SOURCE: Aarons, Victoria. “‘In Defense of the Human’: Compassion and Redemption in Malamud's Short Fiction.” Studies in American Fiction 20, no. 1 (spring 1992): 57-73.

In the following essay, Aarons explores elements of Jewish ethics of compassion in Malamud's short stories.

“You bastard, don't you understand what it means human?” With this challenge, Malamud's desperate character Mendel, in “Idiots First,” demands from Ginzburg, the anthropomorphized figure of death, a commitment to compassion and pity.¹ Mendel's defiance of death's merciless indifference reaffirms rachmones, the Yiddish term for compassion, a fundamental concern of Jewish ethics.² Rachmones is emphatically preoccupied with human motives and choices. It is the singular distinctive feature of Malamud's authorial voice. Moreover, this emphatic plea for compassion is nowhere more apparent than in his short stories, where formal constraints show his characters in the stark, unadorned, and precarious conditions that define and delimit their moral choices. As Mark Shechner points...