My Father is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud

by Janna Malamud Smith

Overview

Bernard Malamud was one of the most accomplished American novelists of the postwar years. From the Pulitzer Prize winner The Fixer as well as The Assistant, named one of the best "100 All–Time Novels" by Time Magazine—to mention only two of the more than a dozen published books—he not only established himself in the first rank of American writers but also took the country's literature in new and important directions.



In her signature memoir, Smith explores her renowned father's life and literary legacy. Malamud was among the most brilliant novelists of his era, and counted among his friends Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Theodore Roethke, and Shirley Jackson. Yet Malamud was also very private. Only his family has had full access to his personal papers, including letters and journals that offer unique insight into the man and his work. In her candid, evocative, and loving memoir, his daughter brings Malamud to vivid life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619021013
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	02/12/2013
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Janna Malamud Smith is the author of An Absorbing Errand: How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Mastery; A Potent Spell: Mother Love and the Power of Fear; and Private Matters: In Defense of the Personal Life. Her titles have been New York Times Notable Books and A Potent Spell was a Barnes and Noble "Discover Great New Writers" pick. She has written for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Threepenny Review, among other publications. A practicing psychotherapist, she lives with her husband and two children in Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

1 Early Stories 1

2 The Early Journals 27

3 Courtship 65

4 The Year I Was Born 82

5 Corvallis 124

6 Bennington and Its College 160

7 Bennington Girl 192

8 Thanksgiving 226

9 Heart 244

A Chronology of Bernard Malamud's Life 263

Appendix: Other Voices 266

Notes 283

Acknowledgments 291

Editorial Reviews

Praise for My Father Is a Book

"Janna Malamud Smith penetrates to the soul of a great writer's life and family. . .Malamud is alive in this memoir – and in his daughter's stirring gift." —James Carroll

"This book is a must for anyone interested in the work of Bernard Malamud, or, indeed, the writer's life." —Mary Gordon

"Courageous. . . intimate. . . Smith is a passionate and uncompromising truth–teller, and it is by telling the truth that she has honored her father and mother as well as her readers." —Jonathan Kirsch, L.A. Times

"Keen and nuanced. . . A profound portrait of a loving father, a writer whose struggles with his own frailties fueled enduring works of literature." —Publishers Weekly (Starred review)

"My Father Is a Book does what the best reminiscences of artists do: It leads us back to the work." —Edith Pearlman, The Boston Globe

"At once loving and lovely, a book worthy of the man." —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

"This beautifully written book should do much to rekindle interest in Malamud's work." —Heller McAlpin, Newsday

"Deserving. . . generous–spirited. . . compelling." —Steve Weinberg, San Francisco Chronicle

"[Smith] tenderly fills in the missing pieces of a man who exists as much on the page as he does in her memory." —Vogue

"Excellent. . .[a traditional] biography would be hard–pressed to match the emotional complexity and intensity that make this memoir hum with energy." —Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Moving, unostentatiously eloquent... Analytical without being acrimonious, honest without wallowing in self–preening exposure, this is a wise, generous book full of insights..." —Merle Rubin, Christian Science Monitor

"Candid yet sensitive. . . exquisitely captures ‘the particular psychic pleasure and confusion' of being the daughter of novelist/short–story writer Bernard Malamud. . . The author amply demonstrates that she has inherited her father's unblinking moral scrutiny and sympathy for the yearning heart." —Kirkus Reviews

"Smith's own superior writing in My Father Is a Book beautifully evokes her father's spirit and life, proving that talent runs in the family." —Rocky Mountain News

From the Publisher

No biography of Malamud, one of the great Jewish-American writers, has appeared since his death in 1986, at age 72, so his daughter's beautiful memoir offers the first intimate look at his life. And it is intimate, drawing on correspondence and early journals that describe Malamud's struggle to define himself as a writer and express the anguish that afflicted him all his life: insecurity about his talent, sadness and shame over his childhood as the son of an unsuccessful and unimaginative immigrant grocer and a mother who went mad. Smith (Private Matters) is herself an accomplished writer, bringing a keen and nuanced intelligence to explain her father's efforts to transcend these feelings and transmute them into fiction; she offers a fascinating look, for example, at how Malamud's discovery of Freud helped him grasp that "grand moral struggles belong to the common man as much as to the hero." Refreshingly, Smith is more interested in understanding than judging her father, even when relating his affair, in the early '60s, with one of his Bennington College students; she reserves her rage for the "louche" environment-ruled by "patriarchal harem entitlement"-in which such affairs were a matter of course. Smith offers a profound portrait of a loving father, a writer whose struggles with his own frailties fueled enduring works of literature. (Mar. 15) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Writer Smith (Private Matters) has waited 20 years to tell the tale of her father's life and the ways in which it intertwined with her own. This delay has given her some perspective and emotional distance from her lofty subject, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Bernard Malamud. Calling on her father's letters and journals, his works of fiction, and her own memories, she recounts the seminal events in Malamud's life-his own father's defeatist attitude, his college teaching positions, the prevalence of mental illness in his family, and his unstinting, almost obsessive dedication to his writing. And she provides a fascinating and thorough account of the events that shaped and found their way into his fiction. Occasionally, her psychological explanations and metaphors are a bit contrived, but for the most part they help elucidate the themes present throughout Malamud's work. Not only does Smith give us an insider's view of her father's life, but she also shares what it was like growing up the child of a driven and famous father. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/05.]-Gina Kaiser, Univ. of the Sciences Lib., Philadelphia Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Candid yet sensitive, this memoir by clinical social worker Smith (A Potent Spell, 2003, etc.) exquisitely captures "the particular psychic pleasure and confusion" of being the daughter of novelist/short-story writer Bernard Malamud. Amusing, hardworking and decent, Malamud (1914-86) was also burdened by early poverty and an unhappy childhood. His father, an unsuccessful Brooklyn grocer, was the model for long-suffering Morris Bober in The Assistant; mental illness plagued both his mother and brother. While summoning all his ability and strength for writing, Malamud expected similar devotion to his needs from wife Ann and their two children. Smith rejoiced in her father's presence as a girl, but as an adolescent and adult, she "found his need for me oppressive, felt angry at his oversize, insistent presence." Complicating matters was Malamud's midlife affair with one of his Bennington College students, which sparked retaliatory flings by Ann and Janna (the latter, fittingly, with a married high-school teacher roughly her father's age). The novelist's daughter also silently seethed over the peculiar ways incidents in her life served as fodder for his late-career novel, Dubin's Lives. Nevertheless, the portrait here reveals mutual affection and commitment that, while strained, never broke. Smith's recollections of her father's contemporaries-Lillian Hellman, Howard Nemerov, Philip Roth, C.P. Snow and Shirley Jackson-are consistently trenchant. Even more memorable are passages from Malamud's own journals and letters, which sometimes unfold in a wry and chatty voice but more often are ruminative. (On his parents' influence, he writes, "I think I translated their endurance into mydiscipline.") Above all, Smith enhances our understanding of how the larger themes of Malamud's fiction mirror his concern with imperfect people balancing moral responsibility against the desire to transcend pitiless circumstance. The author amply demonstrates that she has inherited her father's unblinking moral scrutiny and sympathy for the yearning heart.

Kirkus Reviews