Another MULSA book sale remainder! This collection of short stories, published in 1958, won the National Book Award the following year. In 1956 Malamud spent a year in Rome working on the manuscript for this collection, and three of the stories are set in Italy as a result - "The Last Mohican", "Behold the Key", and "The Lady of the Lake". In fact, "Behold the Key" seems almost autobiographical in its description of a struggling writer's attempts to find cheap lodging for himself and his family in Rome. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Malamud incorporates his Jewish heritage into much of his work; of the thirteen stories in the compilation, ten deal with the life of New York Jews. Malamud's characters, mostly poor Jewish immigrants, speak in a beautiful mish-mash of fractured English and Yiddish. The subject of the Holocaust comes up often in these stories - the loss of loved ones, and in some cases, guilt at having survived unscathed while others did not. The main character in "The Last Mohican", Fidelman, is accosted by a Jewish refugee who almost demands assistance based solely on the fact that both are Jewish. Even after very poor treatment by the refugee, Fidelman continues to feel an obligation to this survivor of horrors that Fidelman himself avoided through the lucky coincidence of growing up in America.
I enjoyed most of the stories in the collection; if I had one complaint, it was the fact that many of the stories ended without a resolution of the central problem. (Strangely, the story I enjoyed the most, "Behold the Key", is one of these stories that ends too soon.)
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