The Magic Worlds of Bernard Malamud

Chapter 13. Not True Although Truth: The Holocaust's Legacy in Three Malamud Stories: "The German Refugee," "Man in the Drawer," and "The Lady of the Lake"

Chapter 13 NOT TRUE ALTHOUGH TRUTH The Holocaust's Legacy in Three Malamud Stories: "The German Refugee," "Man in the Drawer," and "The Lady of the Lake" Eileen H. Watts In "Malamud's Jews and the Holocaust Experience" Lawrence Langer roundly criticizes Malamud for infusing his view of humanity into his novels and stories that evoke the Holocaust, either literally or figuratively. Jews in death camps, Langer argues, were not given "the gift of suffering" enjoyed by Morris Bober and Yakov Bok (145), and so are not realistic representations of the unspeakable powerlessness and hopelessness experienced by Holocaust victims, both the living and the dead. In contrast to the surreal grotesqueness of the Holocaust experience, Malamud's insistence on the intrinsic value and dignity of the individual would clearly offend Langer. However, three years before his death, Malamud told Joel Salzberg: "I am compelled to think about [the Holocaust] as a man rather than a writer. Someone like Elie Wiesel who had first-hand knowledge of the experience is in a better position to write about it than I. He has become a voice for those people who could not communicate their personal experiences and emotions" (Lasher, 129). And ten years earlier, in a written interview with Leslie and Joyce Field, Malamud responded in the following way to a 139 140 THEMA TIC THREADS question on the genesis of The Fixer: "Since I was interested in how some men grow as men in prison I turned to the Beilis case.... The Fixer is largely an invention ... However, in it I was able to relate feelingfully to the situation of the Jews in Czarist Russia partly because of what I knew about the fate of the Jews in Hitler's Germany" (Lasher, 38). It seems slightly disingenuous to criticize someone for not doing what he clearly did not set out to do. Malamud's stated intention is not to represent the Holocaust experience, but rather to gather its legacy into his work, and in a 1980 interview with Michiko Kakutani, he explained that his interest in Jews lay in their spiritual quality: "I was concerned with what Jews stood for.... I was concerned with their ethicality-how Jews felt they had to live in order to go on living" (Lasher, 94). Let me suggest that Malamud's concern is not only for what Jews must endure, but for how they must transform themselves to continue living in a world that orchestrated and tacitly condoned their attempted extinction. This current, I believe, underlies three of Malamud's Holocaust short stories, "The German Refugee," "Man in the Drawer," and "The Lady of the Lake." The first two are about Jewish writers, one living during the Holocaust, one in postwar Russia, who must go to great human and artistic lengths to continue living. Thus, in "The Lady of the Lake," The American-assimilated Levin, who is free to practice Judaism unfettered, changes his name, travels to Italy, poses as a Christian, and believes the love of his life to be Gentile . In reality, she is a Holocaust survivor, who has changed her name, presumably in order to live more peaceably in Italy. The stories dramatize the ways in which holocausts (whether physical or spiritual) reveal the extent to which language, survival, and Judaism are intertwined. Consequently, in all three stories translation as a means of a Jew's survival figures prominently, if ironically, first in literary and then in increasingly figurative ways. In "The German Refugee" Oskar Gassner, a German immigrant in New York, has escaped the Nazis, but confronts another enemy within; as an immigrant, he himself needs to be translated as well as his language. Here, translation is revealed as a critical component of the immigrant 's survival, for he must translate himself and his work into English in order to keep his job. In "Man in the Drawer," translation as a means of Judaism's survival takes on more figurative roles, as we are invited to translate or interpret a number of progressively embedded narratives. To this end, Walter Benjamin's essay "The Task of the Translator" (in Illuminations) is enlightening. Benjamin suggests that a text's truth is located not in its lines, but between them and that truth is most visible in translations, that is, in between renderings of a text's original and secondary languages. Citing "the interlinear version of the Scriptures [a]s the prototype or ideal of all translation" (82), Benjamin posits a "language of truth...