SOURCE: Furman, Andrew. “Did Malamud's Jewish Vision Wane?” Yiddish 10, no. 4 (1997): 34-46.

In the following essay, Furman reviews the apparent disparities between Malamud's early and later fiction.

There are few writers more accommodating to both teacher and student than Bernard Malamud. This is not to say that Malamud's work lacks moral complexity or stylistic sophistication, but merely that Malamud scholars discerned, early on in the writer's career, what the essential Malamud was all about and were able to package this insight for students in a few pithy, easily digestible sentences. Malamud was the writer who touted regenerative suffering, the writer for whom suffering for one's family and fellow human beings was a commandment, a mitzvah. As Mark Shechner contends,

In all of contemporary literature, there is scarcely a compact, nay, covenant, between an author and critics more binding than that between Malamud and his. The latter have agreed in...