“All men are Jews,” was one of Bernard Malamud’s more enigmatic statements. What exactly did he mean by this epigram? As the Jewish shopkeeper in Malamud’s first novel, The Assistant, says, “If you live, you suffer,” and that is the dominant theme throughout Malamud’s fiction. Suffering is the essence of life, the mark of what it is to be human, and this has been especially true for the Jewish people. “Being born a Jew meant being vulnerable to history, including its worst errors,” as Yakov Bok reflects in The Fixer. Frank Alpine, the goyisher hero—or antihero—of The Assistant, states the same thing from the outsider’s point of view: “That’s what they live for … to suffer. And the one that has got the biggest pain in the gut and can hold onto it the longest without running to the toilet is the best Jew. No wonder they got on his nerves.”

Malamud’s early life gave rise to this grim philosophy. He was born in 1914 in Brooklyn, to parents who eked out a living as proprietors of a marginal late-night grocery store: a business doomed to failure in the dawn of the supermarket era, and one that he portrayed unforgettably in his fiction. His brother was a schizophrenic, and his mother died when he was fifteen, after which, he said, “I had a stepmother and a thin family life.” Malamud graduated from City College during the Depression and went to work as a teacher-in-training in Brooklyn, later becoming a postal clerk and eventually a civil servant for the Census Bureau in Washington. His literary career was forged by dint of long hours of writing put in during the evenings and on weekends; his stories began to be published in little magazines in the early 1940s, and his first novel, The Natural, came out in 1952. By the time of his death in 1986, Malamud was generally regarded as one of the foremost writers in the United States and had received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Academy’s Gold Medal for Fiction, and, in Italy, the Primo Mondadello.

In spite of the glittering prizes, Malamud remained an admirably modest figure throughout his life, acquiring none of the usual pretensions of the great writer or elder statesman. In Philip Roth’s engaging memorial of Malamud in The New York Times Book Review, Roth recalled his bemusement at first meeting the older man whose work he revered: Malamud, or “Bern,” turned out to be superficially indistinguishable from Roth’s father’s nebbishy buddies, the New Jersey accountants and insurance salesmen whose chatter made up the background music of Roth’s childhood memories. Malamud did not leave his origins behind; they remained an integral part of him and inspired many of his novels and stories.

The author of eight novels, Malamud also wrote fifty-five short stories, which have now been united in a single volume. The Complete Stories begins with “Armistice” (1940), a wartime tale in which a Jewish grocer in Brooklyn listens with increasing distress to the news from France and chafes at the gloating of a chauvinistically Teutonic meat vendor; it ends with two experimental pieces, “fictive biographies” or “biographed stories” about Alma Mahler and Virginia Woolf, both published in 1984. The stories in between demonstrate the development of an original sensibility as it moves from its rootedness in a specific time and place, its exact and poetic rendition of the heartbreaking lives of poor immigrants in New York, into a broad and masterly imagination at home in every milieu.

It is certain that Malamud was a serious writer, one of the most serious in American literature; but “Leid macht auch lachen,” as one of his characters says, and humor is never too far from the surface of even his most tragic tales. He was the first important writer to take the Yiddish-accented vernacular of American Jews beyond the realm of Borscht Belt shtick and turn it into a literary language, inventing, in the process, a totally characteristic style of dialogue that is rich in subtle humor however fraught the subject under discussion. Malamud was thus able to mingle tragedy and farce, not only in content but in style as well, achieving an enviable state of artistic grace.

Malamud’s very best stories are the ones that successfully fuse these elements: for example “The Jewbird” (1963), which Richard Gilman in his memorial piece for Malamud declared to be his best, a judgment with which I am inclined to agree. In this contemporary, facetious fable, a skinny bird with “frazzled black wings” flies into the Lower East Side apartment of the Cohen family. “Gevalt, a pogrom!,” it exclaims upon landing on the dining table; it proclaims itself to be Schwartz, “a Jewbird” who is fleeing “Anti-Semeets.” He begs for asylum, promising that he doesn’t eat much—“If you haven’t got matjes, I’ll take schmaltz”—and saying that he is old and needs a roof over his head. “You know how it is at my age. I like the warm, the windows, the smell of cooking. I would also be glad to see once in a while the Jewish Morning Journal and have now and then a schnapps because it helps my breathing, thanks God.” Edie and little Maurie welcome the bird, but Cohen himself, a big angry man, feels that the bird is crafty and resents his presence in his home, although the bird proves his usefulness by helping Maurie with his schoolwork and improving the child’s grades. Eventually, when his wife and son’s backs are turned, the sinister Cohen succeeds in ejecting the unhappy bird, who meets a violent death at the hands of “Anti-Semeets.”

