One more note on Bernard Malamud, and I’ll be done for a while: For reasons I can’t fathom, some people do not think of him as one of the great American writers of the 20th century. But the people who like him really like him — though they like him for different reasons.
Cynthia Ozick loved “The Silver Crown” and claimed to have stolen it when she wrote the novella “Usurpation (Other People’s Stories).” Joyce Carol Oates taught “My Son the Murderer” and chose it for The Oxford Book of American Short Stories. Robert Giroux, Malamud’s editor, thought his best might be “Jewbird,” which features a scruffy blackbird who talks and tells the family that he barges in on that he’s running from “Anti-Semeets.”
Malamud did different things. You can read him for magical realism, which Malamud said was just old-fashioned fable. Other stories are realistic. I like his two late “biographed stories.”
I read him as a teenager for his character Arthur Fidelman. Fidelman, who confessed to being a failed painter, appears in six stories, which were collected as a novel in Pictures of Fidelman.
My tastes have changed, but I still like the conundrum: I haven’t read the novel but have read the stories. It makes me wonder whether I can claim to have read a novel that I didn’t know existed before I read it.
• Sources: Bernard Malamud, The Complete Stories; New York: The Noonday Press, 1998. I love that book, but you can get a taste of him by reading “The Silver Crown” in Library of America’s “Story of the Week” archives here:
https://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2023/04/the-silver-crown.html
The site includes some details on Cynthia Ozick’s love of that story and on the newspaper article that moved Malamud to write it. If you’re interested in the discussion about “appropriation” in literature, this might be good.
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