A
Karmieli Hebrew teacher who conducts lessons for immigrant retirees has asked
them to discuss a short story by Bernard Malamud.
A
Summer’s Reading is among English language texts studied by Israeli Bagrut (matriculation)
students and it strikes me first, that Malamud himself must have been a
wