Idiots First
Bernard Malamud
 The author
 Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1914
 American author of novels and short
stories. Along with Saul Bellow and Philip
Roth, he was one of the great American
Jewish authors of the 20th century.
 Malamud’s fiction touches lightly upon
mythic elements and explores themes
like isolation, class, and the conflict
between bourgeois and artistic values.
Idiots First
Bernard Malamud
 The author
 His prose, like his settings, is an artful
pastiche of Yiddish-English locutions,
punctuated by sudden lyricism.
 Writing in the second half of the
twentieth century, Malamud was well
aware of the social problems of his day:
rootlessness, infidelity, abuse, divorce,
and more. But he also depicted love as
redemptive and sacrifice as uplifting.
Idiots First
Bernard Malamud
 The author
 “Short stories, perhaps better than other
forms of fiction, point up the haste and
heaviness of the odds against us, and our
million daily miraculous escapes from the
worst of fates and the best of insights.”
 “I write a book or a short story three times.
Once to understand her, the second time to
improve her prose, and a third to compel her
to say what it still must say.”
 “Life is a tragedy full of joy.”
Idiots First
Bernard Malamud
 Setting
 Darkness and coldness
 Eerie, enigmatic occurrence
 Small, deserted park; “a leafless twobranched tree”; “The thick right branch
was raised, the thin left one hung down.”
Idiots First
Bernard Malamud
 Major characters
 Mendel: A sick old man, informed by
Ginsburg the day before that he will die
the next day, desparately tries to send
his "half-wit" son Isaac to his eightyone-year-old Uncle Leo in California. He
does not have enough money to buy a
train ticket for Isaac. He needs "thirtyfive dollars" more.
 Isaac: Mendel's son, thirty-nine,
mentally retarded, who seems to keep
eating peanuts.
Idiots First
Bernard Malamud
 Major characters
 Ginzburg: The death, personified in the end
of the story as “uniformed ticket collector,”
who would not let Mendel take Isaac to the
train to California because it is “Already past
twelve.”
 Mr. Fishbein: A rich Jew who won't give
Mendel the money he needs: “Private
contributions I don't make – only to
institutions.”
 Yascha: A poor old rabbi, who gives Mendel
“a fur-lined caftan”: “I got my old one. Who
needs two coats for one body?”
Idiots First
Bernard Malamud
 Chronology of Events
 On a Friday night in November: Mendel awakes in
fright at suppertime. The clock has stopped. He
takes Isaac to a pawnshop and gets eight dollars
for his "worn gold watch." Then they go to Mr.
Fishbein's to ask for thirty-five dollars in vain. At a
park, Mendel is almost mugged. He took a trolley
with Isaac to a former friend, who turns out to be
dead for years.
 At about eleven: Mendel thinks of getting money
for his furniture at the pawnshop but it is closed.
Mendel goes in a synagogue and calls for a rabbi.
A sexton tells him that he is asleep in his house
next door. Mendel goes to the rabbi's house.
Despite his wife's protest, he gives Mendel his new
coat. Mendel practically snatches it away from his
wife and runs with Isaac. “After them noiselessly
ran Ginsburg.”
Idiots First
Bernard Malamud
 Chronology of Events
 Around midnight: Somehow Mendel has
changed the rabbi's coat into money and
buys the train ticket “in the only booth
open.” He hurries to the gate to the
platform with Isaac. Ginzburg appears in
the uniform of a ticket collector and
stops them. After the argument and
struggle, Mendel manages to board Isaac
on the train. “When the rain was gone,
Mendel ascended the stairs to see what
had become of Ginsburg.”
Idiots First
Bernard Malamud
 Themes
 Filial love — a father's devotion to his
mentally retarded son
 Financial acquisitiveness of the upper
class
 Pain and struggle of the underprivileged
people
 Fearlessness in the face of death
Idiots First
Bernard Malamud
 Symbol – Ginzburg
 Death is portrayed as an evil stalker,
who tries to keep the main character
Mendel from getting his son to a family
member, to take care of him, before he
dies. Ginzburg (Death) takes the form of
many characters in the story, all of which
hinder Mendel from completing his task.
In the end of the story Ginzburg has
Mendel at his mercy, at the gate to the
train, and looks into the eye's of Mendel
and can see the fear he has of not being
able to take care of his son.
Idiots First
Bernard Malamud
 Motifs
 The tree
 Contributing to the story’s refined sense of
terror, vaguely surrealistic dream landscape
 Mendel’s desperately fearful imagination
 Demonstration of Ginzburg’s power and his
ability to strike terror
 The clock/watch
 Reminder for Mendel that his time is
running out
Idiots First
Bernard Malamud
 Malamud and the Jewish writing
 “Every man is a Jew though he may not know it,”
Bernard Malamud has said. For him, this notion of
the Jew as Everyman comprises “the primal
knowledge . . . that life is tragic, no matter how
sweet or apparently full.”
 Beginning with God’s gift of “a spirituality that
raises man to his highest being,” the Jewish drama
persists through betrayal of that gift, destruction,
exile, and “an oftentimes agonizing defense” of
moral selfhood, human responsibility, even
occasional joy. As for the local version of this
drama, Malamud sees the ethical ideal of
compassion echoed in American democratic
principles, and he sees Jewish historical experience
as “a rich and tragic drama of the self-realization
of a people”, akin to this country's own
self-realization.
Idiots First
Bernard Malamud
 Malamud and the Jewish writing
 Malamud (in 1966) thinks it “a lucky
break to be a member of a minority
group . . . in America.” “Everyone has a
heritage,” he says, “but the Jews because
of their everlasting struggle to maintain
theirs, are especially conscious of it.”
However debatable Malamud's inclination
to “see the Jew as universal man,” it can
justify and deepen his fiction.
Idiots First
Bernard Malamud
 Further readings
 Novels
 The Natural (1952)
 The Fixer (1966) (Pulitzer Prize)
 Short Stories
 “The Mourners” (1955)
 “The Jewbird” (1963)