T 1290.pdf - Pondicherry University DSpace Portal

None of Malamud's protagonists believes ininstitutionalized religion like the protagonist of theproletarian novel. Alplne's conversion to Judaism at the end ofAssistant 1s not qulte motivated by religion as by thefatherly, humane ethics of Morris Bober. For ~ o k in !J& w,~ o d is always " In the outhouse, that's where he is ". (~r.16)Malamud's consistent and extensive employment of the comic inhis novels, llke the symbolic and mythlc elements, resemblesthe form of the proletarian novel. An agnostrc humanist,Malamud has unflinching faith In man's abllrty to choose andmake "hls own world" from the "usable past". Thls constitutesthe Malamudlan transmutatlon of the revolutionary optlmismderived from the traditions of the proletarian novels of the1930's.The traditional Jewish folk flgure-the "Schlemiel". thewell-meanlng bungler, the intrinsic loser, the chronic victimand sufferer has been successfully used from the days of thegreat Ylddish writers of the vanished East-European ghetto -Sholom Aleichem, Leibush Peretz and Mendele Mocher Sforim tothe recent eodern Jewish- American writers such as Saul Bellow,Philip Roth, Bruce Jay Friedman and Isaac Bashevls Singer whowrites In Ylddish. Bernard Malamud resembles most in respect ofhls characterization Sholom Aleichem. What Malamud's characterhave in common with Aleichemis is the problems of poverty, the