Malamud's stories - Do they live up to their reputation?

Bernard Malamud's story The Jewbird, one of his best-known I think, owes a huge debt to Gogol - if a nose or an overcoat can take on a life of its own and can affect and even ruin the lives of others, why not a bird who flies in through an apartment window, announces himself as a "jewbird," and takes up residence? It's kind of an amusing story but to be honest not anywhere near the level of Gogol or Kafka for that matter - it's like Kafka with a little bit of schtick - a story that I imagine must have been fun and funny to read aloud (the bird asking for some herring, for example), but I don't think it's a masterpiece by any means - in fact, it's a little heavy-handed in its too-obvious analog between the family's expulsion of the bird and the mass expulsion of Jews in Europe - just as "absurd," just as hard to fathom. Another well-known story, The German Refugee is more successful, I think, because it's tone is more suited to the material: a young student narrates, a 20-year-old probably much like Malamud at that age, hired to tutor a German refugee scholar/journalist to prepare him to teach in the fall, in English, as a visiting scholar. Malamud seems very accurate and poignant in his oblique presentation of the suffering of the German - his morbid state as he reflects on his wife left behind in Germany, on their unhappy marriage, on his anti-Semitic in-laws, and most of all on his loss of a native tongue and his fear of inadequacy, failure, and poverty. A very fine portrait of a man, of a type seemingly long gone in the U.S. but no doubt present today many communities of diaspora. Only problem in the story, in my view, is the rather melodramatic conclusion, which I won't give a way, but it seemed to me forced and heavy-handed - this story needed a more hopeful, or at least a more open, denouement.