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"In Defense of the Human": Compassion and Redemption in Malamud's Short Fiction

1992; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/saf.1992.0001

2158-5806

Victoria Aarons,

Jewish Identity and Society

"IN DEFENSE OF THE HUMAN": COMPASSION AND REDEMPTION IN MALAMUD'S SHORT FICTION Victoria Aarons Trinity University "You bastard, don't you understand what it means human?" With this challenge, Malamud's desperate character Mendel, in "Idiots First," demands from Ginzburg, the anthropomorphized figure of death, a commitment to compassion and pity.1 Mendel's defiance of death's merciless indifference reaffirms rachmones, the Yiddish term for compassion, a fundamental concern of Jewish ethics.2 Rachmones is emphatically preoccupied with human motives and choices. It is the singular distinctive feature of Malamud's authorial voice. Moreover, this emphatic plea for compassion is nowhere more apparent than in his short stories, where formal constraints show his characters in the stark, unadorned, and precarious conditions that define and delimit their moral choices. As Mark Shechner points out with reference to Malamud, "the short story remains the purest distillation of his abiding leitmotif: the still, sad music of humanity."3 In story after story, Malamud, like his character Mendel, demands that we "understand what it means to be human." As Malamud himself put it, in a 1966 interview with Haskell Frankell: "My work, all of it, is an idea of dedication to the human. . . . I'm in defense of the human."4 Mendel, whose point of view governs the ethical texture of "Idiots First," confronts death with both outrage and desperate indignation. Death appears in the human form of the menacing, persistent Ginzburg. As the story opens, Mendel awakens in fright when "the thick ticking of the tin clock stopped" (p. 3), an alliteration that shapes and mirrors the character's inevitable movement toward death. The thickness of the clock's ticking suggests the heaviness, the weight of both living and dying for Mendel, whose love and compassion for his son preempts the not unwelcome surrender to death. Mendel is frightened, not because he has been summoned to death, but because he fears that he will die before he has fulfilled his responsibility to his son. This old sick man, "heavy hearted," "trembling," "wasted," "his heart barely beating," is empowered finally by his outrage in the face of death, "you bastard." And it is this sense of utter indignity that moves him to insist upon performing one last act before he dies. Mendel must put Isaac, his son, on a train to his uncle in California, a son who cannot care for himself: "don't you understand what I went through 58Victoria Aarons in my life with this poor boy? Look at him. For thirty-nine years, since the day he was born, I wait for him to grow up, but he don't. Do you understand what this means in a father's heart?" (p. 14). And the obvious does not even matter here, that uncle Leo, whom Mendel imagines "under the sky, in California. . . . drinking tea with lemon" (p. 10), is eighty-one years old, far too advanced in years to provide Isaac's permanent security. What matters most is that Mendel, despairing for his son, yields not to some arbitrary authority, but rather appeals to some kind of universal moral imperative, compassion. Such pleas are not uncommon in the history of Jewish literature. Job pleads with God for some justification for his suffering. Sholom Aleichem's narrators characteristically beg their audiences to hear them out, hear their stories and complaints. Such demands by no means carry with them the fakery of the sentimental. They are, finally, no more but no less than appeals to a human moral conscience, without which there can be no meaning to suffering. In all cases, despite obvious differences in form, in readers, and in intention, narrators and speaking characters are able to tell their stories to someone else, to an internal addressee who, in their sense of just causes, cares. Like Job and the host of characters who people Sholom Aleichem's vignettes , Malamud's characters speak for vindication, for some proof of human compassion and mercy. In Job, the internal addressee is God, in the second the tales are typically addressed to the writer Sholom Aleichem; Malamud's characters, similarly, speak to others whom they believe to have some control over their fates, their...