SOURCE: Bilik, Dorothy Seidman. “Malamud's Secular Saints and Comic Jobs.” In Immigrant-Survivors: Post-Holocaust Consciousness in Recent Jewish American Fiction, pp. 53-80. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981.

In the following essay, Bilik explores the ways in which Malamud diverges from the conventions of the majority of post-Holocaust Jewish fiction.

No contemporary American writer has written about immigrants and survivors more frequently or more imaginatively than has Bernard Malamud. His fictional world is peopled with Diasporans of all kinds but, unlike Cahan's assimilated Levinsky, Malamud's characters embody significant fragments of the Jewish past. Most frequently Malamud portrays remnants of the earlier generation of immigrants, unwilling refugees from American Jewish affluence, survivors of an older Jewish community who retain unassimilated Jewish values and who do not relinquish their accents and their anachronistic occupations. Although Malamud includes some survivors of the Holocaust in his fictional Ellis Island, he has not yet directly...