INTRODUCTION

Having been exhausted with the different forms of expression such as poetry, prose, essay and drama for many centuries, the writers longed to adopt a new mode of expression and it resulted in the emerge of novel. The novel owes its interest to the curiosity of humanity in the realm of human passion and action. While the drama is subordinate to stage effects, the novel is independent of them. Although the novel is defined as a long narrative in prose, Marion Crawford terms it as ‘pocket theatre’. The novel started becoming popular right from the early eighteenth century not only in England but also in America. The writers also feel comfortable at making use of novel as a tool to analyse the social, moral, cultural and political problems of the day.

Of them, Bernard Malamud, a distinguished twentieth century novelist of American Jewish society, was born in 1914 in Brooklyn, New York to Bertha Malamud and Max Malamud. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia who lived with a meagre income from a small grocery store they ran in Brooklyn. Despite their poverty and lack of formal education, they encouraged their son’s desire for education.

Malamud studied at the City College and Columbia University in New York. In 1940 he got a job at Erasmus Hall Evening High School in Brooklyn, where he had his school education. Even as a school boy he started writing stories which were published in the school magazine. In 2

1945 he married Ann de Chiara, an Italian. The couple had a son, Paul and a daughter, Janna. Since 1947 he had been planning to move from the city, though he taught, night classes in Harlem. It was possible only in 1949 to leave New York and join Oregon State College where he remained a member of the English Faculty till 1961. Since then he had been a member of the Bennington College Faculty, with two years spent at Harvard University. His first story, The Cost of Living was published in 1949. He has written seven novels and five collections of short stories. They are The Natural 1952, The Assistant 1957, A New Life 1961, The Fixer 1966, The Tenants 1971, Dubin’s Lives 1979 and God’s Grace 1982. The collection of short stories are The Magic Barrel 1958, Idiots First 1963, Pictures of Fidelman 1969, Rembrandt’s Hat 1973 and The Stories of Bernard Malamud 1983. Of them, The Fixer and The Assistant are the most famous works, which made him popular in the American literary circle. The Assistant won the Rosenthal Award in 1957. The Fixer won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1967. A Good Review Fellowship and Rock feller Grant enabled him to spend a year in Rome with his wife and two children and while there he wrote The Magic Barrel, which won him the National Book Award in 1967. He is a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and one of the most distinguished of American-Jewish novelists.

The contribution of ethnic writers gives an unbeatable strength to the treasury of twentieth century American Literature. Among the various religious and cultural groups, the Blacks and the Jews have been the most 3 concerned with the problems of a pluralist society. However, the problems of Jews are totally different from that of Blacks, the Blacks have their own stamp of racial discrimination and they show their protest for being treated inferior. The Jews from different parts of the world are moving to the centre of the American social structure. Agitated by their tragic and terrible past, the immigrant Jews from Spain, Portugal, Germany and particularly from the Russian pale have constantly tried to acquire a secure refuge from religious persecution. The major problem, with them in America, is cultural adjustment with the protestant ethos mingling together with the non-Jews. Not only the common Jews but also the American Jewish novelists have to face a cultural fate of being a Jew in America. Among the American Jewish writers, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth play a significant role in the expression of acculturation in their works.

Of them, Saul Bellow dislikes being called a Jew and Philip Roth is a severe critic of Orthodox Judaism. Both of them are aware of Jewish heritage and culture, but their great emphasis is on secular trans-ethnic values. Saul Bellow’s response to Jewishness is quite striking; he regards himself as a mid-westener and not a Jew. Saul Bellow does not want to be included in the list of American Jewish novelists. Philip Roth is another Jewish writer who totally rejects the idea of racial and religious superiority. Once he was charged by the Jewish religious forum for his unwillingness to be a Jew and called him a hysterical self-hate. 4

On the otherhand Malamud’s position is somewhat different from that of Bellow and Roth. The stamp of Jewishness is invariably assigned to the creative genius of Malamud. Such a view is proved wrong by the evidence provided in his novels and stories. Malamud is writing neither in praise of Jewish heritage nor condemns other religions. He is standing as a model for the moral ethos apart from racial and religious dependence. And at the same time he is happy to say that he knows well about Jewish life, culture and literature, from which he is getting the ideas for all his works. He is emphatic in asserting that there is a broad humanistic concern in his works about the Jews. He feels happy to accept that he is a Jew, fully conscious of his heritage of exile and suffering. His statement that “everyman is a Jew” (TH, 137) tends to suggest that Malamud looks upon the Jew as a model of human values and not as a creature of a chosen tribe. Even Roth accepts this humanistic premise in Malamud’s writings. To Malamud, the Jew is humanity seen under the twin aspects of suffering and moral aspiration. When he is specifically asked about his Jewish subject matter, his answer is, As far as Jewishness is concerned, it is there, of course, and I draw from its love of morality to strengthen my own; and from its history as a symbol of man’s struggle, and use whatever other material fascinates excites my fascination; I am not a religious Jew (TAI, 9).

His assertion that he is not a religious Jew correlates with Philip Roth’s perception that Malamud is not a champion of Jewishness but an 5 admirer of the Jewish belief in the moral world and its acceptance of suffering as an unavoidable aspect of human life.

At the outset, Malamud does not look upon the Jew as a specialist in alienation, for that would imply that Jews alone are prone to pain, sorrow and bad luck. He believes that even non-Jews can be the victims of fate, although he admits that he has been influenced by the Jewish concern with morality. In other words, Malamud’s moral vision is shaped by his Jewish heritage which blends realism with idealism. On the whole Malamud highlights the concept of suffering in relation to the doctrines of Judaism which focuses on moral ethics as essentials of human life, with reference to the characters he created in his works. Despite their suffering, his characters do not become fallen victims to evil forces. Throughout their lives they remain untainted. Adversity, in no way, shakes the honesty of Malamud’s characters. This moral and humanistic philosophy is obviously seen in the works of Malamud.

Malamud’s speculation towards Judaism and its experience are very well depicted in the works such as The Assistant, The Fixer, The Tenants, A New Life, The Natural and so on. The Assistant is perhaps the most popular of Malamud’s novels. Although its protagonist, Frank Alphine is an Italian and initially a Jew-hater, he gradually discovers the affinities between a Jew and a Christian. Though Roy Hobbs, the protagonist of The Natural, is not concerned with the religious problems, he also realises that it is suffering that reveals the true value of life. As 6

Irish Lemon explains, suffering has an instructive role for it teaches people to want the right things. Similarly, The Assistant can be called an elaborate rendition on the theme of suffering which runs throughout the entire Malamudian corpus.

Morris Bober, a Jew of sixty years old, runs a small grocery store in the Bober’s lane, Brooklyn, New York. He, with his family, is living in the upstair tenement adjoint to the store. Greatly agitated with the problem of seclusion in the Tsarist Russia, he has migrated to America with a hope to smell the sweetness of freedom. His wife is Ida, and the couple has a daughter namely Helen. One fine morning as usual when he opens the store, he sees a boy, Frank Alphine, an Italian Gentile, lingering near the store. Morris offers him food. Having starved many days, Frank eats it ravenously looking at Morris gratefully. He says “Jesus, this is good bread” (TA, 239). Soon after this incident, Frank becomes a loyal assistant to Morris. Ida and Helen are not happy about having a stranger, particularly a Gentile in the store. They have a preconceived notion that a Gentile-Jew integrity is not practically possible in the modern order of days, and therefore Ida keeps an eye on Frank.

Even though Morris is struggling to meet out the demands of his family with the meagre amount of income that they get from the poor store, he readily comes forward to stretch his helping hand to the sufferers. Each Malamud character centers on the ideology of Judaism for its humanistic philosophy. As suspected by Ida, Frank together with Ward 7

Minogue robs the store at times. Once when Frank is caught red-handed Ida asks Morris to send the guy out of the store, whereas, Morris has no heart to leave the assistant in the street jobless and foodless. On the ground of courtesy Frank is taken back to the store and retained as assistant to Morris. At the later stage Frank becomes the mainstay of the Baber’s family. When their fortune declines he keeps the store open and takes up a night job to collect enough money for Helen’s admission to a college.

The most significant point made in the narrative is that, despite being poor, one can be good. In the growth of Frank’s vision and Morris’s forbearance, the value of suffering is of crucial relevance. It is appropriate to call Morris the ethical center of the novel for he embodies the essential spirit of Jewishness and of humanity in his life style. What Frank realizes through Morris is the meaning of being human in a dogma and doctrine dominated life. Morris is a victim of his fellow Jews around, who forget the primary role of being a Jew in a competitive social order. The neighbouring Jews like the Karps and the Pearls do very little to help Morris. They are, in fact, a foil to Morris. The Karps, Pearls and Bobers representing attached houses and stores, make up the small Jewish segment in America but there is always detachment. On request, Julius Karp gives an assurance to Morris that no grocery store is likely to be opened in his newly built shopping complex just opposite to Morris’s store. By contrast, Morris is greatly shocked to see a new grocery store opened in the same complex. He is not jealous of new stores being opened 8 nearby, but he fears that it may put an end to the already dwindling store. While others do business for financial prosperity, Morris does it for the very existence of the family. He opens the store early every morning to supply a three cent roll to the polish lady who is his first customer. If a buyer ever forgets to take his money from the counter, Morris runs after him to hand it over. Morris cannot even think of cheating others because “to cheat would cause an explosion in him” (TA, 224).

Sam Pearl, with his prosperous candy store, can only talk of race horses and that is the reason why Morris cannot communicate with such a fellow. At the sight of Sam and Karp, Morris does not feel comfortable for their wickedness. At the same time he has infinite compassion for the poor who suffer like him. He always offers a glass of tea to Breitbart, the destitute peddler who sells light bulbs. Morris’s dream of sending his daughter, Helen, to college for higher education, is shattered because of the inadequate income that they get from the grocery store. For the smooth functioning of the family, Helen has to supplement the family income by working in a garment company and forfeiting college education. Inspite of the competition he continues to hope for a little improvement in his condition. Malamud tries to bring out the aspirations of his characters to become better human beings. He suggests that the development of character is not simply a change of place or direction but a tangle of advances and retreats. When Frank hangs around Sam’s joint after the hold up, he closely examines the picture of St. Francis of Assisi, a Jewish saint, in a magazine. When Sam inquires why he is a great 9 admirer of the saint, Frank, further, explains to Sam that the Saint enjoyed to be poor. It is, on account, of being poor that the saint took a fresh view of things. He used to talk to birds. It symbolically represents a sort of spiritual development taking place in Frank. In other words, Malamud seems to recommend the integration of Jews and the Gentiles. A deliberate stress on a fresh view projects the creative intention of the writer which values the fellowship of all faiths. Malamud believes that blind faith on the dogmas of religions will lead to fanatism, which will result in the destruction of humanity. So only through suffering man understands the meaning of life. Morris, despite his suffering, does not get deviated from his honesty which finally transforms a drifter into a good human being. From the life style of Morris on the lines of Judaism, it is clearly understood that suffering engenders commitment to love which will prevent human race from annihilation. At one point, Frank overcomes his initial revulsion against the Jew and starts sharing his experience with Morris.

Since suffering has a regenerative power, it makes a Jew and a Gentile learn the fundamental values of Judaism. Malamud delineates it through Morris, a liberal Jew who has no interest in observing the Jewish dietary laws on Jewish holidays. He keeps the store open on Saturdays when other Jews like Karps and Pearls close their shops and demonstrate their Jewishness by visiting the synagogue. Morris is not worried about the form of his religion but its spirit which lies in being a good Jew. He believes in the Torah. This is the Law – a Jew must believe in the Law. To 10 the question of Frank about who a Jew is, Morris responds that his father used to say that to be a Jew one needs a good heart. But Frank is not satisfied with this. He further asks Morris whether a good heart without traditional religious practices makes a man a real Jew. Morris explains: “This means to do what is right, to be honest, to be good” (TA, 325).

Malamud’s approach to Judaism conveys that to be a Jew, is to be a good human being. His aspiration about moral aspects of human beings in terms of Judaism is obviously seen by the rabbi’s speech at the funeral service. Despite Morris’s deviation from the formal Jewish tradition, he remains a true Jew. He is the ethical centre of the novel. Frank imparts energy to the basic narrative design. It is his gradual transformation from lust to love, and from an unthinking prejudice against Judaism to a deliberate conversion to its manifold humanistic approaches. His earlier association with Ward Minogue, a thief, and his interest in Helen are different from now. Later after the demise of Morris Frank becomes all to her. After the store business is over by late night, he works in a night cafeteria for extra money to send Helen to college. Frank fully understands Morris’s views on life and Judaism only after the grocer’s death. Because of the impact of Morris’s ideology about Judaism, Frank’s former self is gradually disappearing and a new spirit springs within him. A poor grocer’s words and deeds gradually transform an ordinary man into a man of moral ethics.

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In spite of poverty, physical suffering and his inability to send his daughter to college, Morris never thinks of becoming prosperous by crooked ways. Though he is poor, he never forgets to help the poorer. Throughout his life he has not cheated anybody. Even when he is tempted to burn down the store for fire insurance, his honesty does not permit him to do so. To the external world Morris does not seem to be Jewish for his negligence of practicing the regular worship like other Jews, but his Jewishness is brought out to the notice of the world by the rabbi at the time of funeral ceremony. The rabbi echoes in the burial ground before the mourners that Morris is true to the spirit of Judaism, and he further says that there are many ways to be a Jew which implies that Karps and Pearls are Jews only by virtue of their birth. They do not follow the Torah, the Jewish Law, at any point of time in their lives. What Morris wants for himself is that which he wants for others. He followed the Law, the Torah which God gave Moses on Mount Sinai. Morris remains a true Jew till the last spark of his life. What Morris seems to convey is his belief in terms of Judaism that to be truly human, man must treat others in a spirit of equality. After the grocer’s death, Frank continues to run the store and he readily accepts the responsibility of shouldering the family. This act of Frank leads to the conclusion that the amount of love that a man is capable of committing in life in Malamud’s universe. Since Malamud is committed to defense of life, he wishes to bring out the possibility of understanding between man and man especially under the cover of pain and suffering. As he is greatly troubled by the depreciation of the human 12 in modern times, he believes that the human must be protected and the note he sounds again and again is compassion.

After Passover, Frank becomes a Jew. His conversion, in no way, suggests that he will regulate his life as a practicing Jew, visiting the synagogue, praying with a skull-cap and phylacteries or eating kosher and closing the store on Jewish holidays. His conversion is an act of theological orientation. St. Francis aptly remarks that Frank’s conversion is important because he discovers not alone, but through another human being – a law of conduct which might give meaning to the burden of suffering to life. As he accepts faith, he paradoxically eradicates the barriers between the theologies. Siegel, a critic remarks about Frank’s ultimate illumination as follows: Doctrine plays little part in Frank’s conversion. Judaism merely provides him with a practical means of enduring the suffering necessary for salvation. As Christian Jew, Frank Alphine becomes every man, exemplifying the fundamental unity of man’s spiritual needs. For Malamud religion’s function is to convey the essentials of the good heart; he has little sympathy either for the ghetto minded Jew or parochial Christian (RAF, 206).

Since Frank is a Christian Jew or essentially a human being with little interest in ethnic formulations, his act of conversion is in fact a formal recognition of his vital inner change. It is definitely a moral and 13 spiritual conversion. It is Morris’s way of conduct which has made a sea change in the life of Frank, and so it cannot be claimed as religious conversion. Finally from the act of conversion of Frank into Judaism, it is proved that “all men are Jews” (BM(SH), 138), either Jews or Gentiles, irrespective of racial and religious identities. Religious identities are vanishing at the integration of the humanistic ideologies of Morris and Frank. Perhaps Frank has become a Jew, accepting the burden not only of his impoverished life but also of Morris’s philosophy of humility and humanity as well. Morris’s understanding of Judaism is quite different from that of others. Although he suffers from the loss of health, wealth and child, he remains faithful to his sense of self. He is a man and a Jew who insists on remaining true to his understanding of the world. To Morris, the Jewish Law insists upon the moral aspects of human life. Malamud also strongly believes that there is no place for personal grudges in a well-civilized, morally good society.

Malamud’s protagonists, except Roy Hobbs, the protagonist of his first novel, The Natural, are Jews struggling for a new, better life. It is their persistent search for a qualitatively new life that projects Malamud’s moral vision, and his reaction to the problem of the relationship between Jews and non-Jews. Yakov Bok, the protagonist of The Fixer feels deserted after his wife’s departure. He seems to be not interested in anything because he has no child to bring up. Finally he decides to move to Kiev, the Jews-prohibited city in Tzarist Russia. On the way he rescues Nikolai Maximovitch, a member of Black Hundreds, an anti-Semitic 14 organisation lying in the falling snow fully drunk near a cemetery. As a token of gratitude, Yakov is offered a job as an overseer in a brick-kiln. Yakov is, of course, a good man, very strict in dealing with the cartmen who steal bricks while loading them at night. He maintains his record perfectly. Based on an incident of anti-Semiticism in Tsarist Russia, Yakov, the innocent fixer, is arrested and put in prison. In fact he is not, in any way, associated with the ritual murder happened nearby the brick factory. On a false notion that no Jew is innocent after the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ, he is implicated in a false murder case, and the Black Hundreds prepare evidence to consign him to a solitary prison cell. The only mistake, on the side of Yakov, is that he has not introduced himself as a Jew to the brick-kiln owner. Even Yakov cannot be blamed for he was not asked of his identity. For his Jewish identity, Yakov has to undergo rigorous imprisonment. Every barbaric trick possible is employed to terrorise him into confession but he remains undaunted by the brutal treatment. After being imprisoned for two and a half years, he receives the indictment.

The plot of the novel is based on Mendel Beillis whom the Russian government arrested in 1913 on a similar charge of ritual murder. But the character of Yakov Bok is a production of the imagination of Malamud. A simple irreligious Jew attempts to escape the village. Jewishness and an unfaithful wife make him move into the Russian pale. He is discovered living in a Christian area and accused of the ritual murder of a twelve year old boy. He is imprisoned in the Kiev prison and undergoes worst tortures 15 there. The development of his Jewish and humanitarian consciousness is a direct result of his torture in the Russian prison. His victory over disease, death and insanity is more than a physical one and more than an individual one. The novel is placed in a Jewish village in the Russian pale. Yakov Bok, the protagonist, is a Jew by birth, the Jewish history of the Passover supplies dramatic interest to the story. Anyhow, the central impulse transcends the Jewish framework to defend the interest of all humanity. The novel begins with the familiar quest in Malamud’s protagonist for a new life; for a deliberate rejection of the past and an impassioned search for a promising future hoping to improve his prospects.

Once when Yakov discusses the philosophy of Spinoza, a Duch philosopher and a free-thinker, with Bibikov, the investigating magistrate, Yakov sums up the teachings of Spinoza in one line life could be better than it is. Because of his allegiance to reason Yakov avoids the practices of the synagogue and chooses to be a freethinker. In turn Bibikov explains to him that the Tzarist government considers him as a Jew. Jews, in this novel, are not deeply religious which clearly indicates that Malamud’s intention is not to justify Judaism or disparage Christianity. He aims at depicting a heroic struggle against injustice and the marvel of human endurance. In Malamud’s theme, one unavoidable characteristic of human living is human suffering. Despite suffering one should not deviate from moral standards even in the crucial hours of life. This is what Malamud emphasizes in his works through his characters. He says that “there are 16 unseen victories all around us. It is only a matter of plucking them down” (IBPGY, 3). It is absolutely true regarding his selection of theme in The Fixer. Yakov Bok, an innocent man is terrified to confess the crime deliberately imposed upon him for his Jewish identity, is the subject of this outstanding work of Malamud. Suffering is associated with Jewishness in the novel though it is an unavoidable actuality of human existence. Yakov Bok is silently suffering for the entire Jewish community because it is not the crime but his Jewishness has made him suffer in solitary confinement.

Although Yakov abandons his Jewish identity to make his life better in Kiev, the natural impulse of his Jewishness gives a turn to the development of the story. Since it is Passover, a Jewish festival, Yakov makes some matzos and offers it to a Hassid whom he has saved from an angry mob of boys who throw stones at him. In addition to it, Zeniva Golov is one of the boys whom Yakov has chased from the brick factory previously. These two incidents are being cooked up as evidence over the murder of a twelve year old boy, stabbed to death, drained of blood. The conventional superstitious belief of Christians that Christian blood is used by Jews for making matzos during Passover, aggravates millions of Christians for a pogrom across Russia. Moreover, the dishonest workers of the brick factory add fuel to the burning fire of injustice. Yakov, an innocent fixer of thirty years old, gets confused of not knowing how to justify his innocence. He cries: “What I have done to myself? I am in the hands of enemies” (TF, 72). 17

According to Malamud, it is a murder case, the police has to investigate the matter deeply and based on the ground reality further action has to be taken against the culprit. Instead, the police, the Russian government and the general public predetermine that it is a merciless act of a Jew living in Kiev, as a result of their preconceived belief. Yakov is arrested and made to undergo inhuman treatment in the prison. In the prison, he is called by filthy names such as Christ-killer, murdering Jew and blood sucker. Born as a Jew is not his choice, it is a choice of nature for which he cannot be responsible. If he is not a Jew, there will be no accusation against Yakov. According to Malamud man should not be judged on the basis of his racial, religious identity. In the cross-cultural pluralistic modern society people of different factions are living together like members of the same family. When they get disintegrated in the name of ethnicity and religion, ultimately there will be no man at all. So it is not good for others to consider all Jews as murderers for a single man’s mistake. Since the crucifixion of Jesus Christ Jews are looked down everywhere. For the betrayal of Judas, treating all Jews in the same way cannot be justified. In fact Malamud plays neither the role of the champion of Jewishness nor treats other religions inferior to it. To him, every religion is equally important and they teach the necessity of commitment to love. Without mutual understanding among humanity, the horror of I and II World Wars will reappear and devastate the entire human race on earth.

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Malamud’s Jewishness is somewhat different from that of other Jewish writers. To Malamud, “Jewishness is an ethical symbol, a moral stance” (TFBM, 104). His characters suffer greatly and they do not become a fallen prey to evil forces, despite their suffering. Jewishness is portrayed in the works of Malamud as an exalted condition of the humanistic spirit. To a question of his Jewishness, he has made it clear in an interview during his three days visit to Israel for a brief lecture on a Jewish Award that he handles the Jew as universal man. He is persistent in analysing the problems of Jews because he, being a Jew, shares his Jewish experience with others, and he gradually moves from Jewish to non- Jewish experience. In the words of Malamud, man must be treated in a spirit of equality, identities are only secondary and they need not be given due importance in the pluralistic society.

On the other hand he does not forget to remind people of the consequences of losing their identity to escape the horror of modernity. The Fixer describes the tribulations of Yakov Bok, the cruelties of the Czarist authorities, and the suffering of the Russian Jews. The novel traces the development of Yakov Bok from an unpolitical, unidentical and unemployed man into a man who understands the meaning and necessity of being a Jew in a world eager to destroy Judaism and its values. Yakov Bok learns the ethical responsibility of Judaism in Malamud’s terms and comes to understand the urgency of opposing the state, when the state opposes the humanity. At last Yakov realizes his mistake of having lost his Jewish identity to enter Kiev. Like a matured man with adequate 19 understanding of his self and the world, he proclaims: “One thing I have learned, there is no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew” (TF, 335). The impacts of the Holocaust are obviously seen in the novel. Yakov fears that the peasants’ call for a pogrom, on account of a ritual murder, may be directed against all Jews. When he asks for medical attention for pussing sores in his leg fingers, the jail warden retorts that there is no doctor for the Jewish prisoners. On the whole Yakov’s prison experience offers a preview of the Nazi camps.

The Russian government authorities are guilty of their mistake of having arrested an innocent man who has no connection with the murder case. But, unable to collect any evidence for nearly two and a half years to strengthen the accusation, they compel Yakov to confess the crime. In order to escape inhuman tortures Yakov could have either confessed or converted to Christianity. Instead, he remains steadfast in his innocence and his Jewishness. At first Yakov thinks that to be a Jew means poverty, superstition and degradation. Later as he grows in the prison cell which is supposed to be his spiritual womb, he comes to comprehend the meaning of being Jewish which means heroically upholding morality and justice in a world which values neither. Yakov Bok regains his identity by asserting his Jewishness while Levin, in The Lady of the Lake loses his love by shedding his identity. So in Malamud’s view, denying one’s own identity is equivalent to the denial of the self. Yakov Bok comes to see that only through suffering and Jewishness he can understand his responsibility and humanity on behalf of millions of Jews scattered across the world. Morris 20

Bober understands his Jewishness instinctively while Yakov Bok learns it through struggle and suffering.

Once when asked about the concept of suffering in his works, Malamud replied as follows: “I am against it, but when it occurs why waste the experience” (BM(SH), 136). Besides his theme of moral vision, Malamud has a positive attitude towards suffering. His fictions suggest that life is a search to make unavoidable suffering meaningful. Almost each character of Malamud suffers greatly but finally achieves a new glow of dignity. So Malamud’s concept of suffering is not futile, it has a regenerative power. His protagonists realize their mistakes and meaning of life through suffering. He develops the idea of regenerative power of suffering by using the Jew as a symbol of conscience and moral behaviour. To make their lives meaningful, Jews experience an extraordinary amount of suffering but finally they elevate their hardship to the level of an ethical symbol. Malamud insists that suffering is an unavoidable actuality of human existence. It is potentially beneficial and therefore people should learn to accept their burdens and see in them the promise of growth and fulfillment. Unlike the Christian sense of salvation towards suffering, Jewish suffering has a different perspective that goodness itself is its own reward and provides possible solution for the problem of evil that people should respect and nourish one another during their life time. Morris and Yakov play their roles on the lines of Malamud’s views on suffering. At the closing of the novel, Yakov goes to the extent of lecturing the Czar king on freedom and morality and then 21 assassinates him. Though it is not so in reality and only a fantasy, it is rather a moral, and spiritual victory against social injustice. Yakov could atleast inspire crowds to revolution against injustice. It is not out of a soul’s ill will against a government but a symbolic representation of the entire humanity to oppose where there is injustice imposed upon the innocent, irrespective of differences.

Unlike in other works of Bernard Malamud, where the protagonists are Jews and the subject matter is invariably Jewishness, The Natural is a typical Malamuludian novel with mythic background which focuses on the impacts of moral failure of a baseball hero, Roy Hobbs. In fact the most predominant theme in the works of Malamud, is moral vision. Since it is his first novel, it enables him to gain a reputation as one of the most successful American novelist. Having been a member of immigrant Jewish quarters for almost a century in Brooklyn, New York, he had been crazy to watch baseball, the national game of America, which made him write a novel about it later.

In the middle of twentieth century, baseball players were worshipped as demigods. This story functions in the capacity of a grail myth narrating the unquenchable thirst of an ordinary man to become a popular baseball hero. Roy Hobbs is a thirty five years old budding baseball player from the remote Northern part of America whose ambition is to become a baseball legend. Because of his family circumstances he was educated in an orphanage school. Even as a school boy he has won 22 many school level league matches. His greater fascination towards the game makes him perform in a better way in local matches which has given him an identity as an emerging baseball player at the local level.

As he is an innocent poor man, Sam Simpson, an ex-baseball player treats him with fatherly affection. Known that he has immense talents Sam takes him to New York to participate in the Chicago match with a grant offered by the baseball commission based on his previous records. For the first time Roy is exposed to the ultra modern city. On the way to New York by train, he is surprised to see the landscapes and tall buildings with artistic excellence. In the train, Sam Simpson encounters Max Mercy, a sports columnist and Whammer, the leading hitter of the American League and the three times winner of The Most Valuable Award. When he introduces Roy to Max Mercy telling that he is also an emerging baseball player travelling to New York to play in the Chicago match, Whammer simply ignores the interaction. This self-centered, egoistic attitude of players like Whammer and Bump irritates Sam and that is why he prepares Roy to defeat them in the forthcoming matches. Along with Max Mercy and Whammer, a pretty girl, namely Harriet is also travelling in the same compartment and her physical symmetry attracts Roy at first sight. Roy runs after her in the train but his mind is preoccupied with the forthcoming match in Chicago. Roy is used to carry a bassoon case containing his bat, Wonder boy, which was cut out of a tree hit by lightning whenever he leaves for match. It is said that this kind 23 of tree is known for its strength. Roy has so much of love and affection for the bat and it is closely associated with his victory sentiment.

In the meantime the train halts at a station for some time, the passengers get down to buy odd things for them and even children make themselves busy in few minutes play games. Roy also wants to refresh himself indulging in petty matters with few dollars collected from Sam. Whammer, with a preplan to test Roy’s skill in the game, calls him to bat few throws in the open area near the station just before the departure of the train. David-Roy makes the ball fling into the air and Whammer is not able to see the ball at all because it is finally torn to pieces. The self- confidence of Goliath-Whammer is little shattered. He begins to lose his hope of winning the match as he could envision a failing future. In Malamud’s view, Roy’s suffering due to poverty has taught him a lesson to overcome it with a strong will power and determination. Malamud does not expect people to suffer, but he uses it as an aid to moral growth. Roy, as a boy, has suffered a lot. He has not enjoyed parental care because his mother was a whore and therefore he was being brought up by his grandmother. She also died when he was seven years old. And thereafter he was admitted in an orphanage school where he has learnt a lesson out of his past. His suffering has given him moral courage to overcome his difficulties by virtue of his good qualities. He concentrates on the game besides his studies, despite the obstacles. Malamud believes that humanity understands the meaning of life through suffering. People are able to differentiate good and bad only after a great deal of adversity. Suffering is 24 an unavoidable actuality of human experience, everybody suffers one way or the other in the world. So one should remain honest inspite of one’s suffering. When one becomes dishonest to escape the horror of adversity, it will pave way for him to dig his own grave. It is proved with reference to Roy’s excessive desire for lust at the end.

