Critical Essays Bernard Malamud

My mother’s brother, Charles Fidelman, and their cousin, Isidore Cashier, were in the Yiddish theatre.Around the neighborhood the kids played Chase the White Horse, Ringolevio, Buck-Buck, punchball, and one o’cat.

Though my father always managed to make a living, they were comparatively poor, especially in the Depression, and yet I never heard a word in praise of the buck.

On the other hand, there were no books that I remember in the house, no records, music, pictures on the wall.

This novel is considered as being the only novel that does not follow the pattern Bernard Malamud set in his following novels, in which the central character is almost all the time Jewish or analyzes certain problems that Jews had to face.

In fact, in is considered by critics as being a complex novel, blending a story about baseball with mythical elements.

I took to literature and early wanted to be a writer. MALAMUD At eight or nine I was writing little stories in school and feeling the glow. You learn what you teach and you learn from those you teach. MALAMUD Thirty-five years— INTERVIEWER There are some who say teaching doesn’t do the writer much good; in fact it restricts life and homogenizes experience. And a community of serious readers is a miraculous thing.

To anyone of my friends who’d listen I’d recapitulate at tedious length the story of the last movie I’d seen. In 1942 I met my wife, and we were married in 1945. Isn’t a writer better off on the staff of , or working for the BBC? Some of the most extraordinary people I’ve met were students of mine, or colleagues.The mythical story of the Fisher King is woven into the narrative, being adapted to the modern times.The themes found in the novel are classic ones, such as mythology and the inability to overcome a certain flaw.We have two children and have lived in Oregon, Rome, Bennington, Cambridge, London, New York, and have traveled a fair amount. Still, I ought to say I teach only a single class of prose fiction, one term a year.In sum, once I was twenty and not so young, now I’m sixty inclined on the young side. MALAMUD Largely, the life of imagination, and doing pretty much what I set out to do. I’ve taught since I was twenty-five, and though I need more time for reading and writing, I also want to keep on doing what I can do well and enjoy doing.Bernard Malamud is a slender man with a graying mustache and inquisitive brown eyes that search and hide a little at the same time.He is a quiet man who listens a lot and responds freely.His wife, Ann, an attractive, articulate woman of Italian descent, had planned the party, assisted by the young people from Oregon and the Malamuds’ son, Paul, and daughter, Janna.The taping of the interview began late Friday morning, on the back porch, which overlooks a long, descending sweep of lawn and, in the distance, the encircling mountains.On Sundays I listened to somebody’s piano through the window.At nine I caught pneumonia, and when I was convalescing my father bought me , twenty volumes where there had been none.