ABSTRACT
Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn in 1914. Twenty-six years later, in 1940, Bharati Mukherjee was bom in Calcutta. Both write about immigrant experience in America, about the struggle to overcome being viewed as "the Other". That Mukherjee's and Malamud's writing bear comparison should be no surprise. Mukherjee knew Malamud; her husband, Clark Blaise, studied with Malamud at a Harvard Summer School Writing Workshop. One of the reasons for Mukherjee's adoption of Malamud as a literary mentor can be seen as a strategy to place herself in the working-class Jewish tradition and to lend authenticity to her delineation of her socially, if not always economically, marginal characters. As Ben Siegel points out, "In Malamud the past is never dead", as demonstrated once more in "The German Refugee". Mukherjee's story, "Angela" illustrates the shift from the Euro-centered Holocaust memories of Malamud's refugees to the memories of more recent Asian atrocities endured by Mukherjee's immigrants.