All along the way of their journey to New York Sam falls sick and dies in the nearby hospital. But before his death he advises Roy to be steadfast in achieving his ultimate goal of becoming a top most baseball hero because Sam’s soul will get pacified only when Roy makes his dream come true. As per the direction of Sam, Roy meets Clarence Mulligan, a famous baseball player of hard luck and a close friend of Sam. He stays in Stevens Hotel, Chicago. He is supposed to play for the knight’s team the very next day. As usual, the players are getting needy for the match to be started shortly, and Ottozipp, the manager of knight’s team gives counseling to players. The situation becomes tensed as the match is likely to start. When Roy is in the players room, the co-players simply ignores him because there are two reasons behind it, first of all, he is a new addition to the game, secondly his posture does not seem to be of a good player. The stadium is overflowing with baseball fans and viewers. As soon as the match starts, the spectators look at Roy, the batsman with utmost curiosity because he has to bat the throws of Bump Baily, a legendary baseball hero with a gigantic structure. Roy, with his Wonderboy, tears the ball to pieces, Bump, with a roar, follows the ball to catch but dashes his head against a wall. The doctor who examined Bump, 25 reports that he is dead because of the heavy damage in the brain. The death news of Bump brings Roy to the height of fame. This is the first time this kind of miracle happens in the history of American baseball game. It is quite unbelievable but true. Roy, in one day, becomes an uncomparably great baseball player. Even the sports journals, with the portrait of Roy in the cover page, admires him for his immense potence in playing the game.

At this juncture, Malamud talks high of the good qualities of a poor villager all along the way of his progress as a great hero. He was obedient to Sam which made him help the boy to achieve his goal. His eagerness towards the game, his performance in the local leagues and his moral behaviour have brought him to this level, despite poverty and improper family environment. In respect of human life on earth Malamud reinforces that man should not deviate from the ways of moral ethics even in the hour of crucial suffering. On the other hand, he has not forgotten to insist upon the fact that man becomes a puppet at the hands evil forces as a result of his immoral activity.

Roy Hobbs has made people forget the names of Bump and Whammer, the two unshakeable pillars of baseball game in due course. Memo, a pretty but a malicious woman is used as a tool by the gamblers to trap top players for the sake of money. She pretended to be Bump’s girl, until he died but indeed, she is nobody’s girl. She is the girl of bookies. One day Roy sees her sitting close to him in the arena. He falls in 26 love with her without knowing anything about her originality. Above all Roy feels proud of having won the heart of Bump’s girl. In turn she also pretends to be deeply in love with him. To sustain as Memo’s lover, Roy needs more money and so he bargains with Judge Banner, the manager, comparing the pay fixation of Bump with that of him. Judge Banner is like a prophet, who could foresee the impending future of players like Roy whose values are nothing but greed. He doubts whether knights team can win even a sand lot team because they are demoralized. It is known to Judge Banner that Roy is gradually becoming immoral and very soon he will get ruined. And so, out of his concern for Roy due to his horrible past and his long struggle to reach this level, Judge Banner suggests Roy not to run after money because “the love of money is the root of all evil” (TN, 83). He, further, says that he knows when to enhance the salary of players accordingly. Without expecting this kind of reply from him Roy leaves the place angrily. He is straightaway taken to the Pot of Fire, a night club where he is given a rousing welcome by Gus, the head of bookies, and Memo. Roy is almost mad after Memo and he goes to the extent of doing any evil for being her lover without knowing the fact that she is neither the girl of Bump nor Roy.

On another day Roy sees a middle-aged lady watching his play in the ground with encouraging eyes. Her name is Iris Lemon who is more concerned with the victory of Roy in the match than anything else. They soon get acquainted and visit many places in New York. Roy really feels little relaxed at the company of Iris Lemon. Once they visit a desolated 27 lake where they share their experience with each other. Finally they come to know that both of them have suffered so much in their past. Their life style is almost similar. She often encourages Roy to win the coming matches. She is not like Memo whose plans are to pull him down from his status. She tells Roy that “experience makes good people better through their suffering” (TN, 135). She starts loving Roy deeply after hearing his horrible past. She wants Roy to sustain his status of topmost American baseball player forever. At this juncture she expresses her will to Roy saying that “I hate to see a hero fail” (Ibid., 132).

By contrast Roy’s mind is always looking for Memo for Iris Lemon falls little short of Memo’s beauty. He has become like a worm thrown into the burning fire of wickedness. Iris’s love for him is true, eternal and everlasting and her concern is Roy’s betterment, whereas, he is not able to discrimate good and evil. He considers evil as good and good as evil. Although Roy understands the feelings of Iris Lemon, his excessive desire for lust makes him suffer in hysterical thought of Memo. Iris Lemon may be, of course, not up to the expectation of Roy, but she is perhaps the personification of archetype. As Joseph Campbell puts it, “she is the woman whose couches are beaches of golden sand” (BM(SR), 38) who nourishes virtue within her and in others. She has suffered enough to discriminate good and bad and so Roy can accept her with kindness. She discovers not only his potentials of the game but also understands him fully. She functions as the examples of human potential, the living actuality that one can win through from suffering to a larger and more 28 meaningful life. In many ways Iris’s life history parallels Roy’s. But Roy cannot accept her. To his eyes Iris Lemon’s beauty looks less attractive. Resisting love with the same intensity with which S. Levin resists Pauline Gilley in A New Life, Roy returns to New York where he seeks to dig his own grave as a fallen victim at the hands of malicious Memo. Once when there is a heated argument between Roy and Judge Banner over the pay fixation for the series of the matches as fixed for Bump forty thousand dollars, the good-willed Judge, a man of speculative eyes, pacifies Roy explaining the sudden falls of great baseball legends because of their immoral conduct. He further says that the deserving will be rewarded and it is only a matter of time. As a final attempt to protect Roy from the clutches of bookies, Judge Banner makes a philosophical statement that, It is impossible to predict what further good may accrue to one and to others in the future, as a result of an initially difficult decision (TN, 180). But Roy is not in a position to listen to him, instead, he is fond of Memo. As expected, one day he takes part in the party arranged by Memo the previous night without bothering about the next day match, where, she tempts him to take so much of food so that he can feel stronger in her bed chamber after the party.

At one stage Roy, unable to bear the stomach ache cries bitterly. In the hospital the doctor reports that Roy cannot play baseball hereafter as his entrails have been heavily damaged as a result of eating beyond the limit. On request by Roy’s fans, the doctor allows him to act as if he 29 plays. As scheduled the match begins, and the collosium overwhelms with joy to see Roy again in the ground after defeating Bump and Whammer. Everybody believes that he will perform better than the expectation of the spectators. To the contrary, Roy becomes a laughing stock as he cannot bat even the ordinary throws with his Wonderboy. He is terribly upset for his inability to play as before. In a fit of anger, he breaks the Wonderboy into two and bury them into the earth wishing them to grow into trees in future. After this he straightaway goes to meet Judge Banner’s office, where, he is shocked to see Memo, Gus and other gamblers sharing the money gained by book-making. Roy beats all of them violently and spits on the face of Memo calling her a whore.

On the way back to the railway station on foot he realizes his mistakes. He thinks that “I never did learn anything out of my past life, now I have to suffer again” (TN, 206). His suffering in his early life taught him to be good, to be honest and to do right things, later after achieving his goal he took a lighter view of those moral ethics which brought him down to earth. He succumbs to corrupting influences at the height of his fame and loses everything. In the train, a boy thrusts a newspaper at Roy. Tears roll on his eyes to see his ridiculous portrait on the cover page, receiving a bullet in his gut, around him a naked lady dances. According to Malamud Judaism is under the twin aspects of suffering and moral aspiration. To be a Jew one needs a good heart and to be a morally good man one must undergo suffering because one comes to know the difference between good and bad through suffering. It is a 30 universal truth applicable to all in general. Roy, the protagonist of The Natural, also realizes his flaws only after a great deal of adversity. He has lost everything because of his immoral behaviour.

Malamud says that all men are Jews which means that all good men are Jews, irrespective of religion. Some Jews are not Jews because they are not acting according to the Jewish Law, the Torah. Though The Natural does not seem to be directly a novel of Jewish subject matter, the doctrines of Judaism and its insistence on morality is implied throughout the novel. At the outset, beyond this point that there is realization of moral failure and the sense of future suffering for the baseball player, the final chapter records atleast a partial success, that is a confrontation with the unmasked Memo and other gamblers. Ultimately Malamud, in The Natural through his protagonist Roy, a lusty but perfectly viable image, enlightens the truth that when people become immoral they are subject to punishment. So one should be morally good either in the hour of elation or in the hour of adversity. As a writer he is a stern moralist whose consciousness is his sensitivity to the value of man in the American literature.

The Tenants is also one of the most significant works of Bernard Malamud in which he brings out the horror of modernity. This work treats the issue of Black and Jewish sentiments and their problem of co- existence in the multicultural, pluralistic society. It is supposed to be a prophetic warning against fanatism. Malamud gives more emphasis to 31 social problems than Jewish subject matter, however, Jewishness is interwoven in it. On the otherhand it is an autobiographical novel which shows the author’s early struggle as a budding artist, living in a small room as a tenant. Harry Lesser and Willie Spearment are the two artist- protagonists, the first a Jew, the latter a black. Harry Lesser is an unmarried thirty six years old artist striving to become successful in his career. He is living in an old, almost ruined building of Levinspiel in New York as a tenant for so many years. It is an age old, six storeyed building in which more number of families enjoyed their staying once. But now Harry Lesser is the only tenant still staying there. Other occupants were convinced to vacate with a settlement while Harry Lesser indulges in dispute with Levinspiel, the landlord, saying that he is working on his third novel, and the change of place may be a stumbling block on the way of his progress over the completion of his work. Besides this, Harry Lesser has every right to stay there for few more months and he cannot be pushed out of there as per the regulations of the District Rent Control Office. Harry Lesser wants to remain there until he finishes his third novel. At the outset Levinspiel has no personal grudges with Lesser, and he is a very generous man. As the building grows weaker Levinspiel wants to demolish it down to build up a newer one there in the same place. The landlord is very much worried about the life of Lesser because the building may collapse at any time. To be on the safer side Levinspiel, by all means, tries to persuade Lesser to vacate the place before anything wrong happens to him, whereas Lesser continues to stay there, unmindful of the consequences. 32

Meanwhile Lesser is little-agitated to see an intruder in the deserted building namely Willie Spearment, a Black. At the beginning Lesser strongly opposes Willie’s unlawful stay there but later accompanies him on account of being a writer. Though they have their own ethnic formulations, their writing profession develops fraternity between them forgetting their differences. On many occasions when Levinspiel spies the intruder, it is Lesser who gives him shelter to hide. In a short span of time they get acquainted with each other and share their experiences mutually over their writing career. At first their life time achievement is to become successful writers. Only their ambition has brought them to close quarters.

Having published two novels, Lesser is sticking on his third novel for nearly ten years. The first novel received a positive critical acclaim while the second, of course said to be a mediocre novel, was made into a movie which brought him sufficient money to live on for remaining years at least until the completion of his third novel. Actually appreciation and money do not come together as far as literary work is concerned. In one way Lesser’s struggle on his third novel is a symbolic representation of the author’s labour over his works in Harlem, New York. To pick out appropriate words to be put in the passage to be written, Lesser takes his own time, and this is why he finds it difficult to finish it in time. He, further, justifies his delay saying that “you cannot eat language, but it eases thirst” (TT, 13). According to Malamud writing is an art and he believes that without natural impulse one cannot attain the spirit of writing. He has once said that artists cannot be ministers as soon as they 33 attempt it. It requires inner drive and so much of labour to excel. Generally even great writers give up their writings at one point, unable to sustain themselves in their profession. The author has shared his experience that as a writer, he writes and rewrites atleast three times to near perfection. So Malamud’s struggle to excel himself in the field of writing is getting reflected in The Tenants.

Willie Spearment is also an artist staying with Lesser in Levinspiel’s tenement who focuses on black experience in his writing. Indeed, the pursuit of writing has made these two different men as friends, sharing what they have with each other. One day Willie brings Irene Bell, a white Jewish girl, his lady love and two other friends, Mary Kettlesmith and Sam Clemence there to the building for a small party arranged with the consent of Harry Lesser. In fact Lesser himself is one of the guests of the party which paves way for the misunderstanding of the two writers later. Lesser is surprised to see Irene there in the party along with Willie. At once, he becomes jealous of him because he has no heart to see his white Jewish girl at the hands of a blackman. At this juncture racial discrimination dominates their minds. They start finding fault with each other in every activity. For a petty matter of winning the goodwill of a lady, they go up to the extent of killing each other violently, forgetting their friendship over a period of time.

Like every character of Malamud Harry Lesser is also trying to make his life better, but through artistic pursuit. His name itself suggests 34 inadequacy, and reveals his inability to relate to other people around. He loses his girl, Irene and fails to establish a healthy relationship with a fellow writer, Willie. Irene shuttles between Willie and Lesser which exhibits her unsteadiness in choosing men with whom she can live comfortably forever. All these above qualities of each character portrayed by Malamud in The Tenants highlights the complexities of modernity. The attitude of Lesser and Willie clearly indicates that the human race still remains subject to the destructive forces of the world even after experiencing the horror of the Two World Wars. When Malamud was asked why he wrote The Tenants, he answered that both the Jews and the Blacks have suffered so long in the human history, they face the problem of acculturation everywhere in the world, but still they stand apart in the American society which made him write this novel, mainly to eradicate the barriers between them. They are perhaps the most unfortunate human races made to suffer unjustly, and differ only in the nature of their suffering. Jews suffer from the problem of seclusion across the world while Blacks are deprived of human rights. In fact Blacks are treated in subhuman status because of racial discrimination. When this is the case, they should not look at each other either from the angle of anti-Jewishness or from the angle of anti-black sentiments.

Malamud, with reference to his protagonists in The Tenants, projects not only the conflicts between the Blacks and the Jews but also symbolically represents the confrontations among various religious and ethnic groups in the world. Instead of being compassionate with one 35 another, people misconstrue the doctrines of every religion and they gradually become fanatics which make them behave in an irrational manner at one stage. As a result of superstitious beliefs they start hating one another without any reason. Spirituality does not mean race and religion, it is something higher than that which insists on morality because no religion preaches hatred, lust and warfare, rather, it centers on love, compassion, honesty and mutual understanding. Without realizing the self and the world one cannot become a morally good person, and therefore one has to undergo hardship. All Malamud’s characters come to comprehend the meaning of life and their place in the society only after a great deal of adversity. However they achieve a new glow of dignity at the end. According to Ruth B. Mandel, a critic, Malamud believes that the sum of evil in the world is reduced each time one acts morally, and the value of one’s own life is increased each time one values other human beings (CA, 724).

This is what the writer emphasizes in his works. The Tenants may seem to be a novel highlighting only the cultural conflicts of the people of America, but in reality it is not so. Malamud advises people to look at a man on the ground of humanitarian considerations, ethnic, religious and geographical identities are only a mundane matter to be taken into account, for which one cannot blame the other because it is a mystery of nature. Malamud has made it clear in The Fixer with reference to his protagonist, Yakov, that nature invented itself and invented man, and God 36 and religion are the inventions of man. So man should not become a fanatic to the religious dogmas without perceiving it fully.

In The Tenants Harry Lesser and Willie Spearment, at times, reflect each other’s prejudices over their ethnic implications. Lesser’s nightmare containing a black thug that he meets on the stairs makes him form a negative opinion about Blacks even before Willie’s arrival to the tenement. On the other side Willie’s nervousness before asking Harry Lesser to read his manuscript causes Harry to muse. This is evident in developing personal grudges between them. Harry Lesser’s reaction to Irene is laden with jealousy. To Willie, Irene is more of a status symbol than anything else because he refers to her as his White Chick without mentioning her name when she is first introduced to Harry. His loss of Irene to Harry hurts Willie’s pride. Once when Irene asks Harry about his racial implications he denies it but she is aware of it. Willie is also prejudiced with the speculations of black experience. He is full of bigotry, as he is both anti-white and anti-Jewish. All these incidents bring out the latent racism in both the characters. Harry Lesser calls Willie a ‘filthy nigger prick’ and in turn Willie calls Harry ‘a kike apeshit thieven Jew’. Each character is aware of what words will most hurt the other’s racial or ethnic pride, and this reaches its climax when they murder each other with powerful weapons. Here Malamud does not justify either act, rather, he condemns both for being irrational.

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Willie and Harry see ethnic aspects of themselves in each other forgetting their primary job of becoming famous writers incorporating their experiences. They are not upto the level of knowing the universal fact that only love and compassion will bring peace to them to reach their higher ideal of life. Each writer becomes the other’s victim because neither is capable of a sufficient depth of sympathy for the struggles and limitations of the other. Their relationship comes to revolve around selfishness. Willie uses Harry for instruction in the writer’s craft while Harry relies on Willie to provide elements of life outside writing such as women, parties and social consciousness. Their prejudices finally lead to mutual destruction. They feel guilty of what they have done only when they cut each other violently with axes because each feels the anguish of the other. The author, besides portraying the horror of complexity of modernity, reinforces the ideology of Judaism that for the sake of moral aspiration one must undergo suffering. Though it seems to be that there is no Jewish subject matter in The Tenants it is felt there throughout the novel.

In the words of Malamud, Jewishness is not something which relates the life style of Jews and their religious doctrines, it is an exalted condition of the humanistic spirit to be cultivated in every human being. So Malamud’s Jewishness exemplifies morality which is applicable to all sections of the society. Thus Malamud universalizes his Jewishness in his works. He is not a pessimist to expect the world to suffer but he believes that only through suffering one could attain moral and spiritual growth. 38

He believes that one could realize one’s mistakes only after a good amount of suffering. For the smooth functioning of the society, Malamud advises people to respect one another, to nourish one another and to be compassionate with one another, despite the differences. This is the only possible way to prevent man from mutual destruction. The author is not against any religion but he is dead against fanatism because it is the root cause of many problems in the world. Harry Lesser and Willie Spearment have to suffer more to get morally and spiritually refined. It is a lesson not only to these two artist – protagonists but also to the entire humanity who divide themselves in the name of ethnic and religious superiority.

Malamud incorporates the saying of Hillel, a sage in the ‘Ethics of the Ancestors’, a set of chapters containing ethical-didactic message, with his basic faith in the essential goodness of humankind that “Judge all people charitably” (MMM, 168). Especially in a society which lacks humanitarian considerations, the most essential element, for civilized life, is a good heart. Malamud, in guise of S. Levin, a college Professor- protagonist of A New Life, suggests that people must come forward to protect the human, the innocent and the good. Those who had already discovered their own moral courage must join others, this must lead, without fanatism. Love, charity, sympathy, compassion and hospitality are not the components of any particular religion, no religion preaches hatred, loveless lust and war. And so man should learn to stand united, despite the differences.

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History, at times, as a mediator, brings race, sex and warfare rather than brotherhood, love and beauty. However, man has to be bound with obligation and accountability – this is the source of his moral strength. After all growing up is a matter of compromise and accommodation, and maturity is a matter of discovering acceptable limits. When man exceeds those limits, he fails and loses what he is. So Malamud wants the individual to inhabit the world and to function in a society. His concern towards humanity is found in his assertion about the objectives of his writing that My premise is that we will not destroy each other. My premise is that we will live on. We will seek a better life. We may not become better, but atleast we will seek betterment. My premise is for humanism – and against nihilism. And that is what I put in my writings (BMR, 144). It affirms the author’s role as a writer to keep civilization from destroying itself. Thus the present study analyses in detail the moralistic vision of Bernard Malamud in his novels: A JEWISH SPECTACLE

Judaism and Yiddish literature are well known for their antiquity. Judaism is the mother of Christianity. Moses, the messenger of God preached the sermons on the Mount Sinai. Origin of Christianity is only a division of Judaism. When Jesus Christ was betrayed, it got divided and named thereafter as Christianity. The doctrines of Christianity almost coincide with those of Judaism. The most violent act of Crucifixion of Jesus Christ is the chief cause for the emerge of Christianity. After this incident, majority of the public started following the preachings of Jesus Christ.

A meaningless hatred was imposed upon the entire Jewish community for a single man’s sin or crime, that is the betrayal of Judas. All over the world, Jews are suspected, looked down and treated like second-hand citizens. They are targeted everywhere. But according to Malamud, Judaism is an age-old religion which highlights only the humanitarian aspects like any other religion in the world. Malamud, in his works, attempts to bring the most significant aspects of Judaism to the notice of the world. Though fellow Jewish-American writers like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth also do the same, Malamud plays a major role in universalising the ideology of Judaism. His statement “Every man is a Jew” (TH, 137) shows his humanistic considerations, apart from religion and geography. Christianity is the brainchild of Judaism, only a slim line separates the two. All Malamud protagonists do not give up moral values 41 till the last spark of their lives for the main reason that they are Jewish by birth, in spite of their hardship.

Malamud has written seven novels and three collections of short stories. The Fixer is one of the finest works, which won Pulitzer prize and National Book Award. In this novel Malamud portrays the life style and contradictions among the people of different factions in terms of religion, region and race during the period of Nicoholas II, the last Tzar King in Russia. The fixer, Yakov Bok, is basically a Jew. He is a man of thirty years old. His wife deserts him by eloping with somebody. He has no child. Greatly disappointed with the monotonous life style in his village, Yakov Bok moves to Kiev, a Jew-prohibited Russian territory, ignoring the advice of his father-in-law, Shmul, to remain in the village. Knowing the fact well that safety is more important than progress, Shmul pleads Yakov Bok to remain in the village. Though it is a sin for Jews to enter Kiev, Yakov Bok wants to take risk for a better future. Yakov Bok is unable to lead a poverty-stricken life in his village. With so much courage, unmindful of the consequences that he has to come across, on the way of his progress, Yakov Bok leaves the village and enters Kiev.

On his way to Kiev, Yakov recalls his horrible past and dreams of better future. The Christian world of Tzarist Russia pursues its senseless bias against the Jews, therefore, the Jewish fixer, Yakov Bok has been forced to lose his identity to seek identification with Kiev. “Yakov did not look back … The past was a wound in the head” (TF, 14). Bored with the 42 nature of life he had in the village, Yakov Bok resolves to act. It is prompted by his dream of material prosperity and involves a pursuit of capital which indicates the capacity of his spirit. Yakov Bok, a man of thirty, looks pale and aged. In the course of his journey to Kiev, Yakov sees a middle-aged man, Nikolai Maximovitch, lying fully drunk near the cometry. Yakov’s pursuit of capital is definitely an escape from his former authentic self. On the way to Kiev, Yakov sells his horse to get across the river, Dnieper. When the anti-Semitic boatman makes a sign of the cross, Yakov Bok fights an impulse to do the same. All of a sudden he drops his Jewish prayer things into the river water and abandons his Jewish identity. Earlier he cuts off his Jewish beard. This act is a conscious denial of both historical and existential dimensions of his self. By leaving the village and his faith in favour of becoming a free-thinker after Spinoza, a Dutch philosopher, Yakov isolates himself from the protective hold of his community and Jewish faith.

In Kive, Yakov Bok is a drifter. For first few days he lives in the Jewish quarter to see what there is to see in the world. But the contrast between Yakov Bok’s eagerness to change his luck and the unchanged quality of the Jewish quarter makes his situation ironical. Though Yakov Bok does not seem to be a Jew in appearance, he depends on others to be told that he does not look Jewish anymore. This is obviously evident from his submission to the boatman on the river, Dnieper, and now to Nikolai Maximovitch, the drunkenman, lying near the cemetery, whom, Yakov rescues from the snow. Nikolai Maximovitch is a member of the anti- 43

Semitic organization called Black Hundreds. Yakov Bok is frightened to see the black and white button pinned to the drunken man’s coat, bearing the two headed eagle sign of the Black Hundreds. The Jew-hater, as a token token of gratitude, offers Yakov Bok a job of overseer in a brick factory located in an area which is forbidden to Jews. Nikolai Maximovitch has offered Yakov Bok a job of supervisor in his brick factory without knowing the fact that Yakov Bok is a Jew.

During his stay in the brick factory he carries out his responsibility sincerely. He maintains record perfectly. Yakov Bok comes to know that workers under his command steal bricks now and then. Other than Yakov Bok, all others are Gentiles in the factory. Owner of the brick factory is a Gentile, a strong Jew-hater, and the workers also are Gentiles. Actually problem starts only when Yakov starts behaving different to the indifferent workers of the factory. All workers who enjoyed so much by immoral ways, are not able to tolerate the loyalty of Yakov Bok. They are eagerly waiting for the right time to weave conspiracy against Yakov Bok for his honesty. Yakov often prevents some boys from stealing bricks from the factory by chasing them out.

One day Yakov Bok saves a Hassid from the attack of an angry mob of boys and offers him matzos to eat since it is Passover, the Jewish religious festival. After some days, a 12 years old Christian boy namely, Zhenia Golov is found lying dead in a cave near the brick factory. He has been stabbed to death. The murder news spreads like forest fire all over 44 the country, particularly Kiev. Many doubt that it is a merciless act of a Jew for making matzos since it is Passover. The matzos turn out to be the basis of the ritual murder charge brought against Yakov. Malamud’s “Jews do possess an ancient identity and that they bear it, consciously or unconsciously” (BM(SR), 22). Yakov Bok, with a little hope of making a better future, prepares himself to get rid of his self, but his originality is revealed. Yakov’s Jewish instinct tempts him to offer matzos to a fellow Jew on a Jewish holiday. Yakov is accused of a murder of Zhenia Golov, a Christian boy, for religious purpose. Added to it, it has happened near the brick factory in which Yakov is working as a supervisor and staying there itself without telling the fact to anyone that he is a Jew. The Christians believe that a Jew has several uses of Christian blood viz., in baking matzos to cure diseases, and in Passover ceremony. Further Yakov Bok is accused of having traded stolen goods with the other Jews. The fanatic Christian Kiev society and the dishonest brick factory workers give supporting evidences to the Gentile dominated Russian government in order to strengthen the plot against Yakov. Malamud looks upon the Jews as the prisoners of history and ultimately the fixer’s heroism is a compound of several conquests – the conquest of self, of society, of time and of history. Malamud protagonists are not champions of Judaism but admirers of the Jewish belief, The Torah, in the moral world, and its acceptance of suffering as an unavoidable actuality of human experience. Jews are born to suffer so as to sustain moral values.

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On a false complaint Yakov is the thrown into Kiev prison and undergoes inhuman treatment. He is compelled to confess the crime against his innocence, because, according to Russians, no Jew is innocent. In the prison he is called by dirty names such as murdering Jew, Christ Killer, Blood Sucker. The pursuit of ill-treatment reaches its climax. In the prison he is made to live in a filthy environment. He starves for six days complaining that he is being given poisoned food and demands to be taken to the kitchen, but he is not allowed. Having understood well that the accusation is totally irrelevant, Yakov retreats into philosophical speculation “There is no reason, there is only their plot against a Jew” (TF, 155). So Yakov Bok is selected to suffer for all Jews. However it is only holiness maintained by endless pain that man sustains without external support. Yakov comes to realize that Justice is not an absolute for all men but a conspiracy of one class against the other. Yakov Bok is telling Groinfein, a fellow Jew, “If I were’t a Jew there would be no crime” (Ibid., 158). According to Malmud Jew is the peculiarised triumph. Throughout this novel the theme of victory through defeat is constant. Malamud’s Jews are the true epitome of morality, though they are the real victims of social injustice. In spite of their suffering, they do not deviate from the Jewish Law at any age in their life time. Yakov Bok knows well that he undergoes brutal treatment in the prison because of his Jewish identity. The crime that he committed is not murder but born as a Jew.

Norman Podhoretz, an American critic has suggested of Malamud’s characters as “The Jew is humanity seen under the twin 46 aspects of suffering and moral aspiration” (CLC, V.I.194). Therefore any man who suffers greatly and longs to be better than he is, can be called a Jew. The works of Malamud tend to be an affirmation of man’s ability to realize himself even in the face of deprivation and disaster. His protagonists are fugitives from tyranny and injustice. They often spin fantasy about a better life. They know that the price of aspiration is invariably suffering. According to Judaism, Love for mankind is a prerequisite to love of God. Malamud’s Jews are capable of subordinating self-interst to larger human concerns.

Yakov’s every movement, in the prison, is restricted. He is not allowed to read, write and speak. He is not even allowed to keep a bird or animal as company so that he may lesson his worries. He has to be within the cell all the day. Food is served to him separately. Other prisoners are not allowed to look at Yakov Bok.

Yakov Bok is thrown into an unsanitary condition in the prison. Even medical attention is denied to him when his legs are bulged with pussing sores. The jail warden says that there are no doctors for a Jewish prisoner. Yakov realizes that the Jew is a sufferer of all pains. Yakov understands that man is subhumanised in terms of religion. Man is not able to be a free being in his purpose, choice and thought. When Yakov Bok’s freedom, in all possible means, is restricted in the Tzarist Russia, he thinks of Spinoza, a philosopher, a free-thinker whose views on freedom is beyond any discrimination. 47

In the prison Yakov Bok is given a copy of the New Testament. He reads the story of Christ with pleasure. He is deeply moved by the suffering of Jesus when He seeks help from God. Yakov Bok compares the suffering of Jesus Christ to his suffering in the prison. He asks the prison authorities. “How can anyone love Christ and keep an innocent man suffering in prison” (TF, 233). Once Shmuel, his father-in-law, visits Yakov in prison and gets arrested by the Russian police. Bibikov, Yakov Bok’s lawyer, pays heavy price for his attempt to help Yakov. Yakov Bok asks other prisoners whether they are Jews or Russians. They reply that they are Russian prisoners, but to Yakov Bok they look like Jews. The prosecuting Attorney, Grubashov asks Yakov Are you a Hassid or Misnogid? and Yakov Bok says I am neither one nor the other, I am a free thinker. I say this to let you know I am not a religious man (Ibid., 99) Yakov Bok uses matzo of somekind for protection against evil spirits. He is not evil-minded. Only evil men are highly superstitious.

The Fixer is based on the Mendel Beillis, a Jewish brick factory manager, put in prison on a murder charge case. Actually The Fixer is an outcome of an interesting story about Mendel Beilliss which Malamud’s father told him in his childhood days. This story traces the gradual victimization of a poor Jew from a village by Tzarist Russia. Yakov Bok does not believe in institutionalized religion. God is our invention and a protagonist cannot do anything about it. Yakov Bok is suffering in the fire of injustice. All the forces around him destroy him. Beginning from 48 desertion by his wife to his being chained to the prison wall, Yakov’s experiences are examples of the tragic dimensions of human existence. But the moral courage that he gains through these experiences, enables him to maintain his own way before God.

Yakov Bok, through his endurance and courage, creates values within himself that reduces the destructive forces of life inactive. Yakov Bok does not mean that he can put an end to the destructive forces in the world, rather, he convinces others that adverse circumstances cannot destroy the human spirit. Here Malamud embraces the life philosophy of Earnest Hemingway, that man may be destroyed but not defeated. Even after having experienced the Holocaust, the Jews survive in the world. They think that they are born to suffer for a common cause. They are making the suffering meaningful. According to Judaism, one who suffers greatly, understands the meaning of love and compassion. Yakov’s future remains undecided. The socio-political set up in Tsarist Russia is also against Jews. So Yakov resolves to live and participate in history with the full knowledge that he will suffer.

Yakov is shattered when the Investigating Magistrate, Bibikov, in the Tzarist Russian court, convinces him to give up his faith in Judaism. However, at the end, Yakov Bok, on behalf of the oppressed, assassinates the Tzar, pointing the gun at the Tzar’s heart. At last Yakov Bok makes the suppressed people realize the fact that history needs to be rewritten. They need to have a violent change in such an extreme case. What the 49

Tzar deserves, is a bullet in the gut. Thus Yakov Bok, the innocent Jewish fixer, becomes a revolutionary hero in the minds of millions of Jews, particularly in the Tzarist Russia. Malamud protagonist has risen up to active rectification of social justice from passive suffering for humanity. Although Malamud utilizes Jew as a symbol of suffering, he has added a new dimension to his Jewish spectrum. History makes Jews fighters against those injustices which they have suffered so long. Malamud has positive attitude towards suffering. He suggests that life is a search to make unavoidable suffering meaningful. Frank Alphine, Sy Levin, Yakov Bok, Arthur Fidelman, Roy Hobbs and Harry Lesser all strive to escape a horrible past and to achieve a new life. All of them are defeated in their ambition but they achieve a new dignity, turning defeat into victory by assuming a burden of self-sacrifice. Malamud protagonists believe that suffering has regenerative power. In the works of Bernard Malamud Jews are used as symbols of conscience and moral behaviour. Jews are represented as displaced loners who have the potential for achieving moral transcendence through suffering that engenders insight and a commitment to love. Along with the symbol of a Jew as ethical being, another symbol is also incorporated with it – that of life as a prison. Morris Bober, in The Assistant, sees his grocery store as a prison, a graveyard and a tomb.

The grocery store is the source of bitterness, suffering and frustration to him. However it symbolizes his very existence, embodying the source of his moral strength. Yakov Bok in The Fixer spends most part of his life in prison for the crime he has not committed. He finds spiritual 50 peace to remain in the Tzar’s prison with no guarantee of ever-being released.

Yakov Bok, in The Fixer, is representing good men struggling for a meaningful existence. The European Jews experienced an extraordinary amount of suffering throughout the middle ages and again in the 19th and 20th centuries. But they elevated their hardship to the level of an ethical symbol to the entire humanity. In the Tzar court when justice becomes handicapped in accordance with the case of Yakov Bok, his lawyer proclaims “You suffer for us all” (TF, 305). It is the human lot to suffer that suffering is definitely beneficial, and therefore people should learn to accept their burdens and see in them the promise of growth and fulfillment. Jewish terminology of suffering is different from that of Christianity. Christianity believes that suffering is redemptive. One who suffers unjustly, is certainly rewarded after life in the kingdom of God. On the contrary, The Torah, the Jewish Law gives more emphasis to being good than reward after life. Being good itself is a big reward. In such a way, the meaning of suffering of Judaism differs from that of Christianity. Suffering is the way of the world like the sun shines as brightly on the wicked as it does on the good. Judaism establishes its view that goodness itself is its own reward. Therefore love and compassion are so important to the protagonists of Malamud. The only possible solution for the problem of evil is to respect and nourish each other. In other words, lack of love and compassion are the root cause for suffering. It has to be understood by humanity. The concept of association of suffering with 51

Jewishness is not only sentimental but also contains a hard-headed realism.

Once when Malamud was asked about his role as a Jewish American writer, he said “I handle the Jew as universal man, Every man is a Jew” (TFBM, 101). Jewish experience is a fight for existence in the highest possible terms. Jewishness is an ethical symbol, a moral stance. Jewishness does not mean either Judaism or Jewry but a quality dealing with some virtues. Malamud, in his works, does not attempt to identify Jewishness. As a born Jew, he is passing through Jewish to non-Jewish experiences. Ultimately he is dealing with political, social issues in his works.

Malamud, through his protagonists, is universalizing his Jewishness in the positive sense. The Fixer forces the readers to contemplate some ultimate matters like politics, religion etc. The story ends with a note of hope that Yakov’s moral strength succeeds in resisting his evil enemies. A number of Jewish American writers also share the common ideology of Jewish experience in their fiction. What they share, is the emotionalization of Jewish experience after their history in Germany under Hitler. But Malamud’s writings, with regard to Jewishness, have greater influence. His protagonists play a significant role in sharing the Jewish experience with the global community in a positive manner.

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Yakov Bok extends his vision of Jewish community. The persecution of the Jews is an indication of destruction in the western culture. The general public cannot feel free when the innocent are destroyed in the name of politics, history and religion. Yakov Bok’s spiritual encounter fantasy also enforces the revolutionary retaliation against the face of injustice. Yakov Bok’s act of assassinating the Tzar teaches the humanity a sound lesson of not being patient when injustice is deliberately imposed upon the innocent. Yakov Bok finally speaks to himself, pointing the gun at the Tzar that What the Tzar deserves is a bullet in the gut. One thing I have learned, there is no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew … You cannot sit still and see yourself destroyed. Where there is no fight for it, there is no freedom (TF, 335). History is reversible. Any principled individual like Yakov Bok can alter the future. Yakov Bok is suffering, struggling and undergoing inhuman treatment in the prison for the crime he has not committed for the entire Jewish community in the world. Yakov Bok’s total surrender to the will of Gentile dominated anti-Semitic Russian society, is only a physical brutality. He looks defeated physically. Spiritually he has won the Tzarist government for its merciless act against the innocent people. Yakov declares that the freedom of all men depends on the freedom of the least of man. Moreover, he says that it is ridiculous to define love, charity, honesty, endurance as the particular quality of one religion.

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The Natural is not a novel of Jewish subject matter. Anyhow, the Jewish concept of suffering and its association with morality are viewed seriously throughout the novel. Malamud makes use of Grail-myth strategy in the novel to establish the fact that moral failure will result in self-ruin. This novel deals with the emerge of a baseball player and his sudden fall for his immoral behaviour. Though Malamud is interested in base ball game, he writes this novel not only to relish the game but also to reveal the truth that moral deviation at any stage is the root cause for personal failure. Roy, the protagonist of The Natural elevates his position as one of the greatest players after a great deal o adversity. Certainly it is a vertical mobility. But, to sustain the status, he has to remain honest. It is not known to him that in the height of his fame, he should be more careful than before. At last he succumbs to vice, as a result of it, he loses his name, fame and money. Roy returns to his native realizing his mistake. Malamud believes that it is through suffering man understands his problems. It is believed with reference to Roy, that fame is not permanent in the world but a man of stern morality can sustain the position for a longer time than others.

Malamud’s perception about Judaism and its ideology are exhibited in The Assistant. It is a story of Morris Bober, a poor man, running a small grocery store in a corner of Brooklyn, America. Morris Bober flees from Tsarist Russia in order to get rid of its pogroms, poverty and injustice, to America, the land of freedom and opportunity. With a hope of making his life better than before, he starts his career as a grocer in Brooklyn, 54

America. In due course what he finds is mostly disappointment. His only son dies. He is cheated of business success by a partner. He is in a position to adjust with a nagging but loving wife Ida. He is almost deceived by the stupid but successful neighbour. He has to fulfill his dream of sending his daughter Helen to college for higher education. In the mean time Morris Bober takes in Frank Alphine, an Italian Gentile, a Jew-hater, as his assistant. Frank Alphine often steals from the poor grocery store. He seduces Morris Bober’s daughter Helen to fall in love with him. Morris Bober is confined to the store because he is the bread- winner of the family. Although he loses health, wealth and child, he remains faithful to his sense of self like Job in the Old-Testament. Morris Bober is a man and a Jew. He insists on remaining true to his understanding of the self and of the world. He deals fairly with anyone. He forgives Frank and refuses to fire him after being caught red-handed while stealing in the grocery store. He gets up early morning to open the store, so that an old polish woman as a first regular customer of the day will not go to some other store for her three-cent roll.

In spite of his suffering from poverty, he orders paper goods from Marcus, the paper salesman. Morris Bober knows well that ordering paper goods to the already dwindling grocery store is not advisable, but the paper salesman is dying of cancer, and he needs to be kept busy. Marcus, besides his physical ailments, has to win bread for his family by selling paper goods to the humane people like Morris Bober. Morris Bober, out of pity, on his fellow sufferers, often stretches his helping hands though not 55 affordable to him. Morris shovels snow every day morning without waiting for the corporation people, in front of the store, so that passersby will not fall. At one stage Morris is prepared to burn down his store in order to collect the insurance, but he gives up that idea because his inner quality does not permit him to do so. Anyway, in a failing grocery store Morris Bober sustains as a good, kind-hearted human being while materialism, lack of responsibility and exploitation rule the main stream of life in the world.

Morris Bober’s fellow Jews like Louiskarp, Nat Pearl and others are dishonest. They are indifferent to Morris’s economic anxieties. Louis Karp, the liquor shop owner, closes the shop on Saturdays, and he is regular in going to the synagogue. Except Morris other Jews living there in the lane, never touch ham, on spiritual holidays. Nat Pearl, a law student, his father a successful businessman, is also advocating the principles of Judaism, the Torah. All Jews other than Morris Bober are strictly following the dogmas of Judaism. Every Jew has to attend the synagogue for religious worship. They are prevented from eating ham on spiritual holidays. They have to have beard as a mark of Jewish identity. On the contrary Morris Bober does not follow the above said rules. He does not go to the synagogue, and he keeps the store open on Saturdays. He, at times, tastes ham whenever he feels hungry without bothering about the Torah. Other Jews like Louis Karp and Nat Pearl concentrate on materialistic prosperity rather than humanistic considerations. They are many times richer than Morris and they seem to be well displined 56 individuals of Judaism who are moving towards the path shown by God to the rustic external world. Unmindful of the impact on the fellow beings like Morris Bober, without any prior indication, big grocery stores are opened by his competitors. Whenever a new store is opened nearby Morris Bober feels “like a rock dropped on his skull” (TA, 355). When Morris Bober sees a new store being opened in the neighbourhood, it disturbs him a lot, and the competition, to the already failing grocery store, becomes tuffer. At this juncture Morris Bober does not take new stores as competition to him, rather, he is very much worried of his survival. Morris Bober should shoulder the responsibility of sending his daughter Helen to collegiate education. His loving wife Ida reminds him of daily needs to the family. All the above, the grocery store is the only source of income to the family, and therefore Morris Bober, a man of sixty years old, is in a great confusion not knowing what to do next. Therefore any man who suffers greatly and longs to better than he is, can be called a Jew. The works of Malamud tend to be an affirmation of both suffering and morality. Despite being aware of the material prosperity of his neighbour by crooked ways Morris Bober remains honest. He does not even think of becoming immoral for his own financial development. Suffering occupies a central place in Malamud’s creative vision. It is only to define the basis of humanity. When Morris Bober tells Frank Alphine that, “if you live, you suffer” (TA, 325), the implication acknowledges the receiprocal responsibility of man towards man. If a man does not suffer, he fails to grow. Without such inward growth he cannot comprehend 57 either life or build up his relationship with his fellow beings. The intenser the suffering, the greater is the possibility of one’s regeneration.

In the works of Malamud, the concept of suffering leads to humanity and compassion. Morris suffers greatly for his base conduct. Though his narrow-minded fellow Jews are indifferent to him for his unstable economic condition, Morris does not bother much. He does not even attempt to rationalize his poverty-stricken life. He does not want to overcome his financial difficulties by deviating from the path shown by God. Morris Bober’s honesty and his Torah, the Jewish Law, is brought to the notice of the external world at the time of his funeral by the rabbi, a Jewish monk. There are three Jewish families in the run-down corner of Brooklyn, America, including Morris Bober’s, but Malamud projects only Morris and his suffering to uphold morality in a greater sense, because Morris character reveals the real Judaism which God envisions. Jews, in the works of Malamud, are born in this world to suffer and to give a new glow of morality. According to Judaism, materialism and financial prosperity are not the tools to measure the quality of a person. Through Morris character, Malamud insists upon the necessity of being passionate and lovable on the fellow human beings. Morris Bober accepts the Jewish burden of responsibility for his fellow men. He denies success and temptation. He opts the law of responsibility, instead for a life of Torah. By doing so he submits himself to suffering but he is enabled to live meaningfully. Morris Bober’s life style, in the long run, shapes the life style of Frank Alphine, a drifter, an Italian Gentile, and a Jew-hater. Frank 58 finally is moulded upto the level of converting himself to Judaism. He readily accepts the burden of shouldering the family after the death of Morris. Frank Alphine learns the meaning of life through Morris Bober’s suffering.

Malamud protagonists make the entire humanity realize the fact that Jewish suffering is not futile. Judaism reveals the truth that suffering is a sign of love and wisdom. It is proved with reference to the Morris character in The Assistant. Morris Bober is neither a martyr nor a sufferer. He suffers honourably in order to maintain his Jewishness. To Malamud, being humane is also a life-giving experience, that offers hope and meaning to one’s self and others. Morris knows both the meaning of his suffering and the inhuman attitude of his fellow Jews and Gentiles. Therefore Malamud says that he is not a champion of Judaism or Jewishness. His ideology about Jewishness is clearly stated in his statement that all good men are Jews, either Gentiles or Jews.

When Frank Alphine is telling his life history, Morris makes him sit with fatherly affection and offers him something to eat. Malamud lets the whole human society agree with his point, through Morris character, that suffering and morality are like twins of the same mother and no human being can avoid these two inseparable aspects of human life. By creating characters like Morris Bober, Malamud wants to protect the whole community from demoralizing. His positive attitude towards suffering is obviously seen in his works. His works suggest that life is a 59 search to make unavoidable suffering meaningful. Malamud projects his protagonist Morris Bober as an embodiment of humanism, moralism and humanitarianism. In spite of his suffering from poverty, Morris never forgets to help the needy like vendors and wanderers. Frank Alphine, an Italian Gentile, initially a Jew-hater, becomes a loyal servant of Morris Bober. Since Frank Alphine is a Christian Jew, with little interest in ethnic formulations, his act of conversion to Judaism is in fact only a formal recognition of his vital inner change. Through a steady devotion to the ideal of love, Frank learns to distinguish the two divergent forms of attitude. Frank’s conversion is not a religious change, it is a spiritual change within himself. Morris Bober’s way of life makes a complete change in the life style of his assistant, Frank Alphine.

Helen, the only daughter of Morris Bober, at the beginning, dreams of being at the hands of Nat Pearl, the Law student as his wife so that she can enjoy luxury. She often shuttles herself between her actual life and the life she dreams of. It is not possible for her to marry Nat Pearl, a Jewish Law student because of the ground reality and the economic status of her family. Since Nat Pearl is a rich Jewish Law student, Helen is tempted to think of marrying him. In the course of time Helen gives up this idea. Frank Alphine’s loyality, sincerity and his concern for Helen to send her to collegiate education, and the fatherly responsibility of shouldering the family after the demise of Morris make Helen realize the meaning of life. Helen is now being attracted by the attitude of Frank towards life. Helen is no more a fallen victim to materialism. Above all, Morris is like the sun, 60 others are like planets around it. As the sun shines brighter, the radiation removes the darkness of other planets also. It is through suffering that the values of love and justice are highlighted for Morris, Frank, and Helen, ultimately contributing to the understanding of their humanity. Malamud’s protagonists are the persons from working class community, dreaming and struggling for a better life than they live. The plots of his works are proletarian. Malamud’s concern is with the first generation peasants and poor hardworking immigrants. He, at times, speaks of the urgency of protecting the whole human community from demoralization which results in annihilation.

Frank Alphine aspires to be a thief but finally achieves a new glow of life. The gap between his aspiration and achievement brings him closer to the centre of the universal truth that human life is to struggle for betterment whether he achieves it or not. Frank Alphine’s act of conversion stands for the ultimate recognition of his self. He had so long suppressed the thief within himself. He learns the fact that suffering or pain tends to emerge and inspire. Frank Alphine is not going to visit the synagogue for prayer with a skull-cap and phylacteries. He is not going to eat kosher and close the grocery store on Jewish holidays. In fact his conversion is a need to transcend the forms of religions and perceive the underlying unity. It suggests the Jewish Gentile integration as a valuable human ideal. Frank Alphine aptly remarks that his conversion is important because he discovers himself through another human being – Morris Bober, -a Law of conduct, which gives meaning to the burden of suffering 61 to life. As he accepts faith, he eradicates the barriers between theologies. It is Frank Alphine’s ultimate illumination after the mystifying haze of duality.

Jewishness is a matter of identity in the works of Malamud. It forms an integral part of the individual’s personality. In The Assistant, the theme of Jewishness is well developed. The story concerns Morris Bober, his acquaintance with Frank Alphine, a Gentile, a Jew hater, who robs in the store. Later after the death of Morris Bober, Frank is repentant, accepting not only of his impoverished life but of Morris’s philosophy of humility and humanity as well. Here a Jew hating Gentile becomes a Jew not by force but by realization. Jewishness and suffering are the prominent issues in The Assistant, Morris Bober looks foolish to others because he does not strictly follow the Jewish Law. Indeed he is taken into account in the kingdom of God as a true Jew who incorporates all the humanistic considerations. At the funeral of Morris Bober, the rabbi, Jewish monk, says that Morris Bober strictly followed the Jewish Law which God gave to Moses on the Mount Sinai. Earlier, during a friendly conversation with Frank, Morris answers the question of what really a Jew is. He says that his father used to tell him, to be a Jew all one needs is a good heart. Nothing wrong in not keeping the kosher, to follow the Jewish Law means to do right, to be honest, to be good. Human beings are not animals to hurt others and to be hurt by others. This is what a Jew strongly believes. The character of Morris Bober is an embodiment of Malamud’s humanistic philosophy. Morris believes that Jews suffer because they are Jews. Really 62 in the decades following the Second World War and the Nazi destruction of European Jewry, Jews became a symbol for suffering humanity, carrying the longest history filled with miseries inflicted by others, with their worst Holocaust.

As for as Malamud’s Jewishness is concerned, Jews are the chosen people to suffer. If man lives, he suffers. Some people suffer more, but not because they want. Malamud does not talk high of all Jews and Jewish community in the world. He makes the distinction in The Assistant that not all Jews are Jews. Jews like The Karps and The Pearls are Jews by virtue of their birth, whereas, The Bobers by virtue of their sensitivity and humanity. The latter constitute the more significant category for Malamud. The concept of Jewishness is best illustrated by the conversion of Frank Alphine. The final line of The Assistant relates that after the Passover ceremony Frank Alphine becomes a Jew. His conversion is viewed in a higher order of spirituality. In the middle of The Assistant Frank’s position is like cat on the wall. He is neither a Jew to the Jews nor a Gentile to the Gentiles. When Morris dies, a gradual transition is taking place in Frank. He can no longer be the assistant. This change is recognized by Helen who knows more about him than others. Jews are born, not made. Jewishness is not something one is naturalized into. Jewishness has symbolized some sort of exalted condition of the humanistic spirit which is obviously seen in the formula “to suffer is to be Jewish” (CEBM, 42). It may look silly from the historical point of view because all men suffer and very few are Jews. According to Malamud all 63 good men are Jews, they are better than others at putting suffering to spiritual use. Malamud’s protagonists are committed to suffering because it defines their uniqueness and humanness.

Morris suffers because of his economic anxieties. Frank suffers for his base conduct. Helen suffers to actualize her dream of happiness. Each Malamud protagonist insists upon the importance of humanistic considerations above religious or ethnic identity. Malamud is concerned with the ways in which history shapes the individual and the external environment. The most predominant theme in Malamud’s work is the affirmation of man’s capacity to mature and to create a moral structure. As far as Malamud, the Jew is innocent, virtuous and passive. The Assistant is the best story, containing moral arrangement. The poor grocer Morris Bober transforms a young Italian drifter named Frank Alphine into a refined human being by the example of his passive suffering and his goodness of heart. Fanatics of any religion may not be able to understand Frank Alphine’s transformation into a Jew as a sign of moral improvement because they concentrate more on the persistence of brutality and malice.

About 50 years before the French Revolution, Jews, in large number, moved to the west and reached a high economic status. There was a wide recognition to the Jews in the multi-cultural western society. They enjoyed utmost cultural and social freedom. Finally Jews were granted political emancipation in certain western and eastern European 64 countries. As a result of these changes, by the middle of the 18th century, there emerged a rejection of the centuries old Jew-in-seclusion mode of life. It is actually the perennial problem of Jews and Jewish writers also.

Wherever they live, whatever the language they speak or write they face the problem of seclusion. Faith and religion become a basis for much of the best of modern Jewish writing. Finally on the eve of the formation of the state of Israel, The Holocaust has got the greatest influence on the Hebrew writing. Malamud’s roots are Jewish roots. His Jewish origin makes him write about matters which concern Jews directly or indirectly. Despite the complexities involving the Jewishness of Malamud’s fiction, Morris Bober, Yakov Bok, Harry Lesser and many other Malamud characters are revealed as people who became positively involved in the Jewish milieu. On the surface level, The Assistant does not seem to be related to the Holocaust. But certainly Morris Bober is also a symbolic Holocaust victim. A number of indications are provided to that effect. Morris’s economic ruin is caused by new competition in the neighbourhood. A German who owns a grocery store is a competitor to Morris. Frank Alphine, an Italian Gentile, is ungrateful to Morris by stealing things in the poor store. Other tenants of the same building exploit Morris’s kindness by buying things in another shop. The polish woman, who gets the roll each morning is anti-Semite. The German and their II World War allies conspire against the Jews. Frank, an Italian Gentile, drifter remarks that Morris “looks like a sheep to the slaughter (MH 484)”. The poor grocer gets pneumonia. He is advised to inhale gas 65 from a radiator but he forgets to inhale. This is definitely a reference to the fate of Jews in Auschwitz and other camps where they were put to death. Malamud protagonists are doomed to unwanted suffering by the external forces. They make it meaningful by their very existence without deviating from the path of morality.

Robert Alter, an American critic, says that “the Holocaust serves as a symbol of modernity epitomized” (MH, 487) in The Fixer, and to some extent in The Assistant also. It stands as one of the means that modernity has invented to destroy man by making his environment inhuman. There is a connection between the struggles of American Blacks and Russian Jews. The former struggle for their individual rights, and the latter suffer because of what they are. It is actually a symbol of dangers posed by the modern world to any person who is different from others. Malamud attempts to articulate the meanings of Judaism, Jewish suffering and the Holocaust. At this juncture Malamud states that being Jewish means asserting humanity and being humane in the modern world leads to suffering from man’s inhumanity to man. According to Malamud, such suffering is not futile, instead, it becomes the possible rewards of meaningfulness in life for achieving one’s essential humanity to the full. And these rewards are not merely personal triumphs. The values of such worth survive while other evil forces vanish. Ultimately there is a revolt against evil. One can hope to make the world a better place to live in. The inhumanity of the modern condition can be defeated as the Jews defeated the Holocaust through their survival. Malamud suggests that the 66 importance of the Holocaust is enlarged when it stands as ultimate symbol of inhumanity. However, Holocaust serves to bring people nearer to understanding. Malamud protagonists’ understanding of Judaism and Jewish suffering may be different but one can see in The Assistant and in The Fixer an attempt to grapple seriously with one of the most perplexing issues of contemporary Judaism. They attempt to universalize the dogmas of Judaism and Jewish experience, so that one can see one’s life in terms of it.

The Tenants no longer remains Jewish in its theme. On the whole Jewishness continues to be the central theme of Malamud’s fiction other than his first novel The Natural. Many of Malamud’s works are predicated upon the protagonists’ necessary acceptance of his Jewish identity. The Tenants is a beautiful work which gives more emphasis to social problems than Jewish subject matter. The Tenants is an autobiographical work which brings out the early struggle of Malamud as a budding artist, living in a small room as a tenant. Harey Lesser and Willie Spearment are the two well balanced artist-protagonists; the first a Jew, the latter a Black. Harry Lesser is living in an old, partly damaged building of Levinspiel as a tenant for many years. The building is six storied in which more than thirty five families lived once. But now Harry Lesser, a man of thirty six, with a burning desire of becoming a successful writer, is staying all alone. As the tenement is weaker, the landlord, Levingspiel wants to demolish it down in order to avoid any disaster. Other occupants, with good amount of settlement, are convinced to vacate the apartment while Harry Lesser 67 indulges himself in legal argument with the landlord, Levinspiel, for his overstay in the already ruined building. Even after repeated request, Harry Lesser is adamant, often quotes the regulations of District Rest Control Office. Harry Lesser advises Levinspiel to be patient enough until he finishes his third novel which he is writing for nine years. Harry Lesser tells the landlord that shifting his residence, during the course of his writing a novel, will be a stumbling block on the way of his progress as a writer. He remarks “Home is where my book is” (TT, 6). Malamud portrays his character as a sincere, dedicated person to artistic spirit. The same spirit does not continue, until a fellow human, namely Willie Spearment, also a writer, enters the apartment. However, at the beginning, they both are close to each other in every step in respect of their writing.

As per the regulations of District Rent Control Office, New York, America, Harry Lesser can stay in his apartment for some more months and the landlord, Levinspiel, has to meet out the needs of the tenant, as long as he lives there. Willie Speaement is a black man, an intruder in the tenement. Actually Harry Lesser is little disturbed of an unlawful intruder in the building but they come to good terms in terms of their writing carrier. Harry Lesser manages the situation cleverly. He neither betrays Willie Spearment, nor support Levingspiel. Though Willie, a black man, from Missisippi to New York, Harry Lesser, a Jewish white, their artistic temperament makes them forget all the differences. They often discuss their works. Harry Lesser has so far written two novels, working on his third novel. The first novel received good critical acclaim while the 68 second was bad. But, in reality, the second one fortunately was made as a movie which brought him a good some of money to Harry Lesser. Harry Lesser is able to continue as an artist, concentrating on his third novel not because of his first novel, but because of his bad second novel.

As far as literature is concerned, appreciation and money do not come together for a work. Malamud expresses the least possibility of co- existence of mankind in future in The Tenants. Once Willie Spearment, in the course of events, brings a white lady, Irene Bell to the ruined apartment for a get together party in the old building. Along with Willie’s lady love, Iren, Mary Kettlesmith and her lover Sam Clemence also have come there. Willie’s girl Irene Bell happens to be a Jew whom Harry Lesser once loved deeply. Harry Lesser does not like his sweet heart to be at the hands of Willie Spearment. This petty love affair of two youngsters on a girl brings difference of opinion between the two. In Malamud’s view, Jews and Blacks face almost same kind of problem across the world. The first suffer from his being Jewish, while the latter suffer from deprivation of individual rights. They are not able to work together for the simple reason of winning the goodwill of a lady namely Iren Bell, a Jew whom they both love. They are actually here in a deserted building for achieving their ultimate goal of becoming a successful artist, but they start hating each other, forgetting their higher order of achievement, on personal grudges. In this work, Malamud has portrayed his characters Harry Lesser and Willie Spearment suffering from the problem of co- existence. On the whole Irene and Levinspiel also suffer in one way but 69 definitely not in the way as Morris and Yakov do. They are competing with each other in their work, and for the love of a woman. In the long run the competition turns into violence. The writers go to the extreme state of murdering each other at the end of the novel. Sociological changes have altered New York City so much, since The Assistant. In Malamud’s perception the Jew is no longer credible as a symbol in a contemporary American fiction.

