Title: A Post-Holocaust Reading of Jewish Heroism in Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer, “Man in the Drawer,” and “An Apology” Author: Sajjad Mahboobi Affiliation: Islamic Azad University, Karaj Branch Year:2015 Abstract: This thesis has two major purposes: to examine the concept of Jewish heroism in Bernard Malamud’s selected works, and to demonstrate that despite denying it, the author is foremost concerned with Jewish, rather than universal, issues. It is argued that the main characters of Malamud’s fiction, especially in the discussed narratives, portray heroism through resistance, morality, and the responsibility they accept toward their people, while they suffer inevitably and arouse emotion in the reader on miseries and pains of Jews. In light of a truth- oriented historicist approach, the researcher argues that Malamud’s characters are time-bound and benefit from the postwar Holocaust-saturated America and the considerable sympathy that Jews drew especially in those years. While these characters associate the non-Jewish reader mainly with two things, Jew the innocent and the alleged Holocaust, they help American Jews, in particular, rise again from the so-called Auschwitz ashes and free from Jew-the-victim mentality, intensified by the Holocaust propaganda, through displaying heroism of resistance. They also help revive qualities of Jewishness that were fading in the increasingly assimilated postwar perio Keywords: : Post-Holocaust Jewish American fiction, Jewish suffering, Jewish heroism, Jew-the-victim mentality References: Aarons, Victoria. “Malamud, Bernard.” The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction. Gen. ed. Brian W. Shaffer. 3 vols. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 681-684. PDF. Abrams, M. H., and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 10th ed. Boston, MA: Wadsworth, 2012. Print. Abramson, Edward A. “Bernard Malamud and the Jews: An Ambiguous Relationship.” Yearbook of English Studies 24 (1994): 146-156. PDF. ---. 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