What am I missing in Malamud's short fiction?

After trying unsuccessfully for two days to get engaged w/ much-touted new novel in English about Africa, I regressed and went back to reading Bermard Malamud, if just for an evening - read the first story in his Rembrandt's Hat, called The Silver Crown. OK, maybe I have a blind spot, but some of my most-perspicacious reader-friends hold Malamud up as among the best short-story writers of his generation and I just don't see it. I think he had an excellent talent for creating a certain kind of character - an annoying, obsessed, down-at-the-heels, needy antagonist (set generally against a more conventional, more successful, but somewhat self-effacing and insecure protagonist) - he's in the tradition of Gogol and Kafka (and I guess IB Singer as well) - but I don't see how his work advances theirs: let's take one example, one of his best-known stories, The Jewbird: a bird flies through a window of a NY tenement and takes up residence, and starts talkin, and ID's itself as jewbird - and guess what it enjoys herring etc. - eventually the bird is tossed out and its final squawk is to blame the "ant-semetes" (sic). So Malamud excels at putting a bit of surrealism or symbolism or maybe even allegory in the midst of an ordinary bourgeois household - he's a disrupter and a destroyer. But compare with Kafka or Gogol: can the jewbird compare at all with a boy turning into a cockroach, to a nose jumping off a face and taking on an independent life of its own? His imagination isn't as capacious, and, moreover, he doesn't develop the conjunction of real and surreal into anything deeply disturbing, shocking, or profound. His stories just "happen" - as in The Silver Crown, in which a man worried about his dying father contacts an elderly rabbi who offer to sell a silver crown for about $900 that will supposedly cure the father; the rabbi is a fine character, sketched in expertly with wonderful slovenly - house, clothing, etc. - but beyond that what's the point of the story? We know it's a scam, but that it will alleviate some guilt - buying the fake crown makes him feel better but does nothing for his father. It's a perfectly good story - but not a great story, which would entail some kind of surprise, twist, development, wonder (e.g., Singer's Crown of Feathers, to cite a similar story). There is absolutely nothing wrong with Malamud's short fiction, every story of his I've read is well-crafted and worth reading, but in my view it is nowhere near as rich and beautiful as that of his near contemporaries Updike or Cheever, not as broad in social scope nor as comic as Roth or Bellow. Perhaps it's that he has no single unified sense of place in his short fiction (unlike the others I've mentioned), and no particular defining characteristic of style that helps us see the stories as part of a greater whole, as we do in particular with Updike. Please, fans of Malamud, am I missing something? Is there a story I should read that will stand up as among the giants of the century? Which one?