Harry Lesser’s suffering is artistic, the amount of money that he has made for his first novel is enough for his survival till the publication of his second novel. His struggle is not financial, but artistic while other Jewish protagonists of Malamud suffer for better life than what they have today. While Spearment also has the same problems as Harry Lesser in achieving artistic expression. It reveals that there is only a little hope for the co-existence of mankind in a modern society. The Blacks and Jews in The Tenants are like Israelite and Ishmael, the two similar groups attempting to live as one people. The failure of the two protagonists Harry Lesser and Willie Spearment who share love, art, hate and even personality traits to achieve this simple co-existence suggests Malamud’s anxiety for the failure of mankind.

As the conflict becomes more intense they become irrational. When Willie and Lesser meet for the final time, they have degenerated into superstitious savages. Racial discrimination preoccupies their minds over the dispute of winning a lady. Their achievement of artistic creation 70 is completely forgotten. Neither of them attempts to be a complete man, but only defends the false identify which each has assumed. As a result of this they kill each other at the end. The Jew in The Fixer seems to an agent of possible social change. It is emphasized that imposed suffering is meaningless and it has to be eradicated. In The Assistant, the concept of Jewishness reflects an altered perception that suffering itself is beneficial. The Tenants exhibits a more fundamental change to make man civilized. One’s own history should teach one the lesson of compassion and love. The failure of Harry Lesser and Willie Spearment to feel the anguish of the other, until the moment of their mutual destruction, shows that the humanity has learned nothing from the lessons of the past. In The Tenants Malamud’s Jew Harry Lesser has deteriorated from saint to murderer. Harry Lesser and Willie Spearment are the representatives of the humanity of modern era.

At the end of fifties Blacks and Jews are one. There is only a slight difference between them. After a decade, the proposition seems hollow. Once again Blacks and Jews are made to live together, but this fantasy leads to destroy each other. The Tenants’ last paragraph is eerie. The word mercy is repeated one-hundred and fifty times, and once in Hebrew. Malamud, through his protagonists, ensures the fact that mutual understanding and true love are still lacking not only among the countries but also among the people of the same country even after realizing the impact of Second World War.

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The conclusion of The Tenants seems true now. There are other kinds of truth than sociological truth. There is the truth that matches real events in the world in The Tenants. It is the blackman and the Jew turning on one another. There is the truth of aspiration. At the closing of The Tenants when Harry Lesser, a Jew, and Willie Spearment, a Black cut each other, Malamud writes “Each feels the anguish of the other” (TT, 173). This is the truth of invisible faith that Malamud Judaism preaches through Yokov Bok, Morris Bober, Frank Alpine ultimately Harry Lesser and Willie Spearment. Harry and Willie feel bad about what they do only through suffering from pain, the wounds caused, at the mutual destruction. Many of Malamud’s stories resound with the ideology that for the sake of moral aspiration one must undergo hardship. Malamud’s world often proposes a kind of hard-won spiritual goodness.

There remains a thin strand of connection between Malamud’s vision and Jewish temperament. There is a connection between the messianic insistence of realization after suffering and the common sense of ordinary Jews. According to Malamud all good men are Job. In the Old Testament, Job is suffering unjustly to the eyes of others, but Job does not even attempt to rationalize his suffering. He takes it in such a way that it is the mystery of life. God loves both the good and evil, as rain water falls on all. The sociological stories are almost taken for granted by Jews. It is found in the works of Malamud that Jews have always known hard times. Therefore they are naturally sympathetic to others. Malamud characters are not on the side of narrow-minded Jews who always consider Gentiles 72 as their bitterest enemies. In The Tenants, either the act of Willie or the act of Lesser is not justified, rather, they are mocked at for their animal behaviour. They are made to feel bad about their inability to build up good relationship with one another. The protagonists of The Tenants, Harry Lesser and Willie Spearment are embodiments of humanity which gets divided in terms of personal grudges like colour, religion, race etc. What the pity is that people have not learned to be united even after the hardship of Two World Wars.

The Tenant is a work of concerned with despair, violence and the fall of civilization. In The Tenant history rides man because it has deprived man of the opportunity to develop an autonomous sense of self and a possibility lost in the welter of misperceptions. Harry Lesser and Willie Spearment respond not to each other but to the multiplicity of projected images of anger, hate and frustration. In the modern scenario it is difficult to master the complexities of history because all value systems have been constructed of quicksand where ethics, morality and conscience cannot operate. Willie and Harry are isolates whose connections with others are exploitative, rather than caring. There is no inner strength in both of them. They are the fallen victims to the complexity of modernity. Without inner strength one cannot realize oneself and all behaviour is determined by others. There is safety only in prisons for Henry Lesser and Willie for their temperament. The Tenants ends in despair, in a cry for mercy but history is neither the dispenser of mercy nor the guarantor of certainity. 73

With reference to the activities of Harry Lesser and Willie Spearment, affirmation and hope becomes a big question mark in the modernity. The American dream of integrity and fraternity are corrosive. Honesty, responsibility assure material ruin. Race, sex and art offer warfare rather than brotherhood, love and beauty. History destroys humanity with violence as the mediator. It is Malamud’s recognition of the ways in which paradox shapes lives. To be truly free one is to be imprisoned in obligation and accountability – that is the source of his moral as well as artistic strength. Growing up is a matter of compromise and accommodation, and maturity is a matter of discovering acceptable limits, when man exceeds those acceptable limits. When man exceeds these acceptable limits that shape humanity, he fails and loses what he is. Malamud, in his works, wants every individual to inhabit the world for the smooth functioning of the society. In The Tenants, with the portrayal of Willie and Harry, he projects the world where atrocity dominates than the ideal. Mostly Jewish-American writers have portrayed the horror of Holocaust in their writings. They have not transformed the Holocaust experience creatively in order to understand it. The Holocaust is really a horrible experience for Jews and for many sensitive Christians. Even now the wounds are open. In the Jewish world, a kind of sanctity surrounds Holocaust victims and survivors. All Jewish writing deals with the Holocaust directly or indirectly. The characters like Yakov Bok, Morris and Harry are participants. The setting is Europe during the war or afterwards. The plot is the destruction of the Jews. It is said that Jewish writers are not dealing with the Holocaust artistically. In this respect, 74

Malamud is totally different from other Jewish writers of his contemporary. He brings the Holocaust experience to the notice of the world with a new spirit. Instead of projecting the horror of it he gives a new glow that suffering engenders compassion and wisdom. For Malamud’s Jews the only legitimate art form is life itself. Morris life itself is the Jewish Law. Yakov Bok’s unjust suffering gives him an insight to fight against it. Malamud protagonists are more concerned with the values they live by than the desire for materialistic prosperity by crooked ways.

The tension between art and life is one of the themes in Malamud’s recent work Dubin’s Lives. The tension between the actuality and the achievement is the subject of the short story The Last Mohican with a Holocaust background, which appears in Malamud’s first collection The Magic Barrel. The protagonists of The Last Mohican are Arthur Fidelman, a Jewish failed artist from New York and Shimon Susskind, a Holocaust survivor, living a hand-to-mouth life in Rome. Originally Susskind belongs to a Jewish world of Eastern Europe. Now he is stateless, homeless, wandering by selling odd things in Rome, Italy. Fidelman, after his landing in Rome, looks out for a porter to carry his luggage upto a restaurant nearby. Susskind assists Fidelman as he is not familiar with the ins and outs of Rome. During a friendly conversation with Susskind, Fidelmal asks him how he survives and what he eats, remaining jobless, homeless, without identity. Susskind tells that “I eat air” (PF, 15). This kind of answer of Susskind symbolically represents the desertion of Jews across the world during and after the Nazi destruction. Little agitated 75

Fidelman concentrates on his stay and his professional achievement. Fidelman is not married. He has a sister, with whom he is not close. He has no friends and not even a regular job. He is more faithful to his artistic pursuits than to people. Fidelman has dedicated his life to writing a magnum opus on Giotto, the 13th century Italian painter of Christian myth.

Susskind follows Fidelman offering his guideship over his stay and completion of the work. Fidelman runs away in order to avoid him. Though Fidelman is unwilling to meet Susskind in Rome any more, Susskind happens to meet him occasionally asking for financial help. Several dollars that Fidelman has given Susskind, at times, tempts Susskind to be in search of Fidelman in Rome. In the meantime Susskind steals Fidelman’s briefcase containing the manuscript which is more real to Fidelman than life itself. On meeting Susskind after losing the briefcase, Fidelman gives Susskind the suit of clothes, which he is repeatedly asking for, hoping to ransom the manuscript. Finally Fidelman loses both the suit and the manuscript. Fidelman goes out in search of Susskind once again with a hope of getting his manuscript back. Susskind, the Holocaust survivor of extinct race, a Jew, has taught Fidelman how to make human contact. Fidelman shuttles between the doctrines of Judaism and the actual world of Susskind in Rome. In Malamud’s terms, Jews – that is human beings – are responsible for each other. Compassion, commitment to love, truthfulness to oneself and to others are the essence of being human. Although Susskind was deprived not only of his physical 76 but also of his moral roots by the Nazis, in Germany, he survives. He is able to carry on despite his sufferings.

On the other side Fidelman, a scholar-writer, from New York, is very much bothered about his profession. He is more concerned with moral oblivion. The loss of his manuscript chapter almost destroys him. Fidelman learns the art of living, in the uncivilized human society, from Susskind, the last Mohican survivor of the extinct race of Eastern European Jews, the last survivor of man’s ultimate inhumanity to man, the Holocaust. Ironically, the art of survival is taught by an unassimilated Jew living in the capital city of Catholicism to an assimilated Jew of New York, the largest Jewish city in the world. Malamud believes that there is a connection between art and morality. His concern is not with the backdrops of horror as a result of hatred in the humanity. Further he suggests that art needs to crystallize the important, so that it is carried forward to the future in a proper way. Almost all the works of Malamud pave way to the necessity of suffering which enlightens wisdom. His approach to the Holocaust is very rational while other Jewish American writers are emotional to it. Instead of presenting the horrible reality of it, he seeks out the meaning in and out of the event.

The Lady of the Lake, a short story, appears in the collection The Magic Barrel, deals with the foolish idea of hiding one’s identity so as to escape from the problem of seclusion. Henry Levin, the protagonist, a New York born, goes to Italy, Parris etc. on a study tour. He is looking for 77 adventure and romance. Levin decides to shed his Jewish identity to be free from the shackles of discrimination. Now Levin feels free, free of his Jewishness and of the past. Levin settles down in Stresa, a beautiful town, where he meets a beautiful Italian woman, Isabella. The two fall in love with each other at the first site. Quite unexpectedly the woman asks him in a friendly way whether he is Jewish. A bit shaken, he replies that he is not Jewish. Earlier, to a question of Isabella whether Levin is an American, he replies yes immediately without hesitation. Levin feels proud of introducing himself as an American but feels bad about being a Jew for a petty matter of winning the good will of a lady. Originally he is a Jew, but he tells a lie, thinking that Isabella will reject him. To Levin’s surprise, Isabella declares that she cannot marry him because she is a Jew. When Levin says that he is an American to a question of Isabella “if he is an American” (MJM, 19), she is very much pleased for his open mindedness. When he hides his identity to being asked “Are you perhaps Jewish?” (MJM, 19). Isabella is shattered of his false projection. She disappears after revealing the truth that she is a Jew, and she cannot marry Levin, being a Gentile. Levin has lost everything in losing his Jewishness. Levin asserts Jewishness negatively and Isabella asserts it positively. Though she does not articulate the content of her Jewish attachment, she is truthful to her origin. Malamud characters justify the fact that denying one’s own identity is like denying the self. Levin loses his identity for a simple reason of fascinating a lady Isabella, but, indeed, he fails in his attempt only because of hiding his originality. Malamud, by the portrayal of his characters, highlights the point that man is, first of all, a man, identities 78 are only symbols. Therefore there is no distinction either in exposing or in denying one’s own identity.

Some questions kindle the minds of the Malamud readers and researchers. What Isabella and other Holocaust victims suffer. What the characters like Yakov, Morris and Fidelman treasure in retaining their Jewish identity, despite their hardship. What the readers be attracted in Judaism to. In what dimension Malamud highlights the principles of Judaism and Jewish experience.

Judaism does not believe in the concept of the Bibilical redemption for one’s suffering, instead, it asserts that being good itself is a reward for one’s goodness. Here Malamud carries forward the significant idea of generocity. By his statement, every man is a Jew, he does not insist upon the theological survey of Judaism but the need and necessity of mutual understanding. All men are suffering and struggling for betterment in one way or the other. Some prosper while some suffer, but for which they cannot deny ethical values. No religion preaches adversity, hatred and ill will, so one can win the heart of others only by being good to them. Where there is true love, the degree of fraternity is greater and where there is hatred, the degree of disparity is greater. This is the matter that Malamud wants to spread over the universe through his works.

His works have made the global community understand the fact that nourishing fraternity, irrespective of region, religion and colour, 79 among the people, alone will lead the future generation to a happy, constructive and contented life. Thus Malamud attempts to answer the questions with reference to his works and succeeds in universalizing the doctrines of Judaism and Jewish experience. THE MORAL VISION

Many great legends, myths and epics like The Paradise Lost focuses on the importance of following moral ethics. Adam and Eve had been living a comfortable life in a beautiful garden specially created by God for them. They were the first human beings in the creation of God and therefore they were under the direct care of God. God, with keen interest, fulfilled all their needs because they were very obedient in carrying out His commands. They never thought of anything else other than enjoying full freedom in the garden of Eden. God Himself shouldered the entire responsibility of taking care of the couple until they meeting Satan who tempted them to deviate from the ways of their creator.

As a result of this, God did not bother about protecting them from the interruption of evil forces into their lives. Thereafter Adam and Eve had to suffer a lot without the knowledge of finding out the truth. Since their deviation from the direction of God, they have become the first sinners. It is they who paved way for the suffering of the rest of the humanity from every aspect of human life. On the other side, inspite of scientific and technological advancement, human life style has now become better than before. Revolution, in all fields, has brought drastic changes in the destiny of each country in the world. Every part of the world seems to have been globally connected. Since it is a modern age, modernism has brought only comforts to a closer look but not to the hearts. Greed and hatred predominate the human minds because of their 81 immoral attitude. Mutual understanding is greatly missing among the nations of the world which ultimately leads to annihilation. Deviation from the path of morality is the root cause for the meaningless suffering of humanity in the modern era.

Malamud, in his works, insists upon the inevitability of morality both in the hour of adversity and in the hour of elation. He clearly depicts the impacts of moral failure upon the life of a man with reference to his protagonist Roy Hobbs, a baseball hero in The Natural. This is the first novel of Malamud with mythic background. He wrote it at the age of 40. Bernard Malamud, right from his boyhood days, had greater fascination towards baseball game, which made him write a novel about it. Roy Hobbs is a middle aged, unmarried baseball player from the remotest part of America, with a poor family background.

This is the only work of Malamud in which his characters, including Roy Hobbs, the protagonist, are not Jews. It concentrates more on the moral ethics rather than on Jewish perspective. The Natural is a fiction about the rise and fall of a baseball player. It was published in 1952. This novel was made into a movie in 1984. Robert Redford acted in that movie as a baseball hero. Malamud once said in an interview that he was grateful for the film because it helped him to be recognized more as an American than a Jewish writer. Ultimately the central theme of the works of Malamud is morality. The Natural also invariably lies in the realm of morality novel. Malamud believes deeply that “art tends toward 82 morality and it values life” (CLC44, 411). Morality begins with the awareness of the sanctity of one’s life, hence the lives of others.

Roy Hobbs is a good base ball player without adequate knowledge about the external world. Though Roy is not talented enough to get into the outside baseball world, he has exposed his skill in the school league. As a result of his excellent performance in the local leagues, he becomes the mouth piece of the general public. After a great deal of adversity, Roy, for the first time, is taken to Chicago match by a good-willed ex-baseball player namely Sam Simpson. Sam Simpson has so much of love and affection for Roy. All the time he treats Roy with fatherly affection. He wants to bring the immense potence of Roy on the game out to the notice of the external world, so that he can put an end to the life of an ill-willed, egoistic baseball heroes like Bump and Whammer.

During the course of their journey, they unexpectedly meet Whammer, a baseball hero and Max Mercy, a syndicated sports writer in the train. Sam is happy to see them in the running train and introduces Roy to them. When Sam is telling all about Roy to Max Mercy, Whammer does not listen to it. Whammer is also a successful baseball player closely associated with all the Stal Warts of the baseball game. He has won the hearts of baseball viewers by the way he performs in the field from time to time. During the interaction, Whammer takes no notice of Roy thinking that he is odd man out to the baseball game and whose effort to play in the Chicago match is a waste of time and money. But this act of 83

Whammer disturbs Roy greatly and makes him courageous enough to compete with his competitors. Roy is used to carry a bassoon case which contains his baseball bat, named Wonderboy wherever he goes. The baseball bat, Wonderboy, is closely associated with Roy’s victory sentiment. Moreover how it was made, is also a significant story. Once a tree was hit by lightening, Roy cut bat out of the tree and it is said that the trunk part of such trees are very strong. Roy, right from his boyhood days, has had so much of love and affection for the bat. In the train, Sam has to lie down on the floor because berth is confirmed only to Roy. Sam denies Roy’s request to sleep on berth with a notion that sound sleep will help the player to look fresh and perform in a better way in the forthcoming match. As Roy is from a poverty-stricken family, Sam has to manage all sort of expenses besides a sports grant. It is really an exciting experience to Roy that he has never travelled such a long distance ever before in his life time.

Along with Max Mercy and Whammer, a beautiful young girl namely Harriet is also accompanying. Roy falls in love with her at first sight. He follows her track in the train. Eddie, a porter, helps Roy in finding out her place in the train. Once when a white rose pinned to her dress, falls down on the floor, Roy picks it up and gives it to her expecting a positive reply. The symmetry of physical appearance of Roy and Whammer indicate the story of David and Goliath. Whammer has a gigantic figure with a fiery eye, whereas, Roy, a thin, innocent man whose presence in the baseball arena may arouse curiosity in the minds of the spectators. Roy has not been in a well organized baseball team here 84 before, despite his efficiency in it. On the way to Chicago, the train halts at a station for sometime, passengers including Max Mercy, Whammer and Harriet get down to indulge themselves in petty matters for enjoyment. Roy also follows them after getting some dollars from Sam.

In the meantime Whammer, with a pre-conceived idea of testing Roy’s ability, calls him to bat few throws in the open arena. Goliath- Whammer is greatly shocked to see the ball torn to pieces. He starts wondering at the strength of the Wonderboy. This incident is evident enough to Whammer to change his attitude towards David-Roy. Whammer, the leading hitter of the American league and the three times winner of The Most Valuable Player Award, gets confused and his dream of becoming a star is shattered. Mean while Sam is admitted in a hospital for severe stomach ache, and he advises Roy not to lose his temperament in participating in the National Base Ball Match. Knowing that it may lead him to death, Sam tells Roy to continue his journey to Chicago and to meet Clarence Mulligan, Sam’s friend, for further arrangement.

Roy gets confused not knowing what to do after the demise of Sam. However he has to participate in the match in order to make Sam’s dream of making Roy a baseball hero true. After a lot of struggle Roy reaches the destination. The arena is overflowing with baseball fans and spectators. Roy, for the first time in his life, is exposed to the ultramodern playground in one of the loveliest cities in America. As per the suggestion of Judge Banner, manager, coach and trainer, Roy accepts the offer to play for 85 knight’s team. Soon after the match begins, the arena is surprised to see a small, bony figure to bat the throw of Bump Baily, a baseball hero, worshipped by baseball world as a legendary hero. On seeing Bump in the throw, Roy initially stumbles because of lack of self confidence. But he thinks of Sam for a while because without Sam’s support, he could not have come up to this level. The moral support of Sam makes Roy feel determined to win.

To everybody’s astonishment, Roy makes the ball fling into the air. Bump, keeping his eyes wide open, follows the ball to catch but unfortunately he dashes his head against the wall. This incident makes every spectator turn his eyes to Roy with greater curiosity. Bump, lying motionless on the bed, recollects the words of Pop Fisher, the trainer, that “lightening cuts down the tallest trees too” (TN, 44). After few days the death news of Bump, with the medical report saying that he had heavy damage in the brain, greatly shocks every American baseball player. That day onwards Roy becomes the center of attraction in the baseball game. Max Mercy, the sports writer is also influenced and all sports journals start giving due importance to Roy. Indeed, the dream of Sam has come true now but he is not there to see it with his own eyes. Whenever Roy plays, he is interested to see a black haired beautiful lady sitting in a closer view in the stadium, who is supposed to be the girl of Bump, namely Memo. Roy, at times, as a fallen victim to evil forces, concentrates more on the girl than on the game. At the later stage he becomes crazy towards her, in turn, she also pretends to be his girl with an intention to pull him 86 down, so that she could make a lot of money out of match fixing. Originally she is a book-maker or a tool at the hands of bookmakers. Roy, without having insight to realize the ground reality of life, accompanies her wherever she goes. Here Malamud wants to convey the humanity a hard-headed realism that once a man becomes immoral, he is subject to punishment.

There is a sea-change in the attitude of Roy. He goes to the extent of arguing with Judge Banner, the team manager, for more fiscal enhancement. Judge Banner is an experienced person who knows all the pros and cons of the game, and above all he has a prophetic vision. He has seen many great baseball heroes doomed to death because of their immoral activity. Malamud’s concept of suffering is definitely beneficial which teaches one to choose the right, to do the right and to be morally good. Roy’s suffering from poverty, in his early days, has given him an insight to struggle for a higher cause without deviation from morality. But now as a big baseball hero, his behaviour has completely changed. Judge Banner knows well when to enhance the salary of Roy but his persistence for forty thousand dollar per league opens Judge’s inner eye to see his fall. During the interaction with Judge Banner Roy often compares his salary with that of Bump. On the other hand, Judge Banner, a man of speculation, knows the fact that it is not the ball that put an end to the life of Bump but his moral failure is the main cause for his sudden demise. Bump used to call his rivals as scapegoats. He had been behaving like a puppet at the hands of bookies. He was fond of Memo, a malicious 87 woman. All these things let Roy dig his own grave. Having understood well that Roy is at the hands of bookies (book makers), Judge warns him to “resist all evil” (TN, 85).

Further, the Judge insists upon the inevitability of gradual financial development. He lets Roy understand the mystery of life that he is able to come up to this level after hardship about thirty five years. The Judge advises Roy not to be immoral for financial prosperity because “The love of money is the root of all evil” (Ibid., 83). Unmindful of the speculative reply of the Judge, Roy leaves the hall saying that the Judge is biased in dealing with baseball players. Roy is, straight away, brought to Pot of Fire, a night club with full of half-naked girls dancing to the melodious musical note, where, he is received warmly by Gus, the head of the bookie gang. Roy’s state now is almost like a worm thrown into the burning fire of wickedness. Memo is satisfied that she is successful in making Roy involve in match fixing. Roy’s mind is now preoccupied with Memo’s posture and he could no more be a successful baseball player. His lifetime ambition of becoming a baseball hero now turns to be the well wisher of Memo. For winning her heart, Roy needs more money and for that he is ready to do anything against justice. In the meantime, the Judge, out of his concern for Roy, gives him a good counselling by narrating the life history of great personalities like Abraham Lincoln. On the other hand, he never forgets to give him the portrait of Judas Iscariot, a dishonest man, who betrayed Jesus Christ for a petty benefit. All the efforts of the Judge to save Roy from the grave danger of self-destruction, end in vain. The 88

Judge pleads Roy to think of the greatest personalities of the world. He emphasises that emphasis upon money will pervert values. One cannot begin to imagine how one’s life may alter for the worse under the impetus of wealth seeking (TN, 83).

Roy is not in a position to listen to the Judge. Anyhow, one thing is obvious that his performance in the recent matches is not upto the mark of the expectation of the baseball viewers. Once while playing in the ground, Roy sees someother woman sitting close to him with encouraging eyes. Immediately after the match, they become friends. This girl, Iris Lemon is more concerned with Roy’s sporting spirit than anything else. To the eyes of Roy she looks little bulky but beautiful. Iris Lemon is absolutely honest and faithful to Roy. She tells Roy that she does not want to see great heroes like him fail. Once when Roy and Iris indulge themselves in sharing their horrible past with each other on the bank of a desolated lake, both of them are moved to tears. Having been greatly moved with the amount of Roy’s suffering in the past, Iris says that only through suffering human beings learn to do the right things. Suffering engenders insight and involvement in humanity and without suffering self realization will not take place in a man. Malamud’s characters suffer to the core and their suffering leads them to purify themselves from all evils. Roy’s suffering due to poverty teaches him to struggle to overcome it by honest ways. His interest towards the game makes Sam help him to emerge as a popular baseball player. Iris Lemon remarks that “suffering teaches us to want the 89 right things and experience makes good people better through their suffering” (TN, 136). All men are suffering in the world, only the nature of suffering differs from person to person. So people get refined through their suffering. After adversity they are able to identify the difference between good and evil. Suffering enriches one’s knowledge to find out the truth.

Malamud, by the portrayal of his protagonists, renders desires in two separate modes, spiritual and physical. In Malamud’s moral codes, either mode of desire has value to the extent that it results in personal commitment, an assumption of moral responsibility for the other. To begin with, it requires personal integrity. An individual must be honest about himself, never attempting to deceive the other. On these grounds, Levin, the protagonist of The Lady of the Lake lies to the girl with a hope of winning her but finally he loses her. This is definitely a moral failure. Malamud offers various forms of moral stance. They are romantic yearning, physical desire and moral commitment. The degree of morality will increase if the desire decreases. Thus Levin’s commitment to marry Pauline Gilley and adopt her children in A New Life seems admirable when his passion for her dies down.

At the sometime Malamud has asserted that a moral commitment without desire results in an incomplete life. This is evident in his fictions, particularly in The Assistant. On the other side, Malamud has been angry with those who simply seek to gratify physical desire without moral 90 commitment. The author is hard on the protagonists whose attempts to gratify lust are violations of their own integrity, dignity and self-respect. In The Natural, the excessive desire for lust is the root cause for the fall of the greatest baseball hero. Roy’s weakness has been rightly utilized by the conspirators with the help of Memo, to bring him down from the status of legendary hero. Certainly it is a moral failure, Levin and Roy are making fools of themselves. By contrast, in Malamud’s fiction, romantic yearning leads to moral commitment. The aging refugee in The First Seven Years loves the beautiful young daughter of his employer, which is, of course, a comic combination but in reality romance assets responsibility and tenderness. Malamud, at once, reinforces in his works that love is redemptive only if it is based on principled acceptance of commitments.

Even when Roy is with Iris Lemon, his mind is looking for Memo who is secretly planning to pull him down from the status of top baseball player only for money. Iris Lemon’s love for Roy does not seem to be a matter of greater importance to him, rather, he feels proud of being Memo’s lover. Having known that Roy is almost mad after Memo, the Judge warns him to be away from her. It is well known to the Judge that Memo is neither Bump’s girl nor Roy’s girl, she is the girl of every bookie in the field of baseball game. One fine morning the Judge calls Roy and tells him to be aware of the impending fall in the near future to be deliberately imposed upon him. Roy does not seem to have taken the words of the Judge into consideration, instead, he is angry with the Judge thinking that he is not generous in fixing salary for the players 91 accordingly. Along with other players he also has to practise for the next days match. In all sports journals Roy’s portrait has been printed in the front page. Max Mercy, the sports columnist also has made opinions positively about Roy, with a hope that he will prove to be a leading hitter. But Roy is attending a special party organized by Memo, the previous night. Roy is more concerned with sharing Memo’s bedroom that night after dinner at the closing of the party than his performance to win the match the next day. Roy does not remember his past. His past life is very horrible and his ambition to become a popular baseball player is shattered. Roy forgets what was said by Irish Lemon when he met her last time that “We have two lives, Roy, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that, suffering is what brings us toward happiness” (TN, 135). At the dinner party Roy is encouraged by Memo to take much food so that he can meet out her demands in the chamber. After the dispersal of other players, Roy remains there to eat as much as possible as suggested by Memo for winning her goodwill. To save a man from the clutches of a sycorax, the Judge tells Roy not to be awake till late night because it will affect the next days performance in the field.

At one stage, Roy starts screaming because of unbearable stomach ache. He is immediately taken to the nearby hospital. The doctor, who examined Roy, says that his internal parts of stomach has got heavily damaged. It is not easy for him to come back to normalcy. Moreover he cannot play baseball match for a certain period. On request, the doctor 92 allows Roy simply to act as if he plays in the next day match. When Roy enters the baseball ground with his Wonderboy, he is given a warm welcome with a big round of applause by the spectators in the collosium without knowing the fact that he is going to be a laughing stock in the baseball world. To everybody’s surprise, Roy looks sad with bearded face and he becomes a figure of failure. The players and fans who saw him in the hospital predict that he will die soon. It hurts him very much. With a heavy heart, he breaks his Wonderboy into two pieces and bury them in the earth wishing to grow as a tree in future. After having lost everything, he, straight away, goes to the Judge’s chamber. He is shocked to see the Judge, Gus and Memo sitting together counting the money they gained by Roy’s fall in the game.

