“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