Reading Malamud with my parents

(or, I am what I am granted to be, and at present the completion is in the future)

To be clear, my parents weren't reading Malamud. Not lately, anyway. But I was, and I was with them, visiting them on vacation in Florida. In a wonderful conversation before I left town, Matt had suggested that I read Malamud's short story "Angel Levine." Many thanks, Matt, for taking the time for tea and for pointing me in Malamud's direction. Incredibly, I'd never read him.

One of Matt's comments was that "Angel Levine" seems to have an been an influence on Kushner's thinking about his Angel. Definitely. Here is the first encounter between Angel Levine and the old tailor Manischevitz, in the tailor's living room, where Levine has materialized in apparent response to Manischevitz's desperate prayers (Levine is black, Manischevitz is white, the story is circa 1955):

"Who are you?" Manischevitz at last asked uneasily.

"If I may, insofar as one is able to, identify myself, I bear the name of Alexander Levine."

In spite of his troubles Manischevitz felt a smile growing on his lips. "You said Levine?" he politely inquired.

The Negro nodded. "That is exactly right."

Carrying the jest further, Manischevitz asked, "You are maybe Jewish?"

"All my life I was, willingly."

The tailor hesitated. He had heard of black Jews but had never met one. It gave an unusual sensation.

Recognizing in afterthought something odd about the tense of Levine's remark, he said doubtfully, "You ain't Jewish anymore?"

Levine at this point removed his hat, revealing a very white part in his black hair, but quickly replaced it. He replied, "I have recently been disincarnated into an angel. As such, I offer you my humble assistance, if to offer is within my province and power---in the best sense." He lowered his eyes in apology. "Which calls for added explanation: I am what I am granted to be, and at present the completion is in the future."

"What kind of angel is this?" Manischevitz gravely asked.

"A bona fide angel of God, within prescribed limitations," answered Levine, "not to be confused with the members of any particular sect, order, or organization here on earth operating under a similar name."

There's much that's painfully wrong about the story (what makes Levine tick, the exploitation of the sense of oddity surrounding black Jews for Manischevitz, the depictions of women, Harlem, the other African American characters) but also so much that's interesting in it. And in the humor of the exchange, in the angel's seriousness, his language, his humanity, the seeds of Kushner's Angel, surely.

I took Malamud's collected stories with me to the beach, figuring reading them would be a good way to stay in my working brain without absenting myself from my parents to write. I was able to fill my ear with the sounds of Yiddish, its syntax and grammar, its particular framing of the world. But after two whole days of reading Malamud, I felt worn down. The constancy of frustration and sorrow, the infrequency of redemption, the wrong notes in his explorations of black/Jewish relations, the commonplace misogyny--the nagging Jewish wives, the inevitable descriptions of women's bodies, their meaning only in relation to men, as a man's solution or downfall---it got old.

I will be glad to be getting my Yiddishkeit from Grace Paley when her collected stories arrive in the mail. (Just rereading that linked interview with Grace makes me smile with love for her. But that's another post.)

And even as I type this, I know it's arguable: Malamud's stories are recognized for their redemption. But what I know in my body is that reading them all at once, I felt exhausted and sad. When I think about Kushner taking Malamud as one of a thousand and three starting points, I wonder about what stayed the same and what changed. What stayed the same: suffering cannot be redeemed. But, for Kushner, sex can redeem and be redeemed. The body, broken-down and miserable, can redeem and be redeemed. Hope can redeem and be redeemed. So can art. And, improbably, maybe even life.

Kushner's Prior, from the end of Angels In America:

This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won't die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.

Bye now.

You are fabulous creatures, each and every one.

And I bless you: More Life.

The Great Work Begins.