Roy beats them violently for their wickedness over the sacred national game of America. He spits at the face of Memo calling her a whore. On the way down to the railway station he weeps uncontrollably thinking of his fate. At the end he realizes that his moral failure is the root cause for his fall and suffering. He, further, says: “I never did learn anything out of my past life; now I have to suffer again” (TN, 206). Malamud’s concept of suffering is not futile. It teaches humanity to do good, to be honest and to desire right things. In the running train, the newspaper selling boy thrusts a newspaper at the hands of Roy. The headline with the portrait of Roy indicates his pitiable condition. He receives a bullet in his gut and a naked lady dances around him. There is also a statement of the baseball commissioner that if this alleged report is 93 true, this will be the last of Roy in organized baseball and all his records will be destroyed. A philosophical speculation makes Roy recollect what he told Iris Lemon once when he met her: “When he was down, he was down alone” (TN, 129).

According to Malamud, suffering is a sign of love. His protagonists suffer greatly but for which they do not give up their moral ethics because it has taught them both good and bad. Malamud, in his works, highlights the concept of Jewishness with reference to his father’s statement that to be a Jew what all one needs is a good heart, although his characters in The Natural are not Jewish. Roy’s quest to be a baseball hero and his pursuit of Memo become a meaningless struggle for an unattainable ecstasy.

In The Tenants Malamud mocks at Harry Lesser and Willie Spearmint, members of ethnic subgroups for their inability to co-exist in the American social setup. Based on these two characters, Malamud does not intend to appreciate Judaism or criticise other religions, rather, he brings out the irrational urges embedded in the subconscious minds of modern men. When man goes to the extent of discriminating identical authenticity, there will be no man at all. In Malamud’s view, man is a social animal with reasoning power, and he should be able to live together with others without damaging the communal harmony. Nobody can be responsible for his religious or ethnic identity because it is not his choice, it is the choice of nature. So Malamud advises modern men to treat the other in a spirit of equality without considering the identity he bears. To 94

Malamud, man must be judged charitably on the basis of his moral conduct.

Harry and Willie are firm on their preconceived picture about each other. Forgetting the fact that they are basically human beings created on earth to live their lives to the full, they cut each other brutally. They feel bad about their animalistic behaviour only at the end. The novel ends with the stage bare, and only the voice of Levinspiel crying for mercy echoes in the tenement. Malamud believes that love, compassion and mutual understanding are the constructive abstract components which alone can bring peace to humanity.

Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant is a good work which has gained wide popularity for its stern morality in the American literary circle. Malamud believes that art should teach morality to humanity. In addition to various parameters incorporated in a literary work, he gives due weightage to moral ethics in his works. The Assistant is an extraordinary work which highlights the moral aspects of human life in the society. Through this, Malamud teaches humanity a lesson that they should not become immoral for materialistic prosperity, despite their suffering. His characters in The Assistant like Morris Bober and Frank Alphine are the embodiments of morality. Prosperity, by dishonest ways, does not determine the quality of a person and it is in no way connected to humanistic considerations for the existence of human race on earth.

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Disgusted with the life style of Tsarist Russia Morris Bober, a Jew, flees to America hoping for a better future. In Brooklyn in the midst of few Jewish quarters he feels like free-bird to smell the sweetness of freedom. Along with his wife Ida and daughter Helen he settles down there in a small upstair tenement. After discussion with his wife he decides to start a small grocery store in a room adjoint below the tenement. Morris prefers to be a druggist but he yields to the wish of his wife who is more concerned with her husband than anything else in the world. The couple, at times, worry over the sudden demise of their son, Ephraim in his young age. The grocery store is the only source of income for the family. So Morris has to work hard to attract more customers. Morris gets up early morning everyday to open the store so that he can sell three cent roll to a polish lady who is the first regular customer. Though Morris is a man of sixty years old, he does not stop labouring long hours in the store. He is fond of the store. His family and the store are everything to him. Indeed Malamud’s protagonists are hard working guys who strive for a better life than what they have at present. His characters are proletarians. He has sympathy towards the weaker sections of the society. On the other hand, The Assistant is said to be an autobiographical novel of Malamud. It depicts the poverty-stricken life style of the author himself. His father is a poor grocer and therefore Malamud is naturally exposed to the horror of poverty in American urban setting. However he concentrates more on the moral and spiritual sides of humanity than mundane matters in his works.

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Morris works long hours in the store without bothering about his physical conditions. Hard work will never demean the capacity of a person at any stage. His Jewish neighbours like Julius Karp and Sam pearl are richer than Morris. Julius Karp is a liquor store owner who knows the art of making money in the ultra modern pragmatic world. Pearl is also running a candy shop at the corner of the Bober’s lane. Morris does not feel comfortable with his Jewish neighbours because they are indifferent to this different man. They often ridicule at the grocer for his economic anxieties.

In spite of his suffering, Morris is not jealous of his business competitors. Above all he does not want to follow the crooked ways to become financially better. On many occasions he runs behind the customers to return the balance amount of dough to them. He laboured long hours, was the soul of honesty – he could not escape his honesty, it was bedrock; to cheat others would cause an explosion in him (TA, 224). He never even think of cheating others but he is being cheated by others. Even the upstair tenants like Nike Fuso, a mechanic, buys things from other grocery stores and brings them home stealthily. Morris is shattered at the indifferent behaviour of his neighbour but for which he does not treat them badly when they approach him for purchase on loan.

Even when new stores are opened nearby, Morris does not feel bad about it, instead, he is worried that it may put an end to the already failing 97 store. Whenever his fellow Jews tell him the tricks to improve his business, Morris turns his ear deaf. Sometimes when Ida shouts at Morris on seeing him running after a customer to hand over his possessions in the falling snow, he replies that “when a man is honest, he don’t worry when he sleeps” (TA, 287). Morris Bober is honest among the dishonest neighbours. He is like the sun shines on the good as bright as on the evil. Of course, Morris is in need of more money to send Helen to college for higher education but his conscience does not permit him to involve in immoral activities for better earnings. He shuttles between his meagre income that is not enough even to manage the family expenses and his dream of sending his daughter, Helen to College which requires extra money. On the other side, Morris knows well how his fellow Jews are leading a luxurious life. Although he loses health, wealth and child, he remains faithful to his sense of self. While others insist upon going along the way of the world, Morris remains reluctant to adjust with the demoralized human society.

One fine morning, a young Italian drifter namely Frank Alphine, a Gentile, is caught red-handed by Morris while stealing in the store. After hearing the boy’s miserable past, Morris comes to know that he has stolen only milk can and bread for his hungry stomach. Out of pity he takes the boy in as his assistant. But he continues to steal from the poor grocery store whenever possible. Having known that Frank intrudes in Morris’s private and business affairs, he refuses to punish him severely. He deals fairly with every customers. Once when Morris finds Frank stealing from 98 the store, he advises him not to do so thereafter. And he does not take it to the knowledge of Ida, thinking that she may desert the poor boy. Ward Minogue, a thief, with the assistance of Frank enters the store to steal, at once, they get frightened to see Morris there. To escape from the clutches of the old man Ward Minogue attacks him on the forehead. Inspite of Frank’s involvement in the robbery, Morris has no heart to leave him. In turn, Frank also feels guilty of his crime and he learns to earn the good will of Morris in due course. Morris business is already failing and he has to find out possible steps to restore it. In fact, his position is pitiable, whereas, he takes pity on others like Breitbart, the bulb peddlar and Almarcus, a poor paper salesman, suffering from cancer. Actually, as per the doctor’s advice, Almarcus has to take complete rest for six months.

But it is not possible for him because without his support, his family will doom to death, so he decides to continue his job of selling papers till the last spark of his life. Breitbart, the bulb peddlar, once, had been a successful businessman, but only because of his relatives’ mismanagement, he happened to incur heavy loss. As soon as Morris sees Almarcus and Breitbart coming at a closer distance, he comes out of the store with a cup of hot coffee and a loaf of bread to receive them with a smiling face. At once the two poor sales men forget their misery and feel refreshed at the heart-felt welcome of this poor grocer. Morris is poor but rich at heart. To be a good man what all one needs is a good heart.

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With a preconceived idea that a Gentile cannot be friendly with Jews, Ida and Helen advise Morris not to let Frank stay in the store. While others consider Frank as a thief, a Gentile and a Jew-hater, Morris looks at him with a different perspective. Morris is above all religious identities and for him, a man is a man, other identities are only symbols like ornaments on a woman. In his ideology men should love one another and be compassionate towards one another. Suffering, in any form, is an unavoidable actuality of human life, for which one should not hurt others. Having been guilty of his crime, Frank swears to admit it to Morris after sometime. During leisure time Frank contemplates that the “Jew well enough to feel sure of his mercy” (TA, 295). The inmates of the Bober’s lane say that Morris does not cheat others, yet, he trusts cheaters which does not mean that he is foolish enough to be cheated. He perceives things going around him in a better way than others in the gutters. He orders paper goods from Almarcus, the paper salesman, with an intention that it will be a sort of help to him, although it is not affordable to him. Despite his suffering, Morris takes pity on the fellow sufferers and helps them to the optimum level.

Helen is working in a garment company for an additional income for the smooth functioning of the family. Right from the beginning she hates Frank because he is an outsider, a Gentile and a Jew-hater. She often dreams of being at the hands of Nat Pearl, a Jewish Law student. As Nat Pearl is very well acquainted with Helen since her childhood days she feels comfortable in his company. By contrast, Frank becomes all to 100

Helen after Morris falls ill. When Morris has been at bed rest for about a month, Frank takes in charge of the store and works hard for the existence of the poverty-stricken family. Frank sheds tears on seeing Morris lying on bed motionless on account of his ailment. He swears to run the store profitably with all his effort, besides, he plans to work in a night coffee pot to earn more money for sending Helen to college for higher education. Frank thinks that Morris’s absence in the store in no way should shatter the very existence of the family as well as his dream of sending his daughter to college. On suspicion, once, when Morris shouts at Frank angrily, Frank makes it clear to him saying that “I am now a changed man” (TA, 393). Morris Bober’s honesty has gradually transformed Frank into a refined human being.

According to Judaism Saturday is a day of worship. Jews, including Karps and Louis close their shops on every Saturday and visit the synagogue wearing a black hat for religious worship. On the contrary, Morris, a Jew, does not follow any of the above said religious practices. Instead, he keeps the store open on Saturdays, and does not go to the synagogue for worship.

Unmindful of the kosher, the Jewish dietary Law, he tastes ham whenever his starving stomach asks for it. In terms of the Torah, the Jewish Law, everything is upside down with regard to Morris. Frank is obviously astonished at the abnormal behaviour of Morris. Having been greatly confused of Morris deviation from the ways of his fellow Jews and 101 his suffering to sustain honesty, Frank asks him who a Jew is and what a Jew believes in. Morris answers that his father used to say to him that “to be a Jew all you need is a good heart” (TA, 324). The most important thing to a Jew is the Torah. This is the Law – a Jew must believe in the Law. Malamud here does not speak either in appreciation of Judaism or in analysis of the doctrines of other religions. Further he proclaims that good heart makes a Jew. Malamud projects Morris, the protagonist of The Assistant as a morally good person whose ideology in terms of Judaism, deals with spirituality. Morris is kind and honest while his fellow Jews are unkind and dishonest. It is the way of the world and what matters is not what a religion preaches but how a person perceives it.

Morris explains the meaning of what a Jew believes in, in accordance to the Jewish Law, the Torah, Jews are the chosen people to suffer and it is the very fate of them. Once a Jew is born in this world, it ensures the fact that he is born to suffer.

Even after centuries Jews are suffering from the problem of seclusion across the world. Morris says that men are not animals to hurt others. Their life may be hard enough but that should not badly reflect on others. Unless there is mutual understanding among the people of different factions of the society, it will pave way for hatred, ultimately lead to annihilation. At this juncture, Bernard Malamud has beautifully portrayed the horror of Vietnam, the backdrops of Depression and the Nazi destruction in his works. He emphasizes the fact that the root cause, 102 for all such inhuman elements, is lack of love, compassion and morality in the modern world. He further, insists upon the need and necessity for following the moral ethics and to avoid such horrible incidents not to take place once again at least in future. When man becomes dishonest he becomes a fallen victim to evil forces. Suffering and morality may seem to have been two different aspects, but in reality they are like two inseparable sides of the same coin. When man suffers he learns to choose the right things in his life. On account of being a Jew by virtue of birth one cannot call himself a Jew proudly.

In the words of Malamud “all men are Jews” (CA, 724) either Jews or Gentiles. To be a Jew one should be good to others. This is strictly followed by Malamud’s protagonists in his works. Morris is, of course, a poor sufferer, yet his suffering does no harm to others. On the other hand Karps and Pearls are narrow minded Jews who know the art of survival without bothering about the consequences. Whatever business they start, profit is the only criterion that they analyse and they ignore to look into the impacts of it on others. On seeing a new store getting ready to be opened soon nearby, Morris feels “like a rock dropped on his skull” (TA, 355). He is worried that the extravagant shops may put an end to the already failing poor grocery store. Once during a friendly conversation with Morris, Louis tells him that in his newly built row of rooms, he does not have any idea of starting a grocery store. Whereas Morris knows well that these guys are liars and they never mind the very existence of their poor competitors. He, further, makes sure that Louis’s every good fortune 103 spattered others with misfortune. Karps promises Morris that he will be helpful in selling the store and the house for a higher amount than the expectation of the couple. As he assures, he brings a painter who has rich experience in grocery business. The stranger after having carefully examined the store, tells Karp that he is not interested in the dealings. Morris is abruptly upset by the unexpected reply of the auctioneer because he happens to dream a dream from his early days.

At this point Karp pacifies the poor grocer not to lose his heart in spite of the obstacle. He tells them that he himself will buy the store unless anyone comes forward to the sale deal. He asks them to co-operate with his auditor to be sent for fixing the price. With a little hope, Ida and Morris are waiting patiently for few more days for the grocery store sale deal. In the meantime Ward Minogue, a drunkard enters the liquor store stealthily from the backyard to quench his thirst, at once, the store catches fire at the dismantling of the bottles. Unable to put out the fire, Ward Minogue becomes a prey to the flames of fire. On emergency call, Fire Engineers, after putting out the fire, recovers the charred body of Ward Minogue. At the sight of the burnt remains of the liquor store down to earth, the inhabitants of the Bober’s lane grieves over the heavy loss incurred to Karp. But, indeed, the close associates like Morris Bober knows well that it cannot bring down the economy of Karp. Karp is clever enough to compensate the loss by all possible means. Morris Bober’s plan of selling the store for a reasonable price, is shattered and he fears that the fire accident may be a lame excuse for Karp for cancelling the deal. 104

Anyhow Morris does not want to share his inference with his wife and daughter, knowing that it will disturb them greatly.

One fine morning when Morris is shovelling the snow piled in front of the store without safety measures to pave way for the way passers, Ida warns him not to do so. As a result of over work in the falling snow, Morris suffers from pneumonia. The doctor who examined him, advises him to take complete rest for one month. Known that Morris is ill, Frank becomes anxious and he decides to run the store all alone for the smooth functioning of the family which gave him food and shelter. Frank becomes all to the family after Morris’s illness. To meet out the medical bill and the grocer’s dream of sending his daughter to college, Frank has to make extra money other than the regular income from the store. Frank gets busy in finding out the possible ways to earn more and he finally comes to a conclusion that he has to work round the clock, besides being a grocer. As he wished he gets a job in the night cafeteria. After closing the grocery store by eleven O’clock at night, he rushes up to the cafeteria where he has to work till 6 O’clock in the morning. Though Morris is at bed rest in the upstair of the tenement, he comes to know the sufferings of Frank for fulfilling the needs of the family. He asks Ida about sending Frank out of the store ironically. Morris is, perhaps, not able to come down to the store by narrow steps from the up stair but he understands the feelings of Frank towards the family. His attitude towards life has completely changed.

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At the beginning when others, including his wife and daughter, hated Frank, Morris treated him with love and affection. He does not look at his identity. Morris Bober is above all such mundane matters seriously considered by the modern man. In the ideology of Morris, Frank is a man suffering for want of food and shelter.

Malamud’s protagonists are good humanitarians who take nothing into account other than the moralistic ideals of human life. They are more concerned with values than anything else till the last spark of their lives. Frank is a Gentile, Italian drifter, a Jew-hater and a thief for others, but to the eyes of Morris he is a human being and a sufferer. According to Malamud, man should respect the fellow humans, despite the differences. In the creation of God, no child is born with any identity or symbol, later these things are deliberately imposed upon it without its willingness. In due course it is made permanent and the individual is convinced to accept it as an unavoidable actuality of human existence on earth. Frank feels guilty for having stolen things from the poor grocery store. On his gradual recovery from his illness Morris is surprised to see Karp in his house, and his surprise visit arouses curiosity in the minds of the three of them. Morris, Ida and Helen are looking at Karp’s face with greater fascination expecting a positive reply from him regarding the grocery store sale deal.

By contrast, Karp breaks his silence with few words which indirectly indicates his unwillingness to proceed with the sale deal, Morris feels as if his blood freezes on hearing this. Morris is in great distress not 106 knowing what to do atleast for the hand to mouth existence of the family. Bringing out his courage like a young boy, he goes out of his house in search of a job, neglecting the doctor’s advice that sixty is not sixteen. He meets some of his friends and asks for their help in getting a job. None of them comes forward to help Morris. He returns home with frustration thinking of his cruel fate. Morris is tempted to burndown the store for the fire insurance claim with which he can lead his life in a better way. While others usually do the same thing in the hour of hardship, Morris’s conscience does not permit him to do so, despite his suffering. On returning home that day evening he falls ill and he is admitted in the hospital nearby. The doctor reports that Morris dies of pneumonia. It is really a great loss to the family. Ida and Helen cannot even imagine a life without Morris. Above financial requirement, Morris is all to them. They feel as if their lives have come to an end.

In the cemetery after the funeral prayers in Hebrew language, the Rabbi with a heavy heart speaks to the mourners about Morris. The Rabbi says that there are many ways to be a Jew. Morris Bober lived and worked in the midst of Gentiles and sold them pig meat, and he had not been inside a synagogue at least once in twenty years, but he was a true Jew because he lived in the Jewish experience with the Jewish heart. He was true to the spirit of his life. “He followed the Law which God gave to Moses on Sinai” (TA, 423). He suffered greatly, he endured but with hope. Morris did not cheat anybody, yet, he trusted cheaters. He was naturally honest. 107

And he did not believe that others come by their dishonesty. Frank stands quietly observing the activities of the people around the coffin. As the coffin is covered with loose mud around the grave, Helen tosses in a rose. Frank leans forward to see where it falls. He loses his balance and lands his feet on the coffin. Ida and Helen are brought home after the burial ceremony. They weep uncontrollably thinking of their fate. They are in great confusion not knowing what to do. At this stage Frank decides to run the store for making the dream of Morris true. Further, he wants to make sure that the absence of Morris should, in no way, affect the existence of the family. After Passover, Frank becomes a Jew. Ida and Helen cannot easily understand what change has taken place in the assistant. It is not a religious conversion, rather, it is a moral, spiritual conversion. Morris Bober’s life style has transformed a drifter into a refined human being.

The concept of suffering in The Assistant is akin to that of The Natural. But, unlike his first novel, Malamud supports the concept in The Assistant not with an ancient mythic ritual but with Talmudic ethics. At one point Morris tells Frank that the Jewish Law is the basis of his behaviour – not the word but the Law. ‘Nobody’, he says “will tell me that I am not Jewish because I put in my mouth Once in a while, when my tongue is dry, a piece ham (TA, 325). The nature of that Law consists of moral principles. This means to do what is right, to be honest, to be good. Human beings are not animals. 108

This is why they need the Law. This is what a Jew believes in. Later at Morris’s burial, the Rabbi resounds the grocer’s stern morality and dignifies it with oratory. Morris is neither exalted of his own way of conduct nor at the conversion of Frank, what deciphers the characters’ success is their moral striving. Indeed if God exists anywhere in The Assistant, He is in Morris Bober’s soul. That is why Frank’s conversion is clearly a humanistic rather than a religious mystery. Critics may view Frank’s conversion as a symbolic representation of the domination of Jewish tradition. But in reality, Malamud makes the reader understand that Morris’s saintliness is above religious doctrines. Morris sees an inner change in Frank. Malamud also strongly propels that adherence to religious practices cannot be connected with spirituality. To be a human being one does not need to have religious identities. Though Morris dies in the spring, he reappears in the form of Frank.

The Fixer is one of the finest works of Malamud which won Rosenthal Award. Malamud has said that he gets inspiration to write this work from the story his father used to tell him of Mendel Beiliss case during the Tsarist Russia. Although Malamud had not been in Russia, he could visualize the horrible face of social injustice there. At the outset, he concentrates more on the moral aspects of human life than other areas. Invariably all his works lie in the realm of moral ethics. He projects how man has to withstand morality even in the hour of deprivation with reference to his protagonist Yakov Bok in The Fixer. Among the Jewish American writers Bernard Malamud is highly regarded for his moralistic 109 approach towards humanity. He has once said in an interview that “If you don’t respect man you cannot respect my work” (CLC44, 419). The same thing is reinforced in The Fixer also.

Having been exhausted with the monotonous, poverty-stricken life style in the Russian village, Yakov Bok, a married man of thirty years old, leaves for Kiev, a Rusian territory forbidden to Jews, hoping for a better future. On the way to Kiev by boat Yakov drops his prayer things down into the river, Dnieper, to hide his Jewish identity as suggested by his father-in-Law, Shmuel. When Yakov enters the territory, he sees a man namely Nikolai Maximonovitch, fully drunk, falling in the snow near a cemetery and rescues him from the grave danger of death. But Yakov is greatly surprised to see a button with two-headed eagle which is the symbol of Black Hundreds, an anti-Semitic organization in the Tsarist Russia. As a token of gratitude for having saved his life, Nikolai offers Yakov a job of supervisor in his brick factory located within the territory.

Yakov works in the factory with utmost sincerity. He is strict in dealing with the unfair workers who often steal bricks from the factory. Yakov’s honesty is felt as a stumbling block for the dishonest workers who have been enjoying the pleasure of stealing bricks from the factory for long years. One day a twelve year old boy, namely Zeniva Golov, is found lying stabbed to death in a cave near the brick factory. The death news spreads like forest fire across the country. Gentile dominated Tsarist Russian society without evidence confirms that it is a ritual murder of a 110

Jew for religious purpose. In fact there is no connection between the murder and Yakov Bok, but he is arrested on charge of a ritual murder. The only crime that Yakov committed is that he has not introduced himself as a Jew to anyone in the Jew-prohibited Russian territory Kiev. Yakov during his tenure in the brick factory as a supervisor has chased a group of boys out of the factory several times. Zeniva Golov is also one of them. This incident is cooked up as a supporting evidence by the police for the murder case.

The evil-minded brick factory workers make use of the opportunity to avenge Yakov for his loyalty over his boss. On a false complaint of having murdered a boy Yakov is arrested and put in jail. Even before Yakov begins his journey to Kiev, Shmul, his father-in-law, advised him to be away from some books and Jewish identity. In response to the above statement Yakov says that “there are no wrong books. What’s wrong is the fear of them” (TF, 13). Yakov argues with Shmuel justifying his view that books are nothing but treasure house of knowledge which cannot be linked with religion. Religion does not teach hatred, instead, it reinforces the value of unity in diversity. Therefore man is, first of all, a man other identities are only symbols which do not receive due recognition. Yakov moves out of the village with a hope that change of place will change the fate of his life. To the contrary, he is put in prison and undergoes unbearable torture. He has never even imagined of this kind of cruel fate imbedded upon him.

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In the prison Yakov is put in a solitary cell. He is forced to be in a filthy environment. Even food is served separately. He is treated like an animal. His legs are chained to the wall. He undergoes inhuman treatment there in the prison. When he is asked if he is a Jew, he readily confesses, otherwise, he is innocent. Since the Crucifixion, Jews are looked down everywhere in the world. They are in a position to face the problem of seclusion for a single man’s betrayal. Whenever Yakov asks other prisoners about their identity, they reply that they are Christians. But to Yakov they look like Jews. In the Tsarist Russia people are emotionally attached in terms of religion and so they react immediately when anything happens anywhere in the country. Mistaken identity is the root cause for the meaningless suffering of an innocent soul in the solitary confinement. Yakov is suffering for what he has not done. It is really a social injustice imposed upon Yakov for his Jewish identity. Immediately after the incident the Kiev government, without analyzing the ground reality, comes to a conclusion that it is a merciless act of a Jew for Christian- blood for ritual ceremony. As it is a sensitive issue, everywhere in Russia people get ready for a pogrom. The murder case of Zeniva Golov has provoked Gentiles against the Jews in Russia.

At the beginning Yakov thinks that the accusation is irrelevant and so he will be relieved soon, but later he understands that “he was the accidental choice for the sacrifice” (TF, 155). Further, he realizes that this accusation is a conspiracy woven against a Jew by the Russian government. Infact, the involvement is impersonal, but the suffering is 112 personal, painful and possibly endless. The prison authorities advise Yakov to confess the crime to be freed from the fatal punishment. Bibikov, the Investigating Magistrate also pleads Yakov to confess the crime. He is much worried to see the prevalent conditions regarding this case. He is also pushed to the extent of persuading Yakov to admit than to oppose because justice is bankrupt in the Gentile dominated Russian Society. Yakov also broods over his misery, sorrow and suffering. To be a Jew, is not his choice, it is the choice of nature and he cannot be responsible for his Jewish identity in this cross-cultural society. It is irrational to call all Jews by filthy names such as Christ killer, blood sucker and murdering Jew for a single man’s sin. Yakov knows that if he is not a Jew, there will be no crime. So the indictment is more concerned with religious identity than actuality. Yakov, the innocent fixer cannot understand the meaning of what is wrong in being a Jew in this world. He cannot tolerate the inhuman treatment he is forced to undergo in the prison.

When he is given a copy of The old Testament he asks Kogin, the jail guard how anyone can love Christ and keep an innocent man suffering in prison. Yakov expresses his grievance to Bibikov, the Investigating Magistrate over his meaningless suffering for the crime he is not associated with. Malamud protagonists are proletarians who do not yield to evil forces, despite their hardship because they are exemplified as true moral epitomes who are above all kinds of vices. Malamud protagonists are the most innocent people who are cheated, tortured and made to suffer 113 but they never become tainted till the last spark of their lives. Their honesty is often tested with adversity, it gives way for them to show their inner strength. Morris, the protagonist of The Assistant, in spite of his poverty, does not become corrupt and he hopes to make his life better only by means of good ways. Ultimately his honesty results in changing a drifter into a refined human being. This is more of a moral and spiritual conversion than religious conversion. Malamud believes in that values are ever lasting and never changing where as economic prosperity is not static and it cannot, in any way, predetermine the quality of a person.

On several occasions, Yakov recollects the philosophical speculations of Spinoza, a Dutch philosopher, over the suffering of Jews across the world, but he finds it difficult to understand. He is not up to the level of analyzing the intellectual ideology of Jewish suffering. Spinoza cold reason it out since history begins with Jews with their Holocaust. According to theological survey God has chosen the Hebrews to preserve Him. God offers the covenant and Israel accepts. In the long rum they start worshipping false gods which ultimately results in endless suffering and repentance. Having betrayed the covenant with God, Jews have to pay war, destruction, death, exile etc. “Suffering, they say, awakens repentance” (TF, 240). Suffering makes Jews repent for their deviation from the ways of God. By contrast, Spinoza’s views about God is slightly different. He has the idea of God as discovered in all of Nature, whereas this poor sufferer can neither intellectualise nor philosophise the idea of God. 114

In the words of Malamud, Jews are thrown into the burning fire of injustice under the common umbrella of seclusion. They suffer greatly because of their identity. Yakov is suffering in the solitary confinement in the Tsarist Russia, not for the crime he is accused of, but for his Jewish identity. Once during his stay in the brick factory, he rescues a Hassid from a mob of boys who are throwing stones at him. The Hassid looks tired and he needs shelter to take rest. Since it is Passover, Yakov offers him matzos and gives him some books to read. This incident is viewed seriously as supporting evidence in order to strengthen the crime of murder upon the innocent man staying in Kiev only for a better survival.

In the meantime, Yakov receives a letter from Marfa Golov, the mother of Zeniva Golov requesting him to confess the crime as the government and herself are not able to collect any evidence against him over the murder case. After reading the letter, Yakov asks the Deputy Warden for permission to write a reply to her. The Deputy warden says that Yakov can do so only after admitting the murder. Further Yakov keeps the letter aside for handing it over to Bibikov, the Investigating Magistrate. After few minutes Yakov finds it missing. Above all, Yakov has a little hope that The Russian Jewish Forum will take necessary steps to rescue him from the indictment. Unable to collect any evidence to strengthen the accusation against Yakov, Marfa Golov, the mother of the slain, Grubeshov, the Prosecuting Attorney and the police try to convince him to confess the crime. Though Yakov is poor, his honesty cannot be shattered by any external forces. To greater surprise Bibikov, the 115

Investigating Magistrate, also tries to persuade Yakov to admit the crime so that the Russian court, out of mercy, may lessen the punishment.

