Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1914 to Russian Jewish immigrants named Max and Bertha Malamud. He later described his parents as "gentle, honest, kindly people." Max, the manager of a small grocery store, was the model for Morris Bober, the grocer protagonist of Malamud's second novel, The Assistant (1957). Malamud went to high school in Brooklyn and attended the City College of New York, graduating in 1936. In 1942 he received a Master of Arts degree from Columbia University.

Malamud did not begin writing seriously until after World War II, when the horrors of the Holocaust became known to the international community. The revelation seems to have made Malamud more actively aware of his own Jewish identity. "I was concerned with what Jews stood for," he recalled, "with their getting down to the bare bones of things. I was concerned with . . . how Jews felt they had...