A theme running through Malamud's short stories

Last Mohican (great title) is the first story in Bernard Malamud's little-known collection Pictures of Feibelman (sp?), in the Library of America Novels and Stories from the 1960s edition - and one of Malamud's better stories in fact. Reading almost randomly among the stories in this edition, some obvious themes emerge - Judaism, Jewish isolation, Jewish humor, and anti-Semitism top the list of course - but there's also a model or trope that Malamud seems to adopt in nearly every story from this era: the pest, the burr, the hanger-on, the intruder. Last Mohican is a great example: Feibelman arrives in Rome alone and on a tight budget, about to spend a year in Italy working on a book about the artist Giotto - though he's not an academic or a writer, just a man with a dream, a bit nerdy and nebisshy like so many Malamud characters - he's immediately beset upon by a fellow Jew (I recognized you right away as a Jew, he says, which disconcerts F.), a pest and huckster living hand to mouth, who begins to torment F., begging for favors - until eventually F. one day returns to his hotel room and finds that someone has stolen his briefcase along with the mss. of the work he's started (we have no confidence that this work is any good, but F. has devoted his heart to it, poor guy) - this leads F. on a search across Rome to find his nemesis and recover the manuscript. To me, the beauty of this is the fact that his search through Rome puts him for the first time in touch with real Romans and the real life of the city - he wants to be a writer, but he's missing the whole picture by focusing on art history and scholarship, for which he probably has no avocation. The two stories I posted on yesterday - the Jewbird and The German Refugee - also follow the model, with slight variations, of the pesty intruder; so does The Man in the Drawer, which, like Last Mohican, is about a solo traveler, this time to the Soviet Union, who's latched onto by a taxi driver who's an underground writer - he wants the traveler to bring back to the U.S. a sheaf of underground stories and have them published. It appears to be quite a tall order, and to involve some risk, but the visitor - a scholar of a very minor order - refuses, fearing for his own safety - in other words makes a selfish and cowardly moral decision (unlike Yakov in The Fixer) - although the end is a bit ambiguous, and we see, with a glimpse into one of the stories, that the Soviet writer is very good and that publication is his only hope of emerging from life "in the drawer." This type of story, the beset-upon narrator, has a long tradition, possibly originating with Bartleby; Roth, writing just a little earlier than Malamud in this case, has another classic, the story about the Jewish soldiers who take advantage of the reluctant benevolence of the Jewish sergeant - up to a point.