One day Shmuel, Yakov’s father-in-law meets him in the prison and weeps uncontrollably thinking about the sorry state of affairs of the innocent man. Shmuel advises Yakov to plead Nicolas II, the Tsar king for mercy. Furthermore, Shmuel asks Yakov not to give up his faith on God, without God’s favour Jews would have been wiped out from history. Therefore Shmuel says that God may test the innocent but He will save the sufferer finally. Yakov replies that he has talked to Him several times explaining the conditions of his life, his struggles, misfortunes etc. But whatever Yakov says, God remains silent. Yakov strengthens his argument with his father-in-law over the existence of God saying that how a sufferer can believe in God when He does not listen to his problems. Shmuel explains that God’s blessings descend when prayers go upto Him. God does not love a proud man because “a proud man is deaf and blind” (TF, 257) and he cannot hear and see Him. God comes down to help those who believe in Him. Yakov retorts that he asks for everything and he gets nothing from God. From the biological point of view, nature invented itself and also man. Spinoza rationalizes that whatever is there, is there to begin with. It sounds fantastic but it is true. And when it comes down to basic facts, either, God is man’s invention and He cannot do anything about it, or He is a force in Nature but not in history. A force is not a father.

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When a boy is found stabbed to death, out of three million Jews in Russia, the Russian police arrests Yakov Bok, indeed, he has no connection with the crime. He is parentless and his barren wife runs off with another guy. At this juncture God should have shown mercy on him and He should have rescued him from the punishment. So Yakov says that he is not proud and he has nothing to be proud of and this is why there is no use of having faith on God. Shmuel makes Yakov understand that God’s ways are mysterious, yet, He is the creator and total surrender to His will, like Job in the old Testament, is the way of the world. After Shmuel leaves, Grubeshov, the Prosecuting Attorney meets Yakov in his cell. Yakov begs at him to arrange for the trial as early as possible so that his suffering will come to an end. On hearing this Kogin, the jail guard slams the door to the fixer’s feet.

Few weeks after the Prosecuting Attorney’s visit, Julius Ostrovsky, Kiev Bar Council Member, Yakov’s lawyer, meets him in his cell and tells him not to lose his heart because he, with his supporters, finds the ways and means to free him from the indictment. He reveals the bad news of Shmuel’s death, referring a letter that he received from Raisl, Yakov’s wife. Yakov is deeply regretted with the sudden demise of his affectionate only companion. Ostrovsky lets Yakov know that the publisher of Poslednie Novosti, a Russian weekly journal, was fined and the press was shut down for having reviewed the case. On the whole, the lawyer is proud to say that he has collected an affidavit from Sofya Shiskovsky, Marfa Golov’s neighbour who once saw a corpse with wounds lying in the 117 bath tub in the toilet of Marfa’s house. Marfa Golov, who had gone upstairs to get a letter to prove a lie, ran after Sofya and threatened to murder the whole family if they breathed a word to anybody. On account of the threat, Sofya is unwilling to be the eye witness for the boy’s murder case. Luckily he could get atleast a short affidavit. He is trying to bring both Marfa and Sofya into the court at the time of trial. He makes it clear to Yakov that these are the reasons lying behind delaying the case.

Yakov contemplates the past history of Jews in the world. Since the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the crime of one Jew has become the crime of all the Jews. Wherever a Christian is murdered for any other reason by anybody else, Jews are held responsible for that and it is portrayed as a ritual murder for Jewish religious worship. Besides his personal effort as a lawyer to prove this accusation a futile one, Ostrovsky Says that he has sought the help of Suslov-Smirnov, an outstanding lawyer from Mascow, dealing with the criminal cases. Suslov-Smitnov was in his youth an anti- Semitic but he has now become a rigorous defender of the rights of the Jews. Yet the lawyer says that “The Law lives in the minds of men. If a judge is honest, the law is protected” (TF, 311). Because of being honest one cannot expect justice when justice itself is bankrupt. The Juries are also human beings. Only when they are honest they can investigate the matter unbiasedly and can free a convict in no minute.

Truth, regarding this case, is known to all. The accusation is not actually against the killer but against Jewish identity. If Yakov, by any 118 name, is a Christian, he will be free from the indictment. So Law is no where practised when men are narrow-minded. It depends upon the attitude of the general public.

Entering Kiev, a Jews-prohibited city, may be the petty mistake of Yakov, a poor Russian Jew, but for which putting him behind bars on charge of a ritual murder cannot be justified. Yakov, a man of strong will power, cannot be perverted by means of threat. He is not afraid of death because he knows that death is an unavoidable actuality of human existence. Sometimes Yakov thinks of committing suicide, unable to tolerate the tortures of jail officials in the name of searches but he gives up that idea thinking that it may pave way for the confession of the crime. He wants to struggle till his last breath to prove his innocence. Death cannot put an end to a problem, instead, it will aggravate the situation. At the outset, Yakov’s self-demise will badly reflect upon three million Jews living in the Tsarist Russia.

As Yakov expected, Suslov-Smirnov meets Yakov in the prison and tells him that things are going beyond his perceptions, so he has to be ready for the trial soon. Bibikov, the Investigating Magistrate also, with a heavy heart, confirms the same. Yakov’s hopes for freedom become a day dream. He comes to realize the fact that in a country with preconceived notions, honest people cannot claim for justice. He understands that justice delayed is for the denial of it. After two and a half years of rigorous imprisonment Yakov is prepared to bring in the court for trial. 119

Bibikov pleads Yakov not to try to escape because it may result in the restriction of freedom for others in the country. He, further, says that “the purpose of freedom is to create it for others” (TF, 319). Yakov responds that he is not what he was. Time has changed him into a man of profound insight.

On the way to court, Yakov sees people, both Gentiles and Jews, thronging on both the sides of the road. Some weep while some are wailing him as a revolutionary hero. Yakov believes that history can be rewritten. He assumes as if he shoots the Tsar king, Nicolas II dead in his chamber. After this incident he foreshadows the philosophy of revolution that there is no such thing as an unpolitical man. In a multicultural society one cannot be without the other. Though history is adverse enough it is reversible. Finally Yakov learns that there is no freedom where there is no fight for it.

In the last part of the novel, Yakov’s moral vision through suffering is juxtaposed with Tsar’s failure of morality. In the event of yakov’s arrest, the Tsar escapes from his responsibility for Yakov’s suffering by identifying the pogroms as a genuine expression of the will of the people. So it is not Yakov but the Tsar who now faces the trial of history of suffering. Ostrovsky’s statement, that those who persecute the innocent are themselves never free, is an insight into the imprisoned condition of the Tsar. When he pleads for mercy from Yakov, it is denied. At the closing part of the novel Malamud, through Yakov, makes the 120 global community learn that freedom is no longer a possibility. It is an achieved fact. The last lines of the novel are in a sense contrast to its opening lines which describe the Russians running somewhere at the news of the boy’s murder, describes the bondage to history. The question whether Yakov is achieving freedom remains unanswered. Yet what Malamud implies in Tsar’s murder is the inevitable sacrifice, one has to make for one’s intellectual and moral growth. That is to say, through suffering Yakov learns the value of his life, endurance, courage and the ability to make history.

Although the subjects and settings of Malamud’s works vary widely, one characteristic remains consistent, is his moral earnestness. In an interview in 1958, Malamud explained that American fiction is loaded with sickness, it should be filled with love and beauty and hope. He insists that his writings are on the basis of nobility of the human spirit. Malamud’s faith in humanity is obviously seen in the form of his characters. He is appreciated for his ability to come close to the center of human feeling. Malamud has positive attitude toward suffering. His concept of suffering in his fictions suggests that life is a search to make unavoidable suffering meaningful. His novels center on the suffering that results from the conflict between human freedom and human limitations. Frank Alphine, Yakov Bok, Roy Hobbs and Harry Lesser strive to escape a horrible past and to achieve a new life of comfort. Finally they achieve a new dignity by assuming a burden of self-sacrifice.

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Because of frequently writing about Jewish subject matter, he cannot be misjudged as a religious writer. He is a secular Jew whose Jewishness is a moral perspective. The ingredients of Malamud’s writing are the aspirations, struggles and indignities of an ethnic and cultural subgroup - The Yiddish speaking Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Malamud’s characters are neither practicing Jews nor nourished by a strong sense of community. They suffer in lonely isolation, yet, they possess instinctive dignity and inbred humanitarianism. But somehow they convey a strong sense of identity. Philip Roth speaks in appreciation of Malamud in such a way that what it is to be human, to be humane, is his subject; connection, indebtedness, responsibility, these are his moral concerns (CBM, 132). Malamud uses Jewishness as an ethical symbol. In his works the Jew becomes a metaphor for the good man striving to withstand the dehumanizing pressures of the modern world. His characters hold their ethical stances out of a sense of humanity and this humanity is only indirectly linked to their religious heritage. Malamud’s protagonists characteristically transcend the disorder that surrounds them, finding meaning in the power of love and moral commitment. Thus Malamud’s characters preach humanity about the inevitability of living together without damaging the communal harmony, despite the differences in terms of religion, colour and geography. LANGUAGE AND STYLE

Bernard Malamud is a typical Jewish American novelist of twentieth century literature, whose language and style is the expression of his views on various subject matters signaling a far reaching influence on the readers. He uses a simple language so that the readers can easily understand the intentions of the author, and the style he adopts is the most suitable one to portray the circumstances and the characters. He has made use of the different types of discourses in an effective manner in his writings. Moreover he is wise enough to make use of the figures of speech literary forms, terms and techniques at the appropriate places in his works to highlight his theme.

Bernard Malamud lifts the fictional Jew to refinement beyond borders at the closing of his novel. In The Assistant, Malamud’s Jews are shown suffering, contending, failing but never losing sight of the possibilities of future. He seems to be correlating the I and Thou philosophy of Martin Buber, his literary counterpart. “In his view, Love is responsibility of an I for Thou” (BM, 50). Martin Buber contrasts the enormous possibilities of growth in the I and Thou situation, when the self enters into a truly personal relationship with the other. In The Assistant Malamud shows Frank Alpine, a non-Jew forcing himself on a poor grocer named Morris Bober and his family. Sometimes he does harm to them. He later becomes their mainstay, and he takes over the store after Morris’s death. Ultimately he converts to Judaism. This represents an 123 inner change in Frank. He, like many other Malamud assistants, seems to be a messenger from a higher order to teach humanity to give up their blind faith on mundane matters.

In Malamud’s works, the immigrant experience is at once more central than in writers of comparable background. Although most of his protagonists are Jewish, he has never really written about Jews in the manner of other American Jewish novelists. As a matter of fact, he nowhere attempts to represent a Jewish milieu except with a little exemption. To the question of what literary sense Malamud makes of the emphatic ethnic identity of his characters, he clearly means Jewishness to function as an ethical symbol. His character is a type of metaphor both for the tragic dimension of any one’s life and for a code of personal morality.

Malamud is the first important American writer to shape, out of his early experiences in the immigrant milieu, a whole distinctive style of imagination and a distinctive technique of fiction as well. He is not anyway a folk artist but his attitude and feeling of Jewish folk culture have helped him to make a fictional world. He is good at both creating ground – gripping realism and high – flying fantasy, which have the qualities of Jewish folklore. In other words it seems that the Jewishness of Malamud’s characters affords him a means of brilliant fantasy in reality. His characters remind humanity of ordinary human experience. It is significant that there are no Jews in his first novel The Natural but there is also a blend of realism with fantasy. To be a Jew for Malamud is almost 124 interchangeable with the idea of being a Jew which means to assume a virtually possible moral stance in his fictional world. The central development of the idea of Jewishness as imprisonment occurs in The Assistant. The novel suffused with images of claustrophobic containment, and Morris Bober’s grocery is frequently referred to as a prison. Malamud suggests that to be fully a man is to accept the most painful limitations. Those who escape these limitations achieve only an illusory freedom. They cannot be responsible human beings. The kind of history that the Jew has undergone forced him to accept the worst conditions because he had no alternative while trying to preserve his essential human dignity.

At this juncture, Malamud sees in the collective Jewish experience of the past as a model not only of suffering and confinement but also of a possibility of triumph in defeat, freedom in imprisonment. Historical factors ensure that European Jewry is a trapped group of half-starved, bearded prisoners. The Jew as Everyman is a kind of literary symbol that he has been able to make it succeed in his stories and novels. He gives new imaginative weight to his conception of Jewishness by adding a historical incident in The Fixer. By doing so he manages to transform his symbol into the stuff of a novel that finally engages the emotions and the intellect as well.

After having received positive international critical acclaim, Malamud himself offers a simple anecdote in order to establish his greatness, 125

I heard about a lady in Africa who found herself suddenly surrounded by pigmies. They advanced on her with spears. One of them took her purse, opened it, removed the contents, among which was a copy of my novel ‘A New Life’. He replaced everything except the book, returned the purse, and let her go. I am waiting for that pygmy to arrive in New York to apply for a teaching position in an American University. There I will know I reached him” (CA, 725).

In writing about Jews Malamud is striving for universality. His statement that all men are Jews, indicates that Jew is a metaphor for man. Featherstone, a critic, believes that Malamud’s works celebrate not a people but the individual who endures his encounters with life. Anybody who endures is a Jew and thus the insistence upon the community of human suffering lifts Malamud’s work from his own period and places it in competition with the best writings of any time. His Jews are good not in the traditional sense but in the sense of their conduct. Few Jews, in fact, reveal their concern for Judaism as a coherent body of doctrine. They share only a communal sensitivity to persecution and suffering. On the contrary doctrines play only a minor role in the concept of Malamud’s Judaism. One who is sceptical about the humanistic philosophy of Malamud, has to examine men such as Bober, Bok and Levin.

Suffering does not interest Malamud for its own sake. It is rather a part of human life which should not be ignored because only through 126 suffering man is able to discriminate good and bad. What Malamud, further, wishes to explore and express is the sheer terror of existence in the twentieth century. The images of the horrors of Verdun, the Great Depression, Dresden Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Vietnam are seen in Malamud’s fiction. Symbolic landscapes of garbage-filled back alleys and collapsing buildings and anti-Semitic injustice on a massive scale found in Malamud’s fictional world threaten the very existence of the humanity. And so it is understandable that Malamud has chosen the Jews as symbol of suffering for they have lived through the Holocaust, the most horrifying campaign of terror in human history. In Malamud’s works the Jew becomes an isolated loner who represents the hopes, fears and possibilities of twentieth century humanity. John F. Kennedy, the American President also expressed it in his inaugural address that the shadows of above said problems reflect in the works of Malamud. Morris Bober, Frank Alpine and Yakov Bok are masterful creations. But people should not believe that similar suffering will somehow redeem them. Instead they prove that they are honest in the midst of dishonest people. The kind of adversity they undergo cannot shake their mode of conduct. Yakov becomes a powerful example of humanbeings ability to grow spiritually in the face of injustice, but the hard fact is that most poor people unjustly imprisoned simply waste away without being allowed to serve the cause of justice. In this respect Malamud’s writing provides a sort of strategy for living with the terror of modern life on an everyday basis which could be eradicated only by nourishing love and mutual understanding despite all sort of differences. 127

About art and artist Malamud himself has said “Artists cannot be ministers. As soon as they attempt it, they destroy their artistry” (GMD, 114). However, his concern, with the underlying forces that determine the quality of a civilization, has led him to portray not only the American racial encounters and the position of women in various communal situations but also to consider the meaning and function of art in society and the role of the artist in a given culture. Malamud has endowed art and artist with enormous god like power. “The purpose of the writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself” (GMD, 114). Malamud’s characters often echo this notion of the artist as the possessor of truths which must be communicated to the public in order to insure their survival.

A writer writes so people do not forget that they are human. He shows mankind the conditions that exist. Eventhough The Assistant seems to do little with art and artists, it reflects the elevated status of creative effort. Helen’s love of books modifies the barren environment of the novel, altering her feelings for Frank. The novels that Helen chooses from the library, where Frank meet her often, embody deeper truths about experience than Frank’s biographies. Frank is also aware of Helen’s humility in the face of such art, and perhaps this is an attitude that reflects Malamud’s own sentiments. By reading the books, both Helen and Frank come to know the truth about life. Literature can also teach certain kinds of psychological truths. Frank’s reading of Crime and Punishment provides him a source of self realization. It elevates him to the level of assessing his qualities. He feels happy when he finished the book because 128 it gives him an insight to rationalize his views on life, religion and morality. Another element present in The Assistant representing the attitude of Malamud towards art and artist is that the character’s open responsiveness to literature. Their attachment to literature shape them to the desired image and finally they become the gauge of moral sensitivity. Those characters who disregard power of arts are emotionally limited. And therefore any art and artist will be tolerated only when his work retains a moral premise or a strong dedication to the humane ethics of Judaism. Since it is difficult to trace out all the techniques that the author has adopted to near perfection, his attempts to carry out his affirmative dialogue into a more direct confrontation with the world, are inseparable from his own honesty.

In one of his meetings, Malamud said of a former teacher, Theodore Goodman as follows: “He taught me to beware of being dishonest as a writer. He said to me: Either you go in honest, or you sink. And I have tried to stick to that ever since” (BM(SR) 142). He has stuck to that principle, even if he happens to extend himself beyond the resources of his talent. In many ways the development of his novels and stories exemplify an author who looks new with each work. The Natural differs in texture and structure from The Assistant which mainly deals with the ethical aspect of human life. And while The Fixer continues to be the best novel of the decade, The Tenants focuses on the racial discrimination among the ethnic subgroups. Each of these works represents not just a re-elaboration of theme but an entire alteration of 129 manner. In The Natural Malamud represents a poetic investigation of some of the distinctive sources of modern anxiety. There are farce, myth and baseball which are held together by an extraordinary lyrical symbolism and jargon. The ritual cycle of Roy Hobbs’s career is correlated with the self-purification of Frank Alpine. About the artistic creation of Malamud the judges who awarded The National Book Award for The Magic Barrel said that “it captures the poetry of human relations at the point where imagination and reality meet” (BM(SR) 143).

In Bernard Malamud’s writing Jewishness is more of a literary device than religious or historical representation. His use of Jewish characters and subjects is metaphorical, and it must be understood within the context of his fiction. Further, Malamud’s metaphor of Jewishness has changed considerably since his first stories were published. His handling of Jewishness in The Tenants does not seem to be similar to that of in The Assistant. However the theme of Jewishness is of central importance in his stories and novels. This consistent preoccupation provides sufficient material to show a general development in Malamud’s metaphor of Jewishness and its change towards moral perspective. Many of Malamud’s works are predicated upon the protagonist’s necessary acceptance of his Jewish identity. This is perhaps seen in A New Life, where S. Levin, the protagonist ignores his origin throughout the work, is made to realize his mistake at the end. Though Levin is ignorant of the history of his predecessor, Leo Duffy, his activities reflect his origin. To hide his Jewish identity Levin was clean shaven in the photograph which 130 he has sent with his application to Cascadia College. When Pauline picks his application out of the pile, he gets troubled. Only then Levin realizes that the entire episode in Cascadia results from the Jewish identity that he seeks to disregard forever. Malamud deals with the same thing in The Lady of the Lake a short story in the collection The Magic Barrel. Henry Levin, called Freeman, denies his Jewish identity hoping that it will do a favour to be with his ladylove. By contrast he happens to lose his romance, Isabella only because he discards his identity. Jewishness is a matter of identity in A New Life and The Lady of the Lake and it forms an integral part of the individual’s personality and his self-denial which results in futility. In The Assistant, the theme of Jewishness is perhaps similar but more developed and complex. The story moves around Morris Bober, a poor grocer, his daughter, Helen and their relations with Frank Alpine. To Frank’s question about Jewishness Morris responds affirmatively because Morris’s Jewishness is very difficult to define. It is made clear at the funeral by the rabbi. Morris’ Jewishness may not be known to his fellow Jews and Gentiles as he is not following the religious practices. To him, Judaism means different and what one requires to be a Jew is a good heart. Suffering is the key word for describing human condition. Morris believes that “Jews suffer because they are Jews” (MJM, 21). Indeed in the decades following the Second World War and the Nazi destruction of European Jewry, Jews became a symbol of suffering humanity. The worst of all is Holocaust. To accept one’s Jewishness with reference to The Assistant means experience and understanding human condition. Morris views the concept of suffering in 131 a different way and he tells Frank that, “If you live you suffer, some people suffer more but not because they want” (MJM, 21). It is made clear by Malamud through his characters that suffering is an unavoidable actuality of human life. Everybody suffers one way or the other. Judaism enlightens that being good, despite suffering, itself is a reward. And so the concept of metaphoric Jewishness is best illustrated by the conversion of Frank Alpine. Malamud does not present this as a religious conversion, rather, it is a moral and spiritual conversion. Frank has become a metaphoric Jew. Under the influence of Morris, Frank slowly learns the significance of suffering and evolves into a Jew. The Karps and the Pearls are Jews by virtue of their birth, whereas the Bobers by virtue of their sensitivity and humanity. The two families represent the two types of Jews found throughout Malamud’s early work.

Frank is an outsider until Morris’s death because he is neither a Jew to the Jews nor a Gentile to the Gentiles. When Morris dies, the prospect for a gradual transition takes place in Frank. He is no longer the assistant to Morris. The grocer, the symbol of suffering for others, is buried and like the phoenix, Frank emerges as a new grocer, sufferer, and metaphoric Jew. The change is recognized by Helen who thinks that Frank is not the same person he was before her father died. She sees the inner change in Frank. He has become a good human being who gives more importance to humanistic considerations than materialistic development. Even though materialistic development determines the financial 132 prosperity, Frank like Morris, tries to overcome his poverty only by means of honesty.

To project the failing condition of the grocery store Malamud makes use of appropriate similes. He says that the store looked like a long dark tunnel. Morris suffers while his fellow Jews prosper by dishonest ways. His honesty is not shaken despite his poverty-stricken family circumstances.

The Fixer exhibits the first important change in Malamud’s metaphor of Jewishness. The novel is based on the true story of Mendel Beiliss, a Russian Jew imprisoned by anti-Semitic Tsarist officials on charges of having murdered a Christian child for ritual purposes. In this novel Yakov Bok, the protagonist, is guilty of hiding his Jewish identity. Yakov is an archetypal Malamudian Jew, and suffering is associated in the novel with Jewishness. At one point Yakov imagines that all other prisoners are Jews, and therefore he asks them whether they are Jews. They reply that they are Russians, but they look like Jews to Yakov. In an interview with Bibikov, the Investigating Magistrate, Yakov claims to be a free thinker. His image as a representative of the entire Jewish community, submissive to brutality for not the sin he committed, is brought out at the end. The novel concludes with Yakov’s fantasy of assassinating the Tsar. Yakov’s experiences express a radical and revolutionary change in such an extreme case.

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The Tenants, Malamud’s most recent novel, reveals a dramatic change in his metaphor of Jewishness. The novel concerns two writers, Harry Lesser; a Jew, and Willie Spearmint, a black, who find themselves competing in their work and for the love of a woman, Irene Bell. After some days the competition becomes very violent and they murder each other at the end of the novel. The Jews of The Tenants – Lesser, Irene, and Levinspiel have changed from Malamud’s former presentation of Jews. They do not suffer in the same way as Morris does in The Assistant. Malamud perceives some sociological changes in the New York City since The Assistant is published. And the Jew is no longer a symbol of suffering in a contemporary urban American novel. Lesser’s suffering is artistic and the money he earned from his second novel prevents him from any financial difficulties. Willie, a Black, is an example of suffering. He is also, like Lesser, eager to achieve his artistic creation. He is financially poor as well. But he fails to bear his destitution with pride. The Jew, represented by Lesser and Levinspeil in The Tenants, is only an ethnic identity. The Jew does not personify suffering. At once, a rabbi, a Jewish saint, appears in Lesser’s dream and says that the Blacks and the Jews are Ishmail and Isreal; two similar groups attempting to live as one people. This is what Malamud envisions which could be made possible only by loving, nourishing and respecting one another despite the ethnic cultural, and religious and geographical differences. However, the failure of Willie and Lesser’s co-existence foresees the vague future of humanity. Thus, Malamud’s metaphor of Jewishness reflects an altered perception of the world in The Tenants. 134

A review of Malamud’s fiction reveals that it is dynamic. Malamud is successful in making the novel The Assistant as an executed art-work. His later fiction The Tenants possesses a greater maturity of outlook as well as performance. It is a demonstration of Malamud’s ability to produce a fiction of profound insight and with the depth of true tragedy. The Natural is experimental in technique and philosophy. He has been able to save much from Roy Hobbs story. It is based on the Grail-myth. Malamud’s literary and philosophical concerns have not changed since his first novel. His central theme is self-transcendence, and his central technique involves myth. The basic structure of Malamud’s novels is the same as the basic structure of The Natural. Malamud is well known in the literary circle for his distinctive prose style. Future generation will definitely make an extensive use of his structure and style in an elaborate manner. Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck were able to create a kind of prose-poetry of lyrical power by rendering the Spanish syntax and diction of some of their character into English. As a result of this effort, there was an English prose with the rhythm of Spanish poetry and music. Malamud also has done the same thing with the diction and the syntax of Yiddish language and literature. He has used many Yiddish phrases and quotations wherever necessary in his fictions, keeping in view the strengthening of his ideas. His English prose captures the gentle warmth and humor, the sharp pathos for human suffering, and the profound tragic undertones found in Yiddish music, poems and prose. This quality is found in every page of The Assistant. Like Henry James, Malamud also 135 gives least importance to exposition and dialogue in his works. But his prose style is lyrical and flows elegantly. And yet, The Assistant is said to be a novel which is out of touch with the contemporary society. It goes back to the 1930’s and to the Great Depression, an age of heavy milk containers and corner grocery stores. Though critics view it as anachronism, it expresses the feelings and actions of men brilliantly.

It can be said that The Assistant has changed the attitude of people towards life. In A New Life Malamud attempts not only to art directly but also to satirize contemporary society. In The Natural and in A New Life Malamud loses his control over the novel’s form and structure. Instead of developing satirical incidents in the plot, he makes his protagonist indulge in long monologues. The above said defects of social perspective and internal monologues are corrected by Malamud in The Fixer. In this novel, he gives Yakov Bok an intensity and a power of characterization which recalls Morris and Frank Alpine. Yet much of this power is derived from its historical correspondences. To bring out a desired result he has added his own imagination with the historical fact. He has drawn from that historical incident the social, moral and political implications. In The Tenants Malamud is able to use the problem of contemporary society and to mould it perfectly. In The Tenants Malamud balances structure, tone, social and historical perspective and language. Malamud in The Tenants and The Pictures of Fidelman begins to explore not just the psychological factors that force men to live in worlds of myths, but the social factors that create those myths and bind men to them. 136

This exhibits Malamud’s theme of self transcendence in a newer and greater spirit. He indicates that it is not the fulfillment of a man’s potential that is at stake, but his ultimate survival.

Malamud’s literary strategies move the readers and researchers to greater curiosity. His works are readable and understandable even by an ordinary man because his writing style is very flexible. He is regarded high for regaining the tragic vision which has been central to Jewish expression for ages in his novels and stories. He belongs to the literary tradition of East European Yiddish story telling. Enthusiasm and ecstasy are the ideal limits of Malamud’s humour. His comic mode pervades every work, particularly when he deals with the theme of redemptive suffering. Throughout his fiction; the theme of victory through defeat is constant for it is only when his needs remain unsatisfied that Malamed’s hero can recognize the form of his needs. The author, with his unique power, has filled the world of complexity with some moral and spiritual illuminations. Malamud’s affinity to both the themes and the concerns of East European Jewish literature is exposed in his comic mode of expression. He insists that the Jew is a symbol of suffering and moral stance. They are struggling to be better within a mode of good conduct. Their adherence to honesty is unshakeable by means of adversity, because they strongly believe that being good itself is a reward for one’s life. There are no Jews in his first novel, The Natural but the message is very clear as in his other works that it is only by the act of succumbing to the good within the self, man may find the way to re-attain the world. 137

Malamud depicts his sense of humour and comedy too in his witty dialogue in The Assistant. When Louis expresses his willingness to Helen about marrying her, expecting a positive reply: Thank you, she murmured. Thank you is not good enough. Give me yes or no. No Louis. That is what I thought. He gazed blankly at the ocean (CLC.V44, 416). Comic rejections like this always survive in the works of Malamud and that is because of Malamud’s love for his fellow human beings. The characters he has created stand like a strong beacon light for a safe moral harbour. His Jewish heroes are simple human beings who can understand the language of the heart. As one of Malamud’s characters resounds in the short story Black is My Favourite Colour. “What I am saying is... for me there is only one human colour and that is the colour of blood” (CLC.V44, 416).

Malamud’s protagonist is the victim of fate and men, stumbling his way through life but who somehow manages to endure it all. Among other strands that enter into the fabric of Malamud novels and stories, there are components that weave female characters whose love is not constant and steady. The male character’s personality is given depth through the motif of the double. Two characters’ destinies are linked sometime in a father- son pattern. Action mostly takes places in an atmosphere of isolation and imprisonment. The past plays an important role in creating a historical, legendary and mythical connections with the plot. There is seen touches of a pastoral world such as trees, flowers and birds which hint at the 138 possibilities of freedom, purity and innocence. The Jew never enjoys the above said happier strains but there will be a movement in his development towards a qualified rebirth and a limited redemption which he attains through suffering and commitment.

According to Malamud, an artist plays a significant role in the society and his contribution should be constructive. Thus a writer is also a social reformer. Malamud always lightens the serious picture with humour and wit. He achieves this by colourful jokes and proverbs, which makes the tragedy travel in a lighter way. The Jewish accent is also revealed through the immigrant’s imperfect handling of English. The novelist incorporates various elements in his works to insist upon the concept of humanism and his belief in man.

All these components are found in The Tenants as essential parts of setting character, action and tone. Harry Lesser a typical Malamudian Jewish artist protagonist shows his inability to build up good relationship with others. As a result of this, he loses his girl, Irene, and he fails to establish a compatible contact with a fellow writer, Willie Spearmint a black. Harry Lesser’s dedication to his art is a special kind of dedication. Unmindful of the outcome of the protagonist’s struggle to complete his novel and to relate to other people; his commitment and his endurance are certainly meant to redeem him as an individual. Malamud makes Harry Lesser insist on art’s redeeming function and the artists’ deep involvement in it. Irene, who is willing to love Lesser, Like others of Malamud’s 139 women characters, is not that much bright. She is not talented enough for the acting career she has chosen. However Malamud describes her as a beautiful girl. Even though there are some imperfections in Malamud’s women characters, such imperfections often add something new to their sexual attraction. There is a triangle love affair pervading in The Tenant among Harry Lesser – Irene – Willie. She represents love, for which Harry Lesser cannot give up his writing. It is not possible for him to combine both life and art. In this respect his final choice is less compromising than any other Malamudian protagonist. Yet Malamud has appreciated the writer for his commitment to art and regards it as a noble choice. Malamud uses seasonal changes as symbols. Love, hope, nature and human beings are revived in spring. Irene’s blonde hair is going back to its normal black, her eyebrows are recovering their natural shape. As usual Malamud lets most of the book’s action take place in winter. It may be to symbolically represent that wisdom springs only in a great deal of adversity. In The Tenants the scene opens in winter, but in due course, it moves towards spring. The cycle of all the seasons indicates the series of incidents which portrays the unpredictable happenings in one’s life. Nature is thus included in Malamud’s store of archetypal myths of life, death and rebirth, love and hatred. Sometimes the change of seasons does not coincide with the incidents in the lives of Malamud’s characters. Thus Nature as a symbol is used to point out the wilderness of the urban slum.

The ironic contrast between the visions of pastoral calm and beauty and the shabby, imperfect actuality of New York City is employed to 140 effect in the opening section of the book. The images of birds such as gulls and black birds are inherent in Malamud’s work. By the words that describe the voices of the birds, such as ‘mewling’ and ‘shrilling’ the author makes the readers visualize the type of birds. In this context, the novelist excels himself in making use of one of the figures of speech, onomatopoeia. The presentation of beautiful scenery, suddenly moves down to the partly ruined house, the lonely man and his worry over his impending physical and financial problems. The literary elements such as allusion, quotation or parody and irony seem very natural in dealing with the subject matter of The Tenant. Along with other forms and techniques, humour plays a prominent role in the works of Malamud except in The Tenant. Malamud’s gift of comedy is seen in a mock– epic vein. There are phrases suggesting Yiddish sayings and proverbs that are put in a simple language. Dreams and reveries play an important role in The Tenants. This feature gives a far reaching effect to the rendition of the story in a realistic manner. It is understood that a writer who is living an isolated life will indulge in fantasies. When Harry Lesser feels desperate and loses control of himself in anger, his fantasies become hallucinations.

The element of surrealism is found in The Tenants and it strengthens the work. The means by which Malamud achieves an effect of surrealism is his skillful handling of the grammatical category of tense. Malamud mostly proceeds with present tense insertions of various types. On the normal level only present tense is employed to render Harry Lesser’s thoughts. The author has not used any other devices to 141 distinguish between narrative, dialogue and monologue. The present tense is also used for descriptions and explanations of the writer’s present situation. Even though he, at times, writes in past tense, the shift will not confuse any reader. The present tense is next used to paraphrase and summarize the work in progress that Willie has asked Harry Lesser to read and criticize, and also for the writer’s reflections on this manuscript. Lesser and Willie’s discussion of the black’s book constitutes the first confrontation between them, indicating their contradiction over literary and human positions. This section of the novel is rendered in present tense. Willie’s disregard of form is unacceptable to Lesser. Their ethnic superiority separates them. One wants universal significance while the other seeks actions through black writing.

Malamud in his writing maintains a subtle blend of past tense and present tense, direct dialogue and indirect speech, third person focus and first person focus in an efficient manner. When Lesser happens to meet Irene alone for the first time, he expresses his concern for her. This section is completely woven in present tense. As the tension between Lesser and Willie increases, their anguished thoughts over each other are brought out only in present tense. Direct dialogue plays only a minor role in The Tenants because much of the action takes place in Lesser’s mind. His nervousness about his book, loneliness and suffering are expressed in fantasies of fear. While reading the novels the reader doubts whether Lesser is imagining things or not. It shows Malamud’s skill of exposition. His handling of reality and fantasy is beautifully executed, and the readers 142 find it difficult to distinguish them. The representatives of the two traditions – black African and white Jewish understand the meaning of humanistic wisdom only at the end. The dramatic tension increases in a moment where Lesser and Willie are getting ready for violence. “One winter’s night they meet on the stairs... They stare at each other, they talk they part” (CLC, V9.345). It is definitely Lesser’s imagination as if he catches a glimpse of Willie on the stairs. Malamud’s mastery over craft is evident on these circumstances which take the readers from the actual world to a surreal world.

The conflict is approaching its end, as Lesser destroys Willie’s typewriter with an axe. This act is described in the past tense. The concluding sections of the novel are handled by Malamud, intermingling present tense with the past tense. The last confrontation between the black and the white is enacted in an atmosphere of surrealism. Thus the novel ends not in real killing, but in an imagined act of violence which is a sort of reminder and warning to the humanity to give up personal grudges in terms of race, region and religion and ethnicity. In order to teach a lesson to people that preconceived difference of opinion will result in total annihilation in this surrealistic scene Malamud uses past tense for greater effect. This narrative tense has been used so as to function as a vehicle for the unreal world. The past tense is mostly used to set right the imbalance that exists between the realistic narrative and the surrealistic setting and action. The present tense is used to add fancy to the ordinary and actual occurrences. The last sentence of this surrealistic section “each feels the 143 anguish of the other” (CLC, V.9.346) provides supporting evidence to the common use of present tense by the novelist. Only present tense verb sums up the meaning of the imaginary confrontation. Both, Lesser and Willie have emerged with new insight that they should recognize each other. This novel may seem to be pessimistic as the incidents are serio tragic but indeed it is optimistic because Malamud like a Prophet, besides bringing out the horror of modern urban setting, suggests that violence is not the solution for any kind of problem in the world.

The themes and expositions of Malamud get refined in The Fixer. Of them, the most significant theme is a search for a qualitatively new life. It focuses on both materialistic and moral growth and development. It depicts life as a poison which is a necessity for moral involvement and freedom. It enlightens the value of suffering. It evolves ritualistic and mythic elements in life. The theme of new life involves the protagonist leave his home in search of change and new opportunities. This geographical mobility hoping for a new, better life brings sometimes good and sometimes not. On the surface level, the change involves only different surroundings. But the change should involve a growth in the person. The protagonist has to give up his selfish concerns of youth for an involvement in the problems of mankind, that is acceptance of life’s responsibilities. In The Assistant, Frank Alpines’s conversion to Judaism becomes such a change. But Roy Hobbs’ change in his physical surroundings does not include this necessary interior growth, and therefore his life becomes a total failure. In A New Life, S. Levin goes to 144 the west to a new career but what he finds is a third new life when he gives up the Greek dream of freedom for the Jewish acceptance of responsibility and moral development. In The Lady of the Lake when Henry Levin changes his name as Freeman to escape his Jewish identity, it leads to the loss of his beloved, Isabella, a concentration camp survivor. She tells Freeman that she has suffered so much for her heritage and so she cannot betray it. Because of his refusal of his identity he does not gain anything good.

Unlike Henry Levin who denied his Jewish identity deliberately Yakov Bok makes little changes in his physical appearance and changes part of his name. This change finally brings a great disaster in his life. Ironically Yakov could learn that the purpose of freedom is to create it for others inside the prison. His unjust imprisonment brings him moral growth. When he comes out of the jail after a long time, his mind is full of thoughts and ideologies. By refusing to confess and betray three million Jews in Russia, he accepts the responsibility for the entire Jewish community and actively involves in the fate of his people. This novel may apparently seen to be a work dealing with the Tzarist Russia but in reality it shows the moral, spiritual growth of the hero.

In Malamud’s fictional world, there is always a prison. It is the different forms of physical environment – a grocery store, a tenement, an artist’s cabin, a village or a real dirty prison cell. Sometimes critics view that Malamud’s central metaphor of Jewishness is the prison, a perfect 145 symbol for the human and the Jewish condition. Metaphorically, the prison becomes an acceptance of life’s limitations and responsibilities in this context. Malamud’s Jew appears to realize a variety of themes and motifs. Whether the Jew epitomizes the man of hard luck or world Jewry, he has long history. The Jew is a composite of history, legend, myth, folklore and comedy. He often seems to be a fallen victim, but at the end he achieves moral victory, denied to others. It is believed that Malamud’s definition of Jewishness includes such universal human virtues as moral obligation to one’s fellowmen and the entire humanity. According to Malamud acceptance of responsibility means involvement in the suffering of others and learning from one’s own suffering. To analyse Malamud’s use of myth, ritual and symbolism, a fair amount of criticism has been devoted. This closely examines the texture and structure throughout the work. Yakov’s name itself reveals the idea of the scapegoat. When The Fixer is read by heart, the readers will come to know some of the complexities of human life. Literal meaning of ‘Bok’ is a living goat and Steponovitch means son of a sheep. The meaning, in the same sense, is extended to a person or group bearing the guilt for a larger group. The charge of ritual murder against Yakov is really an indictment against the entire Jewish nation. Yakov is the accidental choice for all Jewry.

Mythic elements are present in The Fixer as in The Natural, The Assistant and The Tenants. Certain events take place at specific seasons. The most important of them is the search for a father – either real or spiritual, within or outside. Although it is found in Greek Literature and in 146 the folklore of all factions of people, the search for a father is central to Jewish writings. Beginning with the Jewish saints like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, it occupies a central place in the story of Moses and the successive Biblical kings. The Malamud heroes are free spirits, who insist upon freedom for which they are ready to undergo any kind of ordeal. Even though Frank Alpine, Yakov Bok and S. Levin don’t realize that they are harming themselves for their freedom and ultimately for all, they are looking for a guide or God. Frank Alpine accepts and then becomes Morris Bober. S. Levin accepts the responsibility as a father. Yakov Bok accepts Raisl’s child as his own and even Harry Lesser treats Willie as his son. The most important mythic elements in Malamud’s handling of this theme is that Yakov Bok accepts himself, his family and his community. He steps out of a nebulous history into the Judaic tradition of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and the covenant with God. He approves this formal Judaic tradition, and later he becomes one with it. In this context Malamud strongly believes that denial of origin cannot do any favour to any one at any time, rather, honesty, integrity and virtue are the abstract pillars upon which man is built.

In the final scene in The Fixer, Yakov imagines his confrontation with the Tzar – the so – called father of Russia. Yakov destroys the Tzar because he has destroyed the innocent Jewish people. On the way to the court Yakov leaves the way open for the reappearance of the true father of the Jews and all people - the God of Mercy.

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Malamud utilizes heat and cold, light and dark, fragrance and stench indoors and outdoors throughout his work. He consistently uses weather, season, climate as corollary and symbolic context for his character’s actions and moral conditions. He employs emblems such as mirrors, books, articles of clothing. Thus there is always much more pictorial representation to see in Malamud’s novels and stories. In Malamud’s works, three different styles are persistent. First there is a standard style; that is a style of linguistic materials used by other modern writers which consists of a syntax and a diction drawn from the vocabulary of standard informal usage. This style contains nothing new. A second Malamud style is a dialectic style which evokes the sound of Yiddish influence. It demonstrates Malamud’s familiarity with the old mother tongue. It also exhibits Malamud’s skill at transliterating his mother tongue into a kind of English. Even before Malamud, his Jewish American contemporaries have used this Yiddish English style. And in the twentieth century, Yiddish dialect has been a tool of comedy to comedians over decades. Yet the credit goes to Malamud also for having revived it in his works. The third style is the most complex style which combines both the linguistic and the dialectic styles. Along with Malamud, Saul Bellow, his contemporary writer also has used this most complex third style. This style requires additional force from the combination of lyric, eloquent phrases and idiom and vulgate. This style exalts the vulgate with dignity. The juxtaposition of the two paves way for bitter comedy in Malamud, Bellow and Roth.

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In The Assistant all the three styles appear in a variety of uses and combinations. The dialectic style functions in the conversations of those characters whose mother tongue is Yiddish. This style is inherent in certain interior monologues. The most consistent use of this style is to depict Ida. In Malamud’s treatment of Morris, the dialectic style has not been used because he avoids it. The linguistic treatment of Morris exposes his identity as an Everyman figure and comprises the novel’s thesis that all men are, potentially Jews. The dialect style is made use only when Morris’s ethnic identity is insisted upon. Malamud portrays Morris as a capable man of different situations. Morris speaks to Ida in Yiddish dialect. But when he comes to Frank and Helen, his speech remains homely and linguistic. Whenever Morris deals with the Detective, Minogue, he speaks in a formal, official context. Frank and Helen often interact in dialect style. Yet, Helen’s style is slightly literary because of her aspirations and her education.

The Natural lacks Yiddish flavour since it is not dealing with the Jewish subject matter and the characters also are not Jews. Yet the style is breezy. It is apt to a world of baseball players. At the same time the earthly affairs bring mythic and allegorical machinery to the novel. In fact it provides an illusion of actuality. It produces humour. Like Roy Hobbs, the base ball player, S. Levin’s Jewishness also plays only a small role in the novel. The Jewish elements are suppressed in the mind of S. Levin. In The Natural linguistic materials generate a comic undercurrent. The same comic elements are inherent in The Fixer also. Malamud establishes a 149 contrast between the bombastic language of all the official proceedings and the spontaneous simplicity of Yakov’s own speech. There is incongruity between what is uttered by the magistrates and the officials and of what Yakov is saying inside his own head. This incongruity becomes more when Yakov replies his persecutors. The result is a kind of chorus of voices. Next, the contrast between the characters saying and thought, communicates a difference in the use of language. At the same time Malamud’s voice, as an invisible narrator, merges with Yakov’s. Narrator and hero often become one and they express themselves in the same way. At the outset Malamud does not simply arouse the raw emotions of the Jews against Gentiles by the style he employs in his works, rather, he portrays that Jews don’t become immoral, even in the face of adversity. According to Malamud all Jews are not Jews. His Jew has a different perspective. All good people are Jews, irrespective of religions, identity and all bad people are not Jews as well. Ethnic identity plays only a minor role in the works of Malamud and for that he does not advocate anybody from any religion to give up his faith in it. Readers and researchers and critics come to know the kind of perception of Malamud Jew through Morris’s definition that to be a Jew what all one needs is a good heart. But in The Fixer Malamud’s linguistics seeks out revolutionary reaction against the bad Russians who kill the innocent Jews in the name of religion. Usually Malamud uses bombastic style whenever he narrates the quality of bad guys.

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In The Pictures of Fidelman Malamud uses linguistic style when he narrates character’s elation. On the other hand, he prefers the dialect style while describing the adverse circumstances of Jews. He is so thrilled to break the conventional narrative past tense used by most of the writers in the act of story-telling. Dialogues, expositions, and interior monologues are woven mostly in present tense in his works. Technically the book deals with the Fidelman’s man’s adventures in a new environment, and how the horror of Holocaust has taught him the art of survival. This work is not as potent as The Assistant and The Fixer, it makes a number of important affirmations. It affirms that despite Malamud’s association with the Jewish movement and his importance to it, his material is not restricted to the themes or prototypes characteristic to that movement. It affirms that he retains the capacity, that is generous and beyond narrow scope. Moreover it asserts that Malamud devotes himself to the subject matter which treats the richness of the development of human personality.

Malamud captures the tones and shadows of the traditional Yiddish tale. He is not at all a teller of tales in the traditional manner. He is an extremely self conscious short story writer, sensitive to the formal demands of the short story. His manner is that of the teller of tales, but his technique of structure is poetic and symbolic. He constructs his stories beginning with his final image, involving his characters into the dramatic poses which will contribute to the total significance of that image. The dramatic action of the story attempts to lead the characters into a situation of conflict which is resolved by conflicting forces in their very opposition. 151

Malamud seems to insist that there is a way of escaping the fatal limitations of the human condition. Man need not remain buried in the isolation of himself. He must accept the fatality of his own identity be it Jew or Gentile, success or failure. By working within that identity he has to transcend himself and burst his prison. Malamud’s works find its roots in the tradition of the Yiddish tale, but they gradually move to the other areas of literature. The novelist has mastery over the dimensions of the tragic vision. Similarly the suffering of the Jews seems to be the stuff and substance of Malamud’s art. He is able to beautify his works with the concept of suffering of the Jews. In one way suffering is supposed to be Malamud’s theme and upon which he creates a thousand variations such as comedy, tragedy, imagination, fantasy, classicism etc.

The Jew as symbol for suffering mankind is an original idea because it reflects the merciless killing of Jews during Holocaust, besides, it projects the moral courage of Jews to endure it to participate in the human history. History, at the hands of tyranny, may be adverse enough to annihilate the innocent but there is a universal truth that it is reversible. In Malamud’s style, there is individuality, which is personal yet generous and attentive to the requirements of the public. Most of all, Malamud reveals his romantic feeling through his characters. Though the tormented characters of Bernard Malamud’s fictions grieve over their fate, despair, curse and so on, they are still clinging to the Romantic determination to present a new solution to the problems of the society. It is this Romantic drive which strengthens Malamud’s greatness in each of his works. 152

One of the best claims of Malamud to enduring recognition is his instinct for myth. Right from his first novel to his latest short story, he provides a ritual shadow for his characters and their situations. The Natural is almost out of ordinary reality. Like a Grail, myth, Roy’s attempt to both achieve the position of a great baseball hero and his desire to have Memo, becomes an unattainable ecstasy. However, stern morality is implied in the novel that those who fall a victim to evil forces are subject to punishment. The Romantic will of Malamud presents his characters in such a way that they epitomize Man’s condition. His attempts may fail to achieve. His hopes but he never fails to attempt again and again. This shows the author’s consistent will power that one should not lose one’s heart in spite of repeated failures. The reason why the Jew receives new turns is because he always makes new efforts. On many occasions these efforts are granted success. In this ideology neither failures nor triumphs are permanent in this earthly world. Like many of his fellow Jewish American writers, Malamud speaks for those who have hardly anything in common with themselves and who seek for reattainment of self. As Malamud points out again and again in his fiction, Jewishness is not a necessary ingredient in this success. In The Natural, his first novel, there are not Jewish characters, and yet the myth of salvation is clearly indicated in it than in any of his later novels. Almost Malamud’s Jews are symbols for all men who suffer to be better than they are or whose personalities are exploited by pretence. Saul Bellow once rightly termed the condition of Malamud’s characters as the “debate between the real and the pretender soul” (CLC.V.1, 198). 153

In The Assistant Morris Bober, a kind Jewish grocer gives employment to Frank Alpine, a drifter. Finally, he falls in love with Morris’ daughter Helen. Frank undergoes changes at different levels throughout the novel which are decided by the relationships and identifications he forms. In fact it is apparent that Frank has not been able to integrate with the lawless Ward Minogue, representing his baser side (id). At the same time he finds it difficult to associate himself with St.Francis who represents the ideal spiritual side (superego). Frank seems to shuttle between the two not knowing where to go throughout the novel. Finally he finds himself in Morris who is virtuous, representing a synthesis of the two (ego). In one way, the novel is framed in relational terms which is characterized by the protagonist’s both intra psychic and interpersonal relationship. From the beginning Ward Minogue, Frank’s partner in crime, is depicted as a lawless person. When they rob Morris’ store, Ward Minogue never minds about hurting the old man, whereas Frank, a reluctant participant in the act of stealing, gets some water for the old man to drink. It exhibits Frank’s self-destructive behaviour. Frank steals from the store’s cash register whenever possible, but after having realized his mistake, he works hard to win Morris’s trust as his assistant and he finally establishes stability. Frank still has to stay on the right path and improve his circumstances. This inward change is recognised when he tells Morris “I am not the same guy I was” (TA, 427) Frank has some spiritual speculations and for which he appreciates St Francis.

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The nature imagery, that of birds and flowers, suggests Frank’s associations with St Francis but the saint is not a realistic identification figure for Frank because Frank is not up to the level of comprehending the spiritual ideals of St Francis. And so he seeks identification with Morris, a virtuous man who embodies many of the same ideals. Frank speaks of St Francis in Sam’s candy store that he has potence to preach to birds. He admires the saint for he gave away everything he owned. He enjoyed to be poor. He said “poverty was a queen and he loved her like she was a beautiful woman” (BMORT, 461). Finally after his rejection by Helen, he dreams of St Francis dancing in front of the grocery store with some birds sitting on him. He plucks the wooden rose, once thrown into it by Helen out of the garbage can. He tosses it into the air and it turns into a real flower. He gives it to Helen, who has just come out of the house, saying “Little sister, here is your little sister the rose” (BMORT, 461). From him she takes it although it is with the love and best wishes of Frank Alpine. It was actually a wooden rose which was the symbol of love rejected. Initially Helen rejected his proposal with a carved wooden rose for he is not a Jew, despite his concerns for her. But later, she gradually understands that he is the right person for her. St Francis’ magical tricks of making a wooden rose into a real flower is a symbolic indication of Frank’s proposal of love accepted by Helen. From this it is clear that Malamud is wise enough in making use of both linguistic and dialectic techniques appropriately in his works. There is more bird imagery in the park scene where Helen sees Frank feeding birds. These references are 155 found only after Frank’s confession to Morris and he experiences a moment of extraordinary relief – a tree full of birds breaking into song.

There is a symbol of birds and flowers in the novel. Frank carves first a bird and then a rose for Helen, which is discarded. At the end of the novel, in Frank’s dream, it reappears and the wooden flower changes into a real flower, presented to Helen not by Frank but by St Francis, a saint who seems to suggest to Helen to accept Frank. At Morris’s funeral when she throws a rose on her father’s coffin, Frank stumbles to see where it falls. While all flowers are equally important to St Francis, he is particularly associated with roses for it is said to be the symbol of love, which does not simply represent the love affair of Frank and Helen. Further it asserts the humanistic philosophy that love alone can bring mutual understanding and eradicate the barriers among the people. When love rules the universe, personal grudges will perish automatically. Clearly Frank cannot be an ascetic like St Francis because it is not easily attainable. After a great confusion Frank decides to accept the values of Morris, a real person who is neither a saint nor the lawless Ward Minogue. Morris does not embody any of these two extremes. What he does is simply following the laws of Judaism that require the individual to treat his fellowmen with kindness and consideration. It is seen at the end of the novel that a character is transformed morally after Morris Bober who, having lost his son Ephraim, becomes Frank’s father. At once Morris represents an external ego whose function is to mediate between id and 156 superego. Frank has adopted Morris’s moral code and is prepared to endure hardship to maintain it.

These Jewish laws of Malamud are similar to those of Martin Buber, a Jewish philosopher who emphasized the importance of those laws dealing with man’s relationship to man. Morris lives, as said by Frank, by the spirit of the Law, not by the letter of the Law.

In the stories of Bernard Malamud, a father and son pair exists either symbolically or literally. It happens so even in The Magic Barrel, Malamud’s celebrated short story. In this story, Finkle, the young rabbinical student gets himself away from his Jewish society because of his studies. His goal is to find a wife so that his search for job will become comparatively easy. But what actually happens, as the story progresses, is that he reintegrates himself into the emotional and spiritual well springs of his community. After his spiritual explorations Finkle returns to his society and begins to live fully within it. The interaction between Finkle and Salzman deepens issues and concerns involving an individual’s connection to his community. Through his contact with Salzman, Leo Finkle has learned more about himself than what he has acquired from the study of seared Jewish texts. Ironically, the text that contains truths of doctrine cannot help the rabbinical student to find his heart or his community. His study has done nothing to him but distanced him from his people. He learns truth beyond books by his association with Salzman. This process makes an individual healthy and function as an active 157 member of his Jewish society. At this point, Malamud makes it clear that Leo Finkle is bound to the father figure. When Leo decides to continue his search for a wife, he learns something about his connection to God and humanity on a vertical line. It is meant that his relationship with people affects his relationship with God. However, he has to extend this discovery on a horizontal line also by relating to human beings as they are. In this context, Malamud establishes his view on theology that God is nowhere and without understanding the self and the world around, one’s theological study will become a never ending process. At the end of the story Leo Finkle believes in the concept of finding God by loving fellow human beings and commitment to social responsibilities. Brain Adler, a critic, in appreciation of Malamud for his tremendous effort to bring human hearts to closer quarters, has commented that The Magic Barrel is about the fertility of connection, producing something of human warmth in a sterile modern world (CLC, V85, 219).

In The Fixer Malamud portrays the problems of a man who is cut off from society in a realistic manner. His paradoxical philosophy of achieving ultimate internal freedom, through some kind of bondage, is taken to an extreme state in the novel. It is an established fact that Yakov is imprisoned not only physically but also morally and emotionally. Yakov’s memory of his relative freedom is acute in the prison and that further complicates his condition. Though there is a necessary physical action, the compensating psychological action is enhanced by Malamud’s 158 blending of fantasy with reality, which forms the inner conflict leading to a surrealistic touch to the narrative. Sydney J. Krause, a critic, comments upon Malamud’s use of surrealism thus, surrealism thrives on disparity, situations in which life begins to parody itself. Normal perceptions suddenly arrange themselves in strange and inexplicable relationships ... Hallucination passes for reality and vice-versa (TCLC, V129, 136).

Yakov Bok, unable to undergo the physical brutality in the prison, dives into a world created by his mind. The fantasy is not limited to Yakov’s world alone. Many other characters around Yakov lie to him that they are Russian prisoners, but it is not so in reality. Blind faith in false belief characterize the anti-heroes who are resolved to crush Yakov and his struggle to prove his innocence in relation to the murder case. The actual murderers, Marfa Golov, the boy’s mother and her blind lover accuse Yakov for having once chased the boy out of the brick factory. Thus the whole scene attempts to convince Yakov to the crime for a ritual purpose. On the other hand Yakov’s mind is preoccupied with the physical and psychological torture and the sense of injustice. Reality no longer remains reality, and Malamud employs surrealism to delineate his wandering in a realm between waking and sleeping.

The phantasmagoric reality where Yakov inhabits is best illustrated through his dreams, concerning his oppressors. Yakov dreams of the 159

Tzar’s officials indulging in violent murders as a sort of reaction against this murder. The falsity is further exaggerated by the officials who consider the murder as a blood ritual practised by Yakov a Jew. This quick shift from the phantasmagoric world of dreams to the equally phantasmagoric, reality of prison, mirrors Malamud’s subtle blend of fantasy and reality. Malamud’s use of Yakov’s hallucinations portray the chaotic world into which he has been plunged. At once Bibikov, the investigating magistrate, who is sympathetic towards Yakov, appears in Yakov’s dream and warns him of the impending danger of poisoned death to him by the prison officials as per the direction of the Tzar.

This makes Yakov terribly afraid while he has metalic taste in his mouth during his waking hours. Thus, the dream state confirms reality, for the subconscious mind discovers truths that the waking self is confused to comprehend. The rapid succession of dreams is significant because it forms the structural pattern of the novel. The dreams illustrate the major thematic conflicts between right and wrong, and they highlight the significant motifs and symbols that run throughout the narrative. Above all, it is obvious that through dreams new Yakov Bok is emerging. He finally becomes a man with adequate knowledge about the self and the world around.

While reading Malamud’s works, readers can understand his skill in using the linguistic techniques appropriately to highlight his views about various aspects of human life. In The Assistant, the pathetic 160 condition of the poor grocery store is excellently projected by Malamud. The small store is also similar to that of the author’s prison motif with reference to The Fixer. According to Malamud, the prison and the store are like wombs where Morris and Yakov get refined and come out with the full knowledge of the world. After having experienced the horror of the Tzar regime in Russia, Morris migrates to America, a land of freedom, hoping for better prospects. He has been running this grocery store in Brooklyn, New York for more than twenty years without any further improvement.

Morris has to depend upon the few regular customers for the functioning of the store because without their support, his survival itself will become a question mark. Since the time of its opening, customers can see no change in its texture and structure. Here Malamud uses a wonderful simile to depict the poverty – stricken family circumstances of Morris Bober, an honest grocer of sixty years old. He compares this store to a long dark tunnel, which reflects the social and financial constraints of Jews across the world. In the Bober’s lane there are few Jewish families such as Karps and Pearls. Their ethics of life is totally different from that of Morris. Morris, a man of stern morality, lives in the realm of humanistic ideals while his fellow Jews are keen on financial prosperity by any means. Morris always does not like them for their odd behaviour in dealing with both Jews and Gentiles. Malamud illustrates two incidents to test the integrity of the three different Jewish families living together in a Gentile dominated area. Once when a shop in the opposite tenement was 161 vacated, Morris requested Karp, the owner of that building, not to keep a grocery so that he can prevent his perish. In fact, Morris is not jealous of his competitors but he is very much bothered that it may put an end to the already dwindling store.

Karp promised him that there would be no grocery store. On the contrary Morris is stunned to see a grocery store getting ready there. On another occasion, Morris, after having deep discussion with Ida and Helen, approaches Karp for the sale of the store and the house together. At the beginning of the sale deal, Karp gave an assurance that he would send a buyer or himself will buy. Ida and Helen are happy and Morris could see sense of positivity in Ida and Helen, but he is skeptical about the agreement because he knows men and matters around, whereas, Ida and Helen are not up to the level of studying the world. As expected, the sale deal is finally dropped. At this point Malamud, being a Jewish writer, does not speak in admiration of all Jews in general because he does not regard a Jew by virtue of his birth, but by the Law, the Torah which requires only a good heart. To communicate the honesty of Morris and his moral courage effectively, Malamud rightly opts oxymoron, a figure of speech, that Karps, Pearls and Bobers represent “attached” houses but otherwise “detached”.

Honesty, integrity, morality are only words to Karps and Pearls, but to Morris’s they are the bases, and to keep up the above said abstract qualities, he will prepare himself to undergo any kind of hardship. During 162

Morris’s bed rest, Ida, with the help of Frank, looks after the store. But His conscience does not allow him to be on bed as it is the only source of income for the entire family. Whenever he interferes into the business affairs, Ida warns him to be quiet and take complete rest as per the direction of the doctor. In response to her, Morris says that “Rest I will take in my grave” (TA, 238). Here Malamud emphasizes the universal fact that life is mysterious and it is not easy to predict the events of life either joyful or sorrowful. And so man has to be prepared to suffer and endure it with a positive thought that suffering is an unavoidable aspect of human life till the last sport of his life. He further insists that there is no suffering where there is no life. Man cannot escape from his responsibilities until he lives on earth. Certainly this is a paradoxical statement of Malamud that one can be totally free from any commitment only in the graveyard after death. Moreover he brings out a clear cut picture of fanatism which results in mutual destruction without understanding the original theological survey of each religion. According to Malamud sympathy, hospitality, love, compassion are not the components of any particular religion. They are common to all. He universalizes this humanistic philosophy through his character, Morris, an embodiment of morality. Ironically, Malamud does not speak high of Morris’s fellow Jews like Karps and Pearls anywhere in his works for their regular religious practices. By contrast, Morris requires a good heart to be a true Jew, and not by simply adhering to the above said practices.

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In The Fixer Malamud by lot of images and symbols foretells the impending misfortune in the life of Yakov because of his geographical mobility. On the way to Kiev, the scene Yakov sees and the incidents he witnesses, ensure the fact that he is going to suffer more in Kiev, the Jew-prohibited territory than in his Jewish village. Yakov is going up to the bank of the river, Dnieper by Shmul’s horse cart. One wheel of the cart gets partly damaged, and he manages to drive it to the destination. When the cart is passing through a Jewish neighbouring village, he sees “a big wigged Jewess plucked a bloody necked hen, and a black goat tethered to a post baaed at the horse” (TF, 15).

Even before getting ready Shmul warns Yakov not to enter Kiev. When Yakov leaves the village, ignoring the words of Shmul, he further insists on to cut off his beard so that he will not look Jewish. At the beginning, Yakov does not give much importance to the life saving words of Shmul, but later when the boat is moving in the middle of the river, Yakov is afraid to see the stern face of the boat man and drops his prayer things, before being asked about his identity. At this point, readers can understand Malamud’s concern for the suffering Jews across the world. He is, further, able to visualize the amount of horror and terror, a Jew has to undergo for the simple crime of entering a prohibited area. The images and symbols, he presents in his works, are supposed to be the bad omens which represent a great misfortune waiting to play its role in the life of Yakov, immediately after his entry into Kiev.

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After getting a job as overseer in a brick factory for having saved the life of Nikolai Maximonovitch, a member of Black Hundreds, an anti– Semitic movement in the Tzarist Russia, Yakov thinks, without knowing the mystery of unborn future that his problems are almost over. Indeed, his problems take deep root only during his stay there in the factory. Yakov is taken revenge by the fellow workers for his honesty and integrity. While loading bricks in the trucks Yakov is very strict in dealing with the factory workers and it is really a stumbling block for them to steal bricks. As they expected, Yakov is arrested on a false complaint made against him for his Jewish identity. In most of his works Malamud is proud to say that Jews are the chosen people to suffer for they have suffered so long in the human history for being Jewish. His celebrated statement that to suffer is to be Jewish highlights the point that Jews are the example for the suffering humanity. Proshov, the corrupt foreman of the brick factory tells Grubeshov, the Prosecuting Attorney that “A name belongs to you as your birthright, but it hung on him like a suit of stolen clothes” (TF, 112).

In order to strengthen the crime, the Kiev government cooks up evidence against Yakov. Phroshov, the foreman makes use of the right opportunity to victimize Yakov saying that his suspicion about Yakov’s name proves right. He tells Grubeshov that his perception about Yakov’s false identity as a Russian Gentile has come true because of the tremendous effort of the Tzarist government. At this juncture, Malamud seems to suggest that denial of one’s origin is not advisable at any 165 circumstance because it is not his mistake, moreover, it is not a mistake at all. And he believes that one cannot certainly gain anything by losing his originality. The major mistake that Yakov did is nothing but hiding his identity; otherwise, he is innocent and even for which he cannot be claimed because he was not asked for. Malamud has used an appropriate simile to expose the universal truth that originality and identity cannot be hidden by changing the external appearance and by changing names. According to Malamud, a Jew is a Jew by any name, and it is proved with reference to Yakov in The Fixer. Yakov Stephonovitch is the altered name of The Fixer, wherein he has added a suffix to resemble a Russian Gentile. At last he is forced to suffer for that simple reason.

Malamud has handled the subject matter of false identity in a dignified manner with an appropriate simile. Proshov brilliantly speaks in exposing Yakov’s Jewish identity by a comparison. He says that Yakov looks like a man in another’s attire. To focus the point how his altered name is irrelevant to his stature, Malamud has used this wonderful simile appropriately for the better understanding of the readers.

To test the moral stability of Yakov he is forced either to confess or to convert to be free from the punishment, but he does not entertain either. Hence Malamud exemplifies Jews as moral beings. He believes that adversity in any form will not shake their moral ethics. At the closing of the novel, when Yakov is taken to the court for trial, 166

a church bell tolled. A black bird flew out of the sky. Crow? Hawk? Or the black egg of a black eagle falling towards the carriage (TF, 326). These are the images and symbols, Malamud uses to express his concern towards the innocent victims when they are punished in the name of justice. In the last part of the novel the author seems to have used pathetic Fallacy, a literary term to highlight the view that even natural objects grieve when the innocent people are mercilessly killed.

In The Natural Malamud deals with the rise and fall of a baseball hero. Even as a boy, he had greater fascination towards baseball game because it is the national game of America, and the players were once worshipped as demigods. Malamud himself has said in an interview that he was very much interested in myth and he was waiting for the right time to use it appropriately. It became a tool at the hands of the author when he started writing his first novel, The Natural in which he does not, of course, deal with the Jewish subject matter, and the characters are not Jewish. Malamud is known for his simplicity in the expression of his views. In The Natural he has made use of many figures such as fables, parables, similes and metaphors, myths etc to highlight the concepts of suffering, endurance and moral aspiration.

He is very careful in portraying Roy, the mainstay of this novel. He takes extra care in handling Roy throughout the novel to teach the humanity a lesson that spirit is more important than stature to achieve 167 anything in the world. With an appropriate metaphor, the author projects Roy and from which the readers and critics can understand that this tiny man is going to do wonders in the baseball field. In the train, when Sam introduces Roy to Max Mercy, a sports columnist and Whammer, a baseball legend, and the three times winner of the Most Valuable Award, Whammer takes no notice of him, and further, he is not involved in the interaction. To explain how proud the most famous and the richest people are, the author has created such situations in this novel. On the other hand, he has not forgotten to say that a proud man is deaf and blind and he finally meets an unwanted end. In the very next sentence, Malamud compares Whammer, a gigantic figure to Goliath which ridiculously signals an impending fall in the near future, Sam works hard to teach a good lesson to the proud players like Whammer, with the help of Roy, who is a middle aged, emerging baseball player from the remotest part of America and the winner of prize in school level leagues.

The stature of Roy naturally reminds the readers of David, a small boy who made the gigantic Goliath roll in pain on earth like a ball. The metaphorical victory works out properly even in case of Roy and Whammer. It shows Malamud’s skill in handling the figures, forms and terns to communicate with the readers effectively. On seeing Roy, Pop Fisher, the couch, underestimates his potentials in the game, and he misconstrues that Roy’s place is not the baseball field but the old man’s home. Later his premonition does not come true.

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Malamud has used an appropriate figure, metaphor, to convey the message that Roy is an outstanding baseball player and he is going to defeat not only Whammer but also Bump, who sustains the position decades together. To exhibit the ficklemindedness of modernity, the author concentrates on a number of fables and parables in his works. To enlighten the truth to Roy, Judge Banner tells the story of a farmer who being fed up with the colour of his cow, exchanged with that of his neighbour’s, hoping that it would give more liters of milk than his. From that day onwards, prosperity gradually disappears and poverty starts taking a deep root in his family. He realizes his mistake only in his suffering. Malamud believes that those who are morally good can sustain their status for a longer time.

The novelist, further, narrates the incidents that happened in the lives of both Abraham Lincoln and Judas Iscariot for better communication with the readers, so that they will be able to discriminate good and bad. In fact, they both struggled a lot for their uplift but only the ways each chose were different. Malamud seems to suggest that virtue is finally rewarded while vice is punished. Thus the writer justifies the poetic justice by referring to parables and fables wherever necessary in his works. In one way, it may be an anecdote because these incidents are also real incidents which Malamud has shared with the readers for they should remain honest even in the hour of hardship.

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Malamud is very skillful in creating characters that represent the ideals of Malamud. Iris Lemon and Memo are two female characters who play their roles simultaneously so as to test Roy’s moral conduct. The former is the embodiment of virtue while the latter is of vice. It shows Malamud’s artistic talent in using these two extremes side by side in a well balanced manner. These two abstract elements decide the fate of a person, and the rise and fall is the question of which dominates. If vice is predominant, fall is ensured. Memo, a bookie girl pretends as if she is sincerely loving Roy after Bump’s sudden demise. In turn Roy also believes her tricks to dig a pit to make him fall into it. In the mean time Iris Lemon, a virtuous women with so much of concern for Roy appears on the scene and tries to moralise him but ultimately her efforts end in vain. Roy’s eyes search for Memo even when he is at the hands of Iris which ironically undertones the dominance of vice over virtue. Without having the capacity to discriminate between the two, Roy falls a victim to the evil forces and suffers like a worm thrown into the burning fire. At last what makes Roy know the difference between good and bad, is suffering.

Due to the handling of the concept of suffering Malamud cannot be considered as a pessimist. He uses it positively. According to Malamud suffering engenders an insight and commitment to love. It is a tool at the hands of people to measure what is right and what is wrong. Suffering makes life meaningful, and without suffering one cannot understand what is good and what is bad. At once when Iris tells Roy that there are two 170 lives, the life people learn with and the life people live with after that, he cannot comprehend it.

But at last when he suffers from stomach ache he realizes his mistake and the plot woven by the conspirators to pull him down from the status. Roy is suffering both physically and spiritually. In the baseball ground when he is asked to act as if he is playing with his Wonderboy, his victory sentiment is shattered. He happens to cut a sorry figure before millions of baseball fans because of his moral failure. Besides this, Roy is shocked to see a ridiculous portrait of himself in the newspaper, indicating his fall. At this juncture, Malamud warns that one should be careful at the height of one’s fame. In the last part of the novel Roy is left all alone, and he recalls the saying that when one is down he is down alone. Neither his attempt to be a baseball hero nor to win the heart of Memo is successful. Malamud has excellently utilized the Grail-myth strategy to teach the impacts of moral failure to the entire humanity with reference to his protagonist, Roy in The Natural. On the way back to the railway station to go back to his native station, Roy is in deep monologue that he has not learnt anything out of his past and so he has to suffer again to be a morally good person. Malamud, in his works, does not say that all should suffer to get refined, rather, he suggests that suffering helps them to understand their problems.

Generally critics view that it is very difficult to analyse Malamud’s literary standards, as he is more concerned with the moral standards of 171 literature, but when his works are closely examined it is clear that he has handled various figures, forms, terms and techniques appropriately to expose his vision in his works. Therefore he gets acknowledged not only as a writer of moral standards but also as a writer of literary standards as well in the twentieth century American literary circle.

Malamud’s works may rightly be translated into other languages in the world, so that the non-English speaking people also will be able to enrich themselves with a knowledge that victory is ensured not by killing others brutally but by winning the hearts by means of love, endurance and mutual understanding. Everyman in the world may be made to know the mystery of life that peace is nowhere but in him. One cannot go anywhere to sign peace separately, rather, he should be able to live with others with a sense of fraternity, despite the differences in any form.

In the early days of knowledge, scholars concentrated more on translating useful books on medicine, arithmetic and astronomy than literary works. Abu Yahya ibn-al-Batrig translated Euclid’s book on Geology in the third BC, and Ptolemy’s book on Astronomy in the Second BC. Later, when man attempted to translate the literary works, first importance was given to content and then to language and style. Since modernity has brought only comforts to human life on earth, it is high time to translate the literary works of moral standards of writers like Malamud on a large scale to bring the human hearts to closer quarters. CONCLUSION

Though this research study analyses the five different critical approaches such as, The Moral Approach, The Psychological Approach, The Sociological Approach, The Formalistic Approach and The Archetypal Approach, the main focus of it is on The Moral Approach in the select novels of Bernard Malamud. Right from early days, the moral effect of literature has been duly emphasised by writers like Plato, Horace, Sidney, Dr. Johnson, Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot and so on. Subsequently in the twentieth century, a group of writers, called Neo-Humanists are concerned with the ends of literature as affecting man in the realm of moral perspective. According to them, man is distinguished from the animal by his reason and his possession of ethical standards. In spite of his animalistic urges, he wishes to cultivate his human nature under the control of reason. So freedom is not only liberation from circumstances, but subjection to inner law.

The same idea takes its root in the American literature also. The contemporary American writers like Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt are more concerned with the moral standards of literature than its literary standards. Anyhow, there is a difference of opinion between these two writers in acknowledging the religious sanction of the moral impact. Paul Elmer More persists on the inevitability of religious persuasion into the moral ends of literature while Irving Babbit remains secular and religiously non-committed. T.S. Eliot criticised both of them for their 173 central weakness in not admitting the influence of both into the recommendation of moral standards. As a result, the term, Christian Humanists was coined, it may be applied to T.S. Eliot. He declared positively the necessity of relation of religion to literature. Although the Marxists seem to differ from moralists and they are the exemplars of the Social Approach, the moral view is unconsciously retained in them. Eventually Eliot makes his judgement clear in ‘Religion and Literature’ that the greatness of literature is determined by moral standards, and literary standards are, perhaps, the measuring scales to decide whether it is literature or not.

He, further, makes his view clear that he is not concerned with religious literature, but with the application of religion to literature. According to him religion and literature are like two sides of the same coin, but for which the writer should not be treating the whole subject matter of his work in a religious spirit. The religious ethics may be unconsciously incorporated in a work to teach the humanity the value of fundamental beliefs which have the capacity to shape man in a sense of civilization. The moral approach to literature is basic to human interests to exist within the confines of a group. Humanism is thus defined as an attempt to defend the classical virtues.

Among the American writers who express the traditional theological concern for the moral ends of literature, Bernard Malamud is the most distinguished. Unlike Thomas Carlyle whose focus is on the 174 technicality of literature, Malamud, in his works, insists on the moral aspects of human life. At this point it is made clear that he is an artist, not for art sake, but for humanity sake. Even critics sometimes find it difficult to analyse Malamud’s literary standards in his writings. In 1975, Malamud expressed the view that art tends toward morality and it values life. He added more that even the act of creating a form is a moral act. Morality begins with an awareness of sanctity of one’s life and the lives of others. It helps him to be identified as one of the most popular moralistic writers in contemporary American literature.

He handles the religious or theological doctrines of Judaism in relation to literature to enlighten the universality of the traditional moral ethics and beliefs. Having been a writer of Jewish background, frequently writing about Jewish subject matter, one may assume that he is a religious writer. But he is a secular artist whose Jewishness is a moral perspective, and definitely not a religious persuasion. Malamud uses Jewishness as an ethical symbol. In his works the Jew becomes a metaphor for the goodman striving to withstand the dehumanizing pressures of the modernity. His characters hold their ethical stances out of a sense of humanity, and this humanity is only unconsciously linked to their heritage.

Despite the diversity of subjects, techniques, and settings in his fiction, Malamud creates a unified moral vision based upon the values of humanism which have been central to the Western civilization since the 175 ancient Greeks. As a moralist, Malamud focuses on the necessity of retaining certain values such as the primacy of human aspiration, the power of love, the potential of meaningful suffering, the beauty of human spirit and self-sacrifice. This humanistic vision is naturally inbred in Malamud as he had well disciplined family life.

The contemporary American literature has demonstrated a moralistic thrust. The value system, carried within this tradition, has been humanistic, emphasizing such concerns as the liberation of the individual human spirit and the need for love, faith and respect in human relationships. The sources that made Malamud write novels and short stories intending to teach moral, are Hawthorne, James, Twain and Hemingway. Critics agree that the most prominent component in the works of Malamud is moral vision. As a humanist, Malamud is committed to a position that is neither Jewish nor Christian because his statements of moral purpose do not mention God. In fact he does not believe in a supernatural deity. His works do not fall within the Greek and Christian tradition of tragedy. However, in his writing Malamud draws on his understanding of all these traditions. In most of his works, he combines his humanistic moral vision with a sense of theological orientation to create General Humanism.

Besides his moral sensibility, Malamud has a positive attitude towards suffering. Once when asked about suffering as a subject matter in his writing, he replied that he is not for it, but when it is a common 176 element of human life, it is better to share such experience with one another, so that people will be able to differentiate good and bad. His fiction suggests that life for the good hearted people is a search to make unavoidable suffering meaningful. Nearly all his novels center on the suffering that results from the conflict between human freedom and human limitations. His protagonists strive to escape a horrible past, and strive to achieve a new life of comfort and fulfillment. All of them seem to have been defeated in their ambition, but they achieve a new glow of dignity, turning defeat into victory by assuming a burden of self-sacrifice. Malamud, in his fiction, develops the idea of the regenerative power of suffering by using the Jew as a symbol of conscience and moral behaviour.

In The Assistant, Frank Alpine, at one stage, believes that Morris Bober lives in order to suffer, but Morris tells him that people suffer because they all live. He, further, explains that suffering is one of the conditions of life. Morris suffers for the Law which means to do what is right, to be honest, and to be good. To Malamud, Jew is a metaphor of good man struggling to uphold moral values without yielding to evil forces, despite the dehumanizing pressures of modernity. His famous statement that all men are Jews implies that it is the human lot to suffer, and that suffering is beneficial. Therefore they should learn to accept their burdens and see in them the promise of growth and fulfillment.

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Malamud does not believe in the concept of reward after life for one’s suffering, rather, he believes that being good itself is a reward to one’s life while evil inflicts its own punishment. That is why love and compassion are so important in Malamud’s fiction. No suffering can be redeemed by any act of God or State. The only solution possible for the problem of evil is for people to respect and nourish one another now during this life. In his fiction Malamud considers the moral evolution of his characters. They grow in ethical depth through various kinds of suffering, intellectual as well as physical. Using all kinds of literary techniques, Malamud succeeds in showing the human soul, stripped bare of pretence and materialistic aspirations, in conflict with its own divided nature. In this context it is clear that spiritual conflict dwells at the center of Malamud’s moral universe. He ascertains that freedom can be achieved only through moral awareness which binds a person to others in a web of commitments.

Each of the protagonists of Malamud’s novels faces a trial of conscience or spiritual test and finally triumphs only by accepting spiritual guidance or by listening to his own troubled conscience. They first find themselves in a desperate situation, try to escape, seek for justification and reassure themselves about redemption. But their final experience is, perhaps, purification. At last they realize the fact that justification for their actions will not come from God or any other external source, but only from inside themselves. Frank Alpine and Yakov Bok win a moral victory, despite the corrupting temptation to seek material success. In the 178 realm of Malamud’s fiction, compassion, love and understanding the human values rather than physical circumstances, give meaning to one’s life. And it is a world that blends hope with despair, pain with possibility and suffering with moral growth. Based upon the day to day activities of ordinary people, Malamud creates beautiful stories that capture joy as well as sorrow of life. From this it is understood that Malamud’s protagonists are proletarians whose life style is the primary source of inspiration for the artistic creation of the author himself. In his works Malamud expresses the dignity of the human spirit searching for freedom and moral growth in the face of hardship, injustice and the anguish of life in the modern era.

Malamud represents the Jew as universal man. His celebrated statement that everyman is a Jew refers every good man either Jew or Gentile who is positively involved in human relations. In this context Malamud does not care what an artist feels about his religion or culture or what he chooses as subject matter from these sources. He has to make a choice out of it in terms of his vision of life and in terms of his art. Thus Malamud is successful in universalizing the doctrines of Judaism.

In the Talmudic set of chapters known as the Ethics of the Ancestors, the sage Hillel says that one should strive to be a decent person, especially in a society which lacks such role models, which, in Malamud’s writing, seems joined with his basic faith in the essential goodness of mankind. A character named Elazarben Arakh replies, to a question of what is most essential for the civilized life by his mentor, that 179 what one needs is a good heart. This kind of positive hope about life is reminiscent in Morris Bober who explains the meaning of being Jewish in a spirit of morality.

Frank’s conversion to Judaism is only a moral and spiritual one since doctrines play no role in it. In this case, it can be said that the moral conduct of Morris Bober has changed the attitude of Frank towards life considerably. At the funeral, the rabbi says that Morris is a true Jew for he lived in the spirit of the Law, not the word but the Law which insists upon being humane. It is really a great surprise to others because Morris has not followed the practices strictly. His understanding of Judaism is different from that of others who pretend to be lovers of mankind, ignoring the humanistic ideals in their lives.

Morris suffers greatly for his base conduct, but his conduct has transformed a drifter into a refined human being. To escape the horror of suffering he never even thinks of doing wrong things. Any form of adversity cannot shake the integrity of that old man till the last spark of his life. In the ideology of Morris, suffering is the common element of human life on earth. Everybody suffers one way or the other. Therefore one should try to overcome his obstacles being within the borders of moral constraints. Deviation from morality to escape the horror of life will certainly pave way once again to animalistic behaviour. Only because of his reasoning power man is able to control his animalistic urges. So love, 180 compassion, respect, honesty, charity are the constructive components which help man to prolong his race in the planet, earth.

Yakov Bok in The Fixer suffers for his identity. For the crime he has not committed, he is forced to undergo brutal punishment in the prison. Unable to justify the crime, the police threatens him to confess. But Yakov remains steadfast in his honesty with the full knowledge that he is going to suffer more. To get rid of the fatal punishment he has not succumbed to corrupting influence because it will badly reflect on the millions of the innocent people in the world.

Yakov’s unjust suffering in the solitary confinement has made him a man of adequate knowledge about the world. Only through suffering Yakov comes to know his contribution for the well being of the honest people like him. Unless Yakov has suffered he could not have learnt his responsibilities as a man. Finally when he is taken to the court for trial, he assassinates the Tzar for assassinating the innocent people in the name of justice. It may be a fantasy, but it is a moral and spiritual victory to Yakov. His suffering has taught him to understand what is good and what is bad. He resolves to fight against social injustice without shedding his originality and honesty. Yakov Bok, an innocent, poor village fixer, has come up to the level of understanding the problems of the people around the world and act accordingly. Malamud protagonists are men of stern morality who cannot be distracted at any stage. They are the moral 181 epitomes. Honesty, integrity and loyalty are the sources of inspiration for them to live their lives to the full.

Roy Hobbs, a base ball hero, in The Natural suddenly falls down from his status mainly because of his association with the evil forces. His passion towards the game brought him to Chicago to play with baseball demigods. Initially his honesty in dealing with men and matters around and sincerity towards the game earn a good will in the minds of millions of baseball fans across the world. Once when he starts finding the crooked ways and means to enjoy the petty pleasures, he has to face a cruel fate like his predecessors. It is certainly a moral failure.

Malamud introduces two female characters in The Natural, one vicious, and the other virtuous, to test Roy’s insight to understand the truth. As expected, he succumbs to vice. As a result of this, he loses everything. Like Grail-myth strategy, Roy’s attempt to possess Memo and to sustain the status of baseball hero, becomes an unattainable ecstasy. His mind is in search of Memo, a malicious woman even when he is with Iris Lemon whose concern for Roy is pure. Iris Lemon tells Roy that there are two lives, the life people learn with and the life they live with after that, in a sense to make him know the mystery of life. She, further, tells Roy that suffering teaches one to want the right things, and it teaches one what is right and what is wrong. Roy recalls the saying of her philosophical speculation only at the end. Having known that he has been trapped by book makers, he uncontrollably weeps for his sorry state of affairs. At 182 once he learns the truth that the root cause for his fall is his deviation from the path of morality. With reference to Roy, Malamud establishes the universal truth that one who becomes immoral, is subject to punishment in one way or the other. On returning to the railway station he thinks that he has not learnt anything out of his past and so he has to suffer again to be a morally good person to be away from destructive forces.

In The Tenants Harry Lesser and Willie Spearmint are the two budding writers who get acquainted in pursuit of art. Even though Willie is an intruder to the tenement, Harry Lesser gives him shelter on account of being a fellow writer. In their first meeting they greet each other and discuss only about their artistic creation. Later as the novel progresses they look at each other’s origin. At a point, heated argument deepens over the superiority of their ethnic identity between them. In addition to it, their friendship gets worsened over the dispute of possessing a girl, Irene Bell. At one stage they get ready for mutual destruction, forgetting the fact that they are basically human, and they should judge each other only on the basis of their conduct. The animalistic urges in them take deep root which results in killing each other violently. In this context Malamud says that each feels the anguish of the other.

They suffer in pain rolling like worms. Only through suffering they learn the art of living together as one people. Thus Malamud’s writings insist on judging people on the basis of their moral conduct. No body can be responsible for his ethnic, religious identity because being Jewish or 183

Gentile is not his choice, it is the choice of the way of the world. In The Assistant Malamud neither treats all Jews in a high order nor neglects all Gentiles. To him a moral being is capable of transforming the society where there will be no war and hatred. Other Jews like Karps and Pearls are Jews only by virtue of their birth, according to Malamud.

From the historical perspective, it is known that man has met two World Wars over the dominance of religious or ethnic identity in the modern age. Literature of each nation also reflects the clashes among the people of different factions in terms of religion, region and colour. By contrast in the realm of Malamud’s fiction, every man is treated in a spirit of equality, his Jewishness is an exalted condition of the humanistic spirit, and his Jew is a universal man. In his humanistic philosophy, moral ethics plays a pivotal role, whereas, religious identity plays no role. His prophetic vision is that life on earth is a bliss, so people should learn to live it to the full without damaging the communal harmony despite the differences. War will not be a solution to any sort of problem in the world, rather, it will aggravate the situation to worsen the human condition and ultimately devastate human race on earth.

According to Malamud, love, charity and endurance are not the components of any particular religion over another. These are the common abstract qualities which can prevent man from annihilation. From the geographical point of view, nature invented itself and man, religion is the invention of man. He should not become a prey to what he invented, 184 provided, no religion preaches war and hatred. Fighting over religious dominance is an illusion, that leads to fanatism, ultimately resulting in destruction. Mankind should not forget the universal fact that man is, first of all, a man, all other identities are only secondary. This is why he should treat the other in a spirit of equality.

Malamud has said that he is an American, a Jew, but writing for all men. He is treating the Jewish subject matter in his writings because he is familiar with it. However, he is gradually delving deep into non-Jewish experience to universalise his ideology. Malamud is a moralist who moves beyond religious borders to universalize his vision on human life. He speaks of art as sanctifying human life and freedom. Malamud, on the other hand, believes that the sum of evil is reduced each time one acts morally, and the values of one’s own life is increased each time one values other human beings. Upon receiving the National Book Award for The Magic Barrel, Malamud said that his work is an idea of dedication to the human, therefore one who does not respect the other, cannot respect his work, because he is writing in defense of the human.

Even after experiencing the horror of massive destruction by the two great World Wars, problems, wars in the name of religion, region and ethnicity, are still becoming vigorous day by day everywhere in the world, which shows that mankind has yet to learn a lot from its past. So Malamud as a writer feels his responsibility to moralise man to develop the spirit of fraternity and equality in him, in order to keep civilization 185 from destroying itself. In such a way, his visions are universally applicable and relevant to the present.

Thus this research study recognizes Malamud as a writer of stern morality who can act only like what he is, and his works concentrate on shaping man on the moral ground for the smooth functioning of the society.