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Chapter 12 REFLECTIONS ON TRANSMOGRIFIED YIDDISH ARCHETYPES IN FICTION BY BERNARD MALAMUD S. Lillian Kremer Folkloric characters of Yiddish literature have been successfully transmogrified by modern American writers who have transplanted treasures of the traditional canon to the American literary landscape.1 Among the most successful of these contemporary translators is Bernard Malamud who has created a body of fiction incorporating stock figures from Yiddish literature and folklore-recasting them, reclothing them in modern dress, to explore themes of spiritual crisis. T'shuvah, turning to God or the right moral path, central to the Jewish principle of redemption, is a fundamental concept in Malamud's affirmative fictions. "The Magic Barrel" and two stories from Pictures ofFidelman, "The Last Mohican" and "Pictures of the Artist," evidence derivative Yiddish character constructs enacting Jewish themes. Although readers of twentieth-century American literature have passing acquaintance with the shadchan (matchmaker) and schnorrer (beggar) and have become conversant with the schlemiel (fool, simpleton) who has garnered substantial fictional treatment and critical analysis in Ruth Wisse's The Schlemiel as Modern Hero and Sanford Pinsker's The Schlemiel as Metaphor , the figure known as the tzaddik (righteous man) and the variant lamed 123 124 THEMA TIC THREADS vov tzaddik (one of thirty-six legendary saints) generally elude critical scrutiny in their nontraditional transformations and settings, and remain detached from their literary precursors in critical commentaries on Malamud 's work.2 According to Jewish legend, as Philip Birnbaum explains, the lamed vov tzaddikim, thirty-six anonymous righteous men inhabiting the world in each generation, are described as being extremely modest, "concealing their identity behind a mask of ignorance and poverty and earning their livelihood by the sweat of their brow" (306). In the folk tales, these figures, also known as nistarim (concealed), emerge from their self-imposed obscurity to avert threatened disasters perpetrated against the Jewish people. As soon as their tasks are accomplished, they return to anonymity in the Jewish community. Each is unknown to, and independent of, the others, and when one dies another appears in his place.3 While the persona has been used in twentieth-century prose in its traditional form of communal service, either warding off an enemy or giving solace to the suffering as for example in the prize-winning French novel, The Last of the Just, in Jewish American fiction the transformed character plays on an intimate stage of personal spiritual drama. Paralleling the traditional hidden saints, the American secularized incarnations are common men, boorish, yet verbally adept, materializing when needed, whether or not their presence is desired . Relentless until success is achieved, they then depart as mysteriously as they appeared. Both Ita Sheres and Marcia Gealy argue persuasively that there are direct parallels, if not direct influences on Malamud's writing from biblical and talmudic texts. Analyzing Malamud's novels from the perspective of biblical and Jewish mystical thought, Sheres identifies three "keys" to understanding the Jewish nature of his work: the Akedah, Abraham's sacrifice ; the legend of the lamed vov tzaddikim, and Isaac Luria's "mystical interpretation of Jewish exile" reading intense suffering for a purpose.4 Sheres argues that "If the concept of change by individual righteousness and isolation [associated with the legend of the thirty-six hidden saints] is carried over to Malamud's novels one clearly realizes that the basic premise of the main protagonists is positive and that their decisions to attempt to transform their fates are closely related to a deep belief in the essential benevolence and grandeur of man."s Similarly, Marcia Gealy identifies some of Malamud's best short stories with the major teachings of Hasidism, isolating "the need to journey inward to achieve salvation, the importance of identification with a holy man or teacher, the primacy of love, ... the reality of evil, ... [and] the Hasidic belief in the sanctity of the tale, the notion that a story could have potency to effect change ..."6 Gealy enumerates characteristics Malamud shares with Hasidic storytellers-the same juxtaposition of sacred and profane, the same fusion of Jewish past REFLECTIONS ON TRANSMOGRIFIED YIDDISH ARCHETYES IN FICTION 125 and present-but judges that "in the best sense of the tradition, Malamud, ... has broken away and found his own distinctive voice.,,7 Although Malamud read neither Hebrew nor Yiddish, he understood spoken Yiddish, attended Yiddish theater, and, in an interview with Curt Leviant, acknowledged that he had read classical Yiddish and Hebrew writers in translation, among them Mendele Mokher Seforim, Sholom Aleichem, I. L. Peretz...

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