recent years, it has been impossible to discuss the career of Bernard Malamud without mentioning his place as the second partner, along with Bellow and Roth, in the ruling triumvirate of Jewish-American literature, which Bellow has called the Hart, Schaffner & Marx of American letters. Those who do not discuss the Jewishness of Malamud feel obligated to explain why they have avoided the issue. It is true that most of his protagonists are Jews (only The Natural among his novels has nothing to do with Jews), but their Jewishness seems part of Malamud's attempt to portray a most Christ-like figure, homo patiens, the man who suffers. Malamud sees this suffering for others as the ultimate test of humanity and he is only half joking when he recasts the New Testament phrase about the lilies of the field, "consider the Jewish lily that toils and spins." Malamud's heroes rarely unloose the shackles of suffering and many, like Frank Alpine and Yakov Bok, deliberately ask for more, but they acquire a spiritual freedom when they learn how their suffering relates them to the rest of mankind.

Although many of the short stories (and The Fixer) are structured on the model of the Yiddish folk tale, most of Malamud's longer fiction is based on non-Jewish archetypes: The Natural is the grail legend imposed upon the myths of baseball; The Assistant is a modern day life of St. Francis of Assisi; A New Life is a travesty of the pastoral romance; and Pictures of Fidelman is a neo-Jamesian view of American innocence abroad. Seen from either the Jewish or the mythic perspective, the Malamudian hero, victimized to the end, learns to cast off the prison of self and reaches out to share the suffering of at least one other human being. While Malamud does not have the intellectual range of Bellow or command of Roth's verbal pyrotechnics, his moral vision reaches depths unprobed by either of his peers.

Malamud was born in Brooklyn, New York, of immigrant parents who, like Morris and Ida Bober of The Assistant, ran a small grocery store which stayed open late at night, leaving Malamud with little family life. His first writing was for the literary magazine at Erasmus Hall, from which he graduated in 1932. In the middle of the Depression, he spent four relatively unhappy years at the City College of New York where he obtained a B.A. His master's degree from Columbia University in English (with a thesis on the reception of Hardy's poetry in America) gave Malamud credentials similar to those of S. Levin in A New Life, and in the early 1940s he started writing short stories while teaching night classes at Erasmus and later at Harlem High School. Formative influences from his reading included the Russians Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Gogol, Yiddish writers Sholom Aleichem and I. L. Peretz, the short stories of Sherwood Anderson and Hemingway, and the novels of Mann...