In Bernard Malamud's writing,… Jewishness is more of a literary device than it is a religious, historical, or sociological representation. Malamud's use of Jewish characters and subjects is metaphorical and idiosyncratic, and it must be understood within the context of his fiction without recourse to external sources and familiar assumptions; further, Malamud's metaphor of Jewishness has changed considerably since his first stories were published, and being Jewish in a recent novel like The Tenants no longer means what it did in an earlier work like The Assistant…. [The] theme of Jewishness is of central importance in many of Malamud's stories and in all of his novels after the first, The Natural (1952)….

Many of Malamud's early works are predicated upon the protagonist's necessary acceptance of his Jewish identity. This is perhaps most readily seen in A New Life (1961), a novel otherwise devoid of Jewish content, where the acceptance by...