Jewish Ideas In The "buddy" And "fitter" Resolve

The Assistant and The Fixer are Bernard Malamud's greatest works. In The assistant Malamude embarked on subjects that would characterized his writing for the rest of his career: the situation of Jews in the modem world as emblematic of modern men generally, and the necessity of suffering and compassion in human life. The Fixer reproduces the Jewish experience in the anti-Semitist movements and in the vagrant life. In his writings, Malamud, in details, exhibits the physical and psychological experiences of Jews. There is a pronounced Jewish touch in Malamud's fiction. So he was called as "the writer with most Jewishness". Malamud was so greatly influenced by Judaism and the Bible that it was fairly common for him to use archetypal patterns or ritual behaviors found in primitive societies, mostly in the Bible. Malamud's stories and novels, in which reality and fantasy are frequently interlaced, consistently stress the morality and Jewishness and often illustrate the importance of moral obligation. His moral lessons are always combined closely with Jewishness. He draws upon Jewish heritage and Jewish religious thought to address the themes of sin, suffering, self-sacrifice and redemption. In a great sense, the essential reason of Malamud's stressing morality and focusing on suffering in his fictions, resulted from the influence of the Jewish religion, law, history and literature. This paper aims at analyzing Judaic and biblical ideas echoed in Malamud's two novels The Assistant and The Fixer, thus seeking a profound understanding of his writings from a new perspective.