There are Jews everywhere! : Malamud's early stories

Today, 50-some years after initial publication (hard to believe!), the stories in Bernard Malamud's "The Magic Barrel" feel a but musty and out of date (or maybe it's the ancient Vintage pb from which I'm reading them, as the old glue binding breaks apart in my hands). Seriously, there are some really funny moments in these stories about suffering old (or sometimes young) Jews - the scene in The Angel Levine when the beset-upon tailor Manishevitz comes across a Talmudic discussion in a Harlem synagogue, the last line of the same story: There are Jews everywhere!, the rambling first paragraph of Girl of My Dreams in which bumbling novelist burns his manuscript, the hapless guy on looking for apartment in Rome and led on a Dantean tour of unsuitable locales by the dubious nonlicensed, part-time realtor, Bevilacqua. And so on. The stories have plenty of literary and Biblical references or allusions, and they also foreshadow to a degree some postmodern techniques (the novelist burning his manuscript in Girl of My Dreams seems to live within in an endless loop of failed or frustrated novelists, as if the story will reading will burn itself up before we complete it) - all good, and yet, they don't have the sense that I got years ago and would still get today on re-reading from the stories of Malamud's Jewish literary contemporaries, Roth, Bellow, I.B. Singer (a bit older) of a complete world to which I'm given sudden and startling access. Malamud's stories feel more literary, more composed, more touched up by the writer at work rather than from the heart or from the well of experience - but I'll keep going in the collection, am curious about the stories set in Rome and how effectively he explores the conflict of cultures (Jewish American - postwar Italian).