(Raised in Brooklyn, the son of Jewish immigrants, and com...)
Raised in Brooklyn, the son of Jewish immigrants, and coming of age in Depression-era New York, Bernard Malamud (1914–1986) began his career writing stories of unsparing precision and power, plumbing the depths of an impoverished urban world. His early, naturalistic style evolved into an inventive, often surreal idiom that blurs reality and fantasy. His first novel, The Natural (1952), is a dazzling reimagining of the possibilities of sports fiction, and it remains one of the greatest and most beloved novels about baseball ever written. In the The Assistant (1957), Malamud created a searing drama of guilt and redemption about a struggling grocer’s family and the mysterious drifter who comes to rob, and then to work at, his store, transforming all of their lives in unforeseen ways. Joining these novels are twenty-six short stories, ranging from the early tale “Armistice,” set in Brooklyn during the troubling weeks of the German invasion of France in 1940, to one of his deepest and most celebrated stories, “The Magic Barrel,” a deep fable about a rabbinical student and the matchmaker who leads him to an utterly unexpected bride.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1598532928/?tag=2022091-20
(Through his distinctive fusion of modernist daring and tr...)
Through his distinctive fusion of modernist daring and traditional storytelling, Bernard Malamud became one of postwar America’s most important writers, his work an inspiration for and lasting influence on novelists who have come after him, Cynthia Ozick and Philip Roth most notably among them. The second volume of the Library of America’s Malamud edition brings together three novels of the 1960s: A New Life (1961), a satiric campus novel set in the Pacific Northwest (based on the author’s experiences at Oregon State), in which native New Yorker Seymour Levin finds himself confronted not only with a new landscape but with erotic intrigue, university politics, and an appointment that isn’t quite what he had expected it to be. The Fixer (1966) is the gripping saga of a Jew imprisoned in prerevolutionary Russia after being falsely accused of the ritual murder of a twelve-year-old boy. The novel-instories Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition (1969) follows the comic misadventures, sexual and otherwise, of a failed American painter in Italy. In the ten unforgettable stories concluding the collection, Malamud shows himself to be an heir to the tradition of Hawthorne, Chekhov, and Kafka, and at his best— “Idiots First,” “The Jewbird,” “The German Refugee”— their equal.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1598532936/?tag=2022091-20
(New York, NY, Farrar: Straus: Giroux, 1983. 1st Edition, ...)
New York, NY, Farrar: Straus: Giroux, 1983. 1st Edition, 1st Printing. Fine/Fine-. 350pgs, Stated "First Printing". Clean, tight and bright. No ink names, tears, chips, etc. Price unclipped. DJ in a clear plastic. protective cover. WE PACK WITH GREAT CARE, 99% OF OUR BOOKS ARE SHIPPED IN CUSTOM BOXES!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374270376/?tag=2022091-20
(Written by the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a Nationa...)
Written by the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for "The Fixer" and a National Book Award for "The Magic Barrel" this book contains 16 of the projected 20 chapters of Malamud's final novel, "The People".
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0701136499/?tag=2022091-20
(Malamud, Bernard. Tufli dla sluzhenki - rasskazy. (Idiots...)
Malamud, Bernard. Tufli dla sluzhenki - rasskazy. (Idiots First / Magic Barrel). Translated from English by R.Rait-Kovalevoy. Iz. CK VLKSM - Molodaya gvardya, 1967. Small-8°. 268 pages. First Russian Edition. Original illustrated wrappers. Very good condition with only few signs of use to the wrappers.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0053QJYIA/?tag=2022091-20
(Malamud's fiction constantly seeks to reconcile extremes ...)
Malamud's fiction constantly seeks to reconcile extremes - such as pain and laughter. He is an eternal optimist concerned with the effect of suffering, a visionary who sees both the need for brotherhood and the essential aloneness of each human being. In the Fixer, Yakov Bok - the title character - retains his sanity and his humanity in the face of overwhelming adversity. Faced with the basic unfairness of his life, the fixer makes a covenant with himself that if "God is not a man he [Yakov] has to be," and realizes "the purpose of freedom is to create it for others."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0032OOMEQ/?tag=2022091-20
(Malamud, Bernard. Tufli dla sluzhenki - rasskazy. (Idiots...)
Malamud, Bernard. Tufli dla sluzhenki - rasskazy. (Idiots First / Magic Barrel). Translated from English by R.Rait-Kovalevoy. Iz. CK VLKSM - Molodaya gvardya, 1967. Small-8°. 268 pages. First Russian Edition. Original illustrated wrappers. Very good condition with only few signs of use to the wrappers.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0053QJYIA/?tag=2022091-20
(Malamud's fiction constantly seeks to reconcile extremes ...)
Malamud's fiction constantly seeks to reconcile extremes - such as pain and laughter. He is an eternal optimist concerned with the effect of suffering, a visionary who sees both the need for brotherhood and the essential aloneness of each human being. In the Fixer, Yakov Bok - the title character - retains his sanity and his humanity in the face of overwhelming adversity. Faced with the basic unfairness of his life, the fixer makes a covenant with himself that if "God is not a man he [Yakov] has to be," and realizes "the purpose of freedom is to create it for others."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0032OOMEQ/?tag=2022091-20
Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn, New York on April 26, 1914. He was the son of Bertha (née Fidelman) and Max Malamud, Russian Jewish immigrants.
Bernard Malamud was educated at New York City College and Columbia University.
Bernard Malamud was a high school teacher (at Erasmus Hall and at other New York City evening high schools) and college instructor (at Oregon State University; Bennington College, Vermont: and Harvard Uni¬versity). as well as a prolific American-Jewish fiction writer, some of whose works have been made into films.
Strongly influenced bv such masters of realistic fiction as Dostoyevsky, Malamud paints starkly realistic portraits, for example, the conditions of imprisonment suffered by Yakov Bok, a simple Jewish artisan accused of ritual Jewish murder in tsarist Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century (The Fixer. 1966). Malamud sometimes ventures into the realm of science fiction — as in God's Grace, where the only survivors of a nuclear war are a Jew, Calvin Cohn, and a chimpanzee — or fantasy —as in “The Jewbird” (in the collection Idiots First) which has been described as a parody of Poe’s "The Raven.” Nonetheless, Malamud used primarily realistie settings, going beyond those settings by means of symbolism and dream-daydream images.
Whereas his Pulitzer Prize-winning fourth novel, The Fixer, is modeled to a large extent on the sufferings of Menachcm Mendel Beilis, a Jew accused of ritual murder by the tsarist Russian authorities in 1913, the work can be seen not only as the portrayal of anti-Semitism in action, but also as a universal study of the individual struggling against the forces of injustice and cruelty, with the Jew as a mythic representation par excellence ol all such individuals. The Jewish identity of Seymour Levin, the central protagonist in A New Life, his third novel, is suggested by the surname and alluded to in a veiled statement only toward the end of the novel; his Jewishness does not play a pivotal role in the work and he is chiefly a symbol of the struggle for academic freedom and integrity in McCarthy era America.
(Through his distinctive fusion of modernist daring and tr...)
(Raised in Brooklyn, the son of Jewish immigrants, and com...)
(Written by the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a Nationa...)
(Malamud's fiction constantly seeks to reconcile extremes ...)
(Malamud's fiction constantly seeks to reconcile extremes ...)
(Bernard Malamud: Novels & Stories of the 1940s & 50s (Lib...)
(Bernard Malamud: Novels & Stories of the 1940s & 50s (Lib...)
(This comprises a selection of 25 of the author's own shor...)
(Bernard Malamud: Novels & Stories of the 1960s (Library o...)
(New York, NY, Farrar: Straus: Giroux, 1983. 1st Edition, ...)
(Fixer, The: A Novel, by Malamud, Bernard)
(Fixer, The: A Novel, by Malamud, Bernard)
(NY 1963 1st (stated) Farrar. Hardcover. Fine in VG DJ, mi...)
(1992 1st edition hardcover)
(1992 1st edition hardcover)
(Malamud, Bernard. Tufli dla sluzhenki - rasskazy. (Idiots...)
(Malamud, Bernard. Tufli dla sluzhenki - rasskazy. (Idiots...)
(PAPERBACK)
While the majority of Malamud’s characters are Jewish, he wanted to be recognized as an American, rather than as an American-Jewish writer. His first novel, The Natural, is his only one without any Jewish characters. The book is an allegory about a baseball star who climbs to the pinnacle ot success and who, through his own uncontrollable passions, suffers humiliating defeat and disaster. However, the presence of Jewish characters in a Malamud work does not necessarily signify that this particular work is exclusively — or even primarily — concerned with Jewish themes.
Quotations:
“You’re sure you're not some kind of a ghost or daybbuk?”
“Not a dybbuk,” answered the bird, "though one of my relatives had such an experience once. It’s all over now, thank God. They freed her from a former lover, a crazy jealous man. She’s now the mother of two wonderful chldren.”
"Birds?” Cohen asked slyly.
"Why not?”
"What kind of birds?”
"Like me, Jewbirds."
Cohen tipped back in his chair and guffawed. “That’s a big laugh. I’ve heard of a Jewfish but not a Jewbird."
“We’re once removed." The bird rested on one skinny leg, then on the other. "Please, could you spare me maybe a piece ot herring with a small crust of bread?”
Bernard Malamud was married to Ann De Chiara, despite the opposition of their respective parents. Ann and Bernard had two children, Paul (b. 1947) and Janna (b. 1952).