The Magic Barrel

Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), a master of the short story whose tragicomic works blend modernism with fable, realism with fantasy, and American English with Yiddish idiom, is often bookended with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth as one of the “three horsemen” of the so-called American Jewish Renaissance of the later 20th century. Like the works of Bellow and Roth, Malamud’s stories and novels introduced a range of Jewish characters, concerns, humor, and vernacular into the forefront of modern American literature, most notably when his short story collection The Magic Barrel won the National Book Award in 1959. However, unlike Bellow and Roth, Malamud infuses his terse, fable-like accounts of the sufferings of ordinary people with ripples of fantasy and mysticism that evoke the shtetls of Europe and the “folk terrain” of Isaac Bashevis Singer, I. L. Peretz, and other authors steeped in the Yiddish tradition.

Although Malamud was born in the United States, he spoke Yiddish before learning English, for he was the son of immigrants from Ukraine. Consequently, the characters and authorial voice of many of his stories are shaded with “Yinglish,” a hybrid of English and Yiddish words and speech patterns.