The Jewishness In Bernard Malamud's Novels

Bernard Malamud is a very famous Jewish writer to emerge on American literary scene since the Second World War. In his career as a writer, which lasted for over half a century, Bernard Malamud has produced eight novels and four short collections of stories. As a major American writer, he has won many literary prizes which include two National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prize. The constituents such as the materials, themes, main characters in Malamud's works are deeply rooted in traditional Jewish history, religion, conception, and culture. Therefore, his literary works give off a rich Jewish odor. His works are mainly concerned with the lower class people, especially the historical suffering and present predicament of East European Jews and American Jewish immigrants. The ordinary people depicted in Malamud's novels are very similar to the schlemiels in traditional Jewish literature. They suffer a lot in their life, and thus want to escape from their shameful past and try to seek a new ideal life. However, they can not break away from their Jewish heritage they once deserted at the bottom of their heart. At last, they learn to live a life of imprisonment and adhere to an ethic of conscience, responsibility, love, and mercy.This dissertation is mainly to examine the Jewishness in Bernard Malamud's novels through analyzing his three representative novels: The Assistant, The Fixer, and A New Life. The previous reviews on Bernard Malamud are mainly concerned with interpreting one dimension of the Jewishness in his novels. Therefore, they fail to evaluate the Jewishness of his novels adequately as well as correctly. My study is to contextualize his works in Jewish historical and cultural background to explore its Jewishness. By means of examining the three aspects of Malamud's moral vision, unique assimilation phenomenon, and Jewish humor in his novels, it is found that his novels have a special Jewish quality. Jewish culture provides him with a great source for his literary creation. It is also a key to understanding his literary works. Without a good knowledge of the special cultural connotation in Malamud's novels, it seems impossible for the critics to decode the textual meaning of his works correctly and evaluate his artistic creation objectively. The dissertation consists of five parts.Part one of this dissertation first gives a brief introduction of Malamud's life experience and his literary works, and then offers reviews on Bernard Malamud. Based on previous study on Bernard Malamud, the focus of the dissertation is located.Part two gives a detailed analysis of Malamud's moral vision presented in his novels. The central part of his moral vision is the endurance of suffering. Through suffering, one can achieve moral insights and make a moral transformation. One important component of his moral vision is to take the Jew as an ethical symbol, and thus the symbolic meaning of the Jew is enlarged as a universal man. This reflects the Malamud's idea of the Jew as everyman. This idea suggests that people should assume responsibility to each other. In this way, the conflicts between Jews and Gentiles will be controlled, and thus a peaceful co-existence can be assured. In addition, seeking a new life is also a great component of Malamud's moral vision. The new life here does not refer to the sense of material level, but that of the spiritual level. Finally, it explores the evolution of Malamud's moral vision.Part three makes a detailed examination of the assimilation phenomenon. The assimilation phenomenon represented in Malamud's novels is not one-sided but two-sided. It is a process of interaction in which Jews and Gentiles can affect each other. That is to say, Jews can be assimilated in some degree in the process of assimilation; on the contrary, Jews can assimilate Gentiles. In fact, the Jewish characters in his novels are not fully assimilated owing to some external and internal reasons. The impossibility of Jewish assimilation in the novels mirrors the struggling history of Jews who try to keep their traditional heritage in the process of assimilation.Part four gives a discussion of the notion and features of Jewish humor. The schlemiels in traditional culture, the double-edged irony, and the Yinglish contribute to a great amount of humor in his novels. The Jewish humor in Malmud's novels is deeply rooted in Jewish culture.Part five concludes the thesis and elevates the significance of Jewishness in literature. So far as the American Jewish literature is concerned, Jewishness refers to a very special Jewish ethos that is comprehensively represented in literary works and different from any other cultural quality, which is brought about by the writers' unique employment of Jewish elements in their literary creation. Bernard Malamud's fiction has a rich cultural connotation and is still worth our further exploration.