In this way Malamud uses the ancient convention of the fable to bring the simplicity and the immediacy of direct moral choice to the lives of his very contemporary characters. Another story employing such a device is “Angel Levine” (1955). Manischevitz, a middle-aged tailor, has recently suffered the loss both of his children and his business. Now his wife, Fanny, appears to be mortally ill. Manischevitz prays to God for help, and not long afterwards a black man visits him, introducing himself as Alexander Levine. “You said Levine?,” Manischevitz asks; “You are maybe Jewish?” Assenting, Levine adds, “I have recently been disincarnated into an angel. As such, I offer you my humble assistance.” Manischevitz is understandably skeptical, but as Fanny continues to waste away he gives in and runs Alexander Levine to earth at a Harlem hotspot. Eventually, he takes the risk of seeming like an idiot and asks for his help. Levine sprouts wings and ascends into the sky; Manischevitz hurries home to his wife, now miraculously restored and wielding a dust mop. “A wonderful thing, Fanny,” he cries, echoing centuries of surprise encounters. “Believe me, there are Jews everywhere.”

It is a light story that has its later, and darker, counterpart, “The Silver Crown” (1972). Albert Gans’s father is dying of cancer. Albert comes across a business card that says in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English, “Heal the Sick. Save the Dying. Make a Silver Crown.” Curious, he tracks down Lifschitz, a retired rabbi living in seedy circumstances. Lifschitz produces fulsome testimonials and states that the crown will cost $986. Albert finds the price a bit stiff, and he is far from convinced that the cure will be efficacious. “Suppose I am a non-believer?,” he asks. “Will the crown work if it’s ordered by a person who has his doubts?” But the rabbi reassures him. “Doubts we all got. We doubt God and God doubts us. This is natural on account of the nature of existence. Of this kind doubts I am not afraid so long as you love your father.” Albert goes along with the plan, but he is never really pleased with it, regretting the money and fearing that Lifschitz will prove to be a charlatan. In the end, thrown into uncontrollable turmoil by his unaddressed fears and rage, he rejects his father: “He hates me, the son of a bitch, I hope he croaks.” And the father, in his faraway hospital bed, does so.

All of the stories have religious implications, but Malamud’s version of religion is decidedly a moral rather than a mystic one. His characters tend to be at turning points in their lives, faced with morally momentous decisions, and they are symbolically either saved or damned according to the course of action they choose. Malamud’s emphasis on moral choice is strongly redolent of the great Russian novelists he admired, especially Dostoyevsky.

Not all of Malamud’s ideas are equally effective. He is certainly not immune to sentimentality, as is evident in “The Lady of the Lake,” a corny and simplistic fairy tale. Henry Levin, a young American visiting Italy, is entranced by the magical Isola del Dongo in Lake Como. Escaping from the tourist group to which he is attached, he meets a beautiful and mysterious girl, who introduces herself as Isabella del Dongo, daughter of the island’s ancient family. When she unexpectedly asks Henry whether he is Jewish, he denies it, believing that his background would be a liability with her. The two fall in love, but predictably, the girl turns out to be no aristocrat but the daughter of the island’s poor Jewish gardener, and although she loves Henry she is determined to marry no one but a Jew; in denying his identity, Henry loses his dream.

Malamud also has a habit of spinning off into slightly more baroque and portentous extremes than his vivid characters, grounded so solidly in the earth, can sustain. This is especially noticeable in the six stories that were originally published together as Pictures of Fidelman. Fidelman (which, it should be noted, was the maiden name of Malamud’s mother) is a would-be painter and art historian who moves to Rome to write what he is certain will be a groundbreaking study of Giotto. In the first story, “The Last Mohican” (1958), he no sooner sets foot on Italian soil than he is accosted by Susskind, a fellow American gone obviously to seed. Susskind greets Fidelman with a “Shalom,” and Fidelman hesitantly returns the greeting, “uttering the word— so far as he recalled—for the first time in his life.” This observation alone is enough to set Fidelman up as an unevolved and unrooted character by Malamud’s standards, and the rest of the story sequence is concerned with tearing apart Fidelman’s second-hand ideas about life and art and his ill-constructed ego, and re-creating him artistically, sexually, and spiritually. Although the stories are full of intelligence and frequent instances of the absurd, sometimes wild humor in which Malamud specialized, Malamud’s conceits eventually become exaggerated and pretentious, leaving the imperfect and human Fidelman far behind.

The real question about Malamud, to paraphrase the old commercial for Levy’s Rye Bread, is: Do you have to be Jewish to enjoy Bernard Malamud? The answer is a qualified “no.” You don’t have to be; but, as one of Malamud’s own characters might say, it couldn’t hurt. There is a very real sense in which Jewishness, the fact and essence of being Jewish, takes center stage in Malamud’s stories, and it can make a gentile reader feel slightly disoriented and out-of-touch. Such is not the case for gentile readers of Roth or Bellow; nor, I would venture, are readers of Updike who do not happen to be Yankee Protestants similarly handicapped. Nevertheless, Malamud’s broad and generous vision of human life, his remarkable skill at making us recognize the plight of the Jew as the plight of mankind, marks him as one of the most important writers of his generation, not only in our own country but throughout the world.