Word: malamud
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Similar misfortune has befallen The Angel Levine, Bernard Malamud's pithy and whimsical parable of an elderly Jewish tailor and his war with God. In the film Zero Mostel portrays Mishkin, a decrepit, latter-day Job on whom God has visited terrible plagues. His Manhattan shop has burned to the ground while insufficiently insured. His wife Fanny (Ida Kaminska) is on her death bed and driving him meshugge (crazy) with petty demands. His back is killing him and-ah, cruel Jehovah!-his only daughter has married an Italian. His faith is moribund, and to revive it an unlikely angel...
...early scenes contain some wildly funny dialogue-most of which has been taken directly from Malamud's story. Mostel is especially entertaining doing the tailor-on-the-roof routine that is his forte. But even Zero's comic genius cannot carry the lugubrious sermonizing about black-Jewish relationships and the mawkish comedy that goes with it. In a reverse insult, Levine calls Mishkin "nigger," to which Mishkin replies, "This is the way a Jewish angel talks...
...Best. O'Hara had little patience with writers of the '60s; he was of an earlier era, a contemporary of Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Sinclair Lewis. "I've never been able to read Norman Mailer," he complained in 1967. "Mailer is a dirty Saroyan." Bernard Malamud and William Styron received the same short shrift. Most young writers, however, confess to at least a degree of admiration for O'Hara. "He has more genius than talent," John Updike wrote in 1966. "Very little censoring went on in his head, but his best stories have the flowing...
...majority of the prevailing culture, they could be called pathological. But from the black person's standpoint, they have been patterns he has had to use to make it." It is scarcely paranoid, for instance, for the black to distrust and fear the white society. Says Dr. William Malamud Jr., a white psychiatrist in Boston: "What's labeled as pathology is very often psychic health in blacks. You can say: 'How else would you expect them...
PICTURES OF FIDELMAN, by Bernard Malamud. Yet another shlemiel, but this one is canonized by Malamud's compassionate talent...