When Jews were News: Looking back on Malamud and Roth

There was a time, the 1950s, when magazines and publishers were hungry for stories about and by American Jews, particularly first-generation, urban dwelling, striving immigrant American Jews. Jews were the literary exotic of the time; to put it mildly, today we Jews have moved from the byways to the mainstream, and it's amazing, looking back at those 50s stories, to think of New Yorker and other staid editors reading them and thinking they'd received news from another world. We do read fiction to get the news from another world, and editors are, rightly, always looking out for what's new. There's probably an over-enthusiasm today for just about any story written from a third-world country, and some of what we see in the major mags and on the shelves is great - the stories of Munuedden, for example - and other stuff is mediocre at best and I figure the only reason it's prominently published is that it's unusual to most Western readers. I've been poking around, on a friend's suggestion, in Bernard Malamud's first story collection, "The Magic Barrel," and found the first two stories at least to be very finely crafted and very dated - no way that these tales of East Side immigrants would be so well-received today, but that's because Malamud has tilled the ground already. He apparently broke through just as did Roth (Philip; the other Roth was a bit earlier and similar to Malamud), and the differences between them are huge - Roth looking forward toward the Americanization and obviously straining to break out into the novelist he would become, Malamud looking backward to the Old World, closer in style, spirit, setting, and sensibility to IB Singer and the Yiddish writers of NYC who had not yet been translated often in English.