On Transmutation Of Jewishness In Bernard Malamud's Works

Along with Issac Bashevis Singer and Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud is among the most distinguished of Jewish American writers. As the son of a Jewish immigrant, Malamud underwent hardships as a Jew in his childhood, which provide him with the materials for his writing and become the source of his writing and motivation of his literary creation as well. Therefore his profound thinking about "Jewishness," which earned him the fame in American literature, is embedded in all the works from his earlier writings which describe Jewish American's hard living conditions to his middle and late writings which portray the Gentile characters. His views of Jewishness go through changes from individuals' concern with meaningful sufferings in his early works to emphasize individuals' responsibility for their ethnic group in his middle writings, and then to his advocacy of multiculturalism in his late works.Naturalistic, existentialist, symbolic, archetypal and narrative theories are frequently employed in studies of Malamud's works, which focus on women, pursuit of new life, the relations between the Jews and the Black and so on. Although the term Jewishness appears frequently in the research of Malamud's works, no systematic research of the transmutation of Malamud's visions about Jewishness has been made. This thesis takes The Assistant, The Fixer and The Tenants as texts studied—Malamud's three representative works in his early, middle and late writings—and is intended to track down the trail of Malamud's thinking about Jewishness: from a writer with parochial nationalism to a multiculturalist concerning himself with the fates of different races.This thesis consists of three chapters. InXhapter One, by interpreting a Jewish Russian immigrant Morris's sticking to Judaism and Gentile Frank's conversion to Judaism, I explored Malamud's parochial vision of Jewishness in The Assistant, in which he eulogizes the Jewish culture as the most splendid culture in human history. In Chapter Two, by analyzing the protagonist Yakov's refusing and reconstructing of his Jewish identity in The Fixer, I tracked down the trail of Malamud's change in vision of Jewishness: much more concerning himself with the ups-and-downs of the Jewish ethnic group as a whole and the change of identities of Jewish individuals, who are always in the racial and cultural conflicts. In Chapter Three, I intended to reveal the fact in The Tenants that in the late period of Malamud's career, Malamud transcends his traditional limitation of Jewishness and turns into a multiculturalist who favors the ideal of co-existence in harmony among different nations and races.These analyses help us come to the conclusion that Jewishness means differently in Malamud's works of different periods, which reflects Malamud's changing views about Jewishness. The changes about Malamud's views of Jewishness result from the changes of his social status and economic conditions, and the literary and cultural thoughts of his age.