SOURCE: Condé, Mary. “‘Pichipoi’ in Mavis Gallant's ‘Malcolm and Bea.’” Journal of the Short Story in English/Les Cahiers de la Nouvelle, no. 32 (spring 1999): 77-86.

In the following essay, Condé explores Gallant's treatment of memory, history, and identity in her story “Malcolm and Bea.”

Mavis Gallant is a writer profoundly influenced by the Holocaust, by “the first pictures of death camps” which, she wrote in 1972, “stopped a whole generation in its tracks” (Gallant 1972 196). In her “Paris Notebook” of the student riots of 1968 she records the seventeen-year-old Barbara's remark that the German students who are being deported are needed: “… Oui, nous avons besoin des allemands.” Gallant comments,

Her mother, who spent the war years in a concentration camp, says nothing. I feel as if I were watching two screens simultaneously.

(Gallant 1968 15)

In a review of Günter Grass from 1973 she recalls that he

had been a prisoner of war...