ABSTRACT
The assumptions about the central importance of Bellow, Malamud and Roth have been made with several layers of reference and cultural use; not least of these is clearly the fact that Jewish characters and ideas are either constantly privileged in the narratives, or dealt with indirectly through intellectual burdens on the development of the dialogic discourse. That is, questions of identity were slowly eclipsed by questions of accommodation to American ideologies, with attendant consequences on the residual Jewishness of the characters. In Malamud’s case, the actual sinews of the syntax, the Yiddish vocabulary and the concentration on the impact of the past on the present in his stories all make him more aligned with the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer than with Roth or Bellow. His novels are a different matter. But the case of Malamud, as with Stanley Elkin also, raises again the question of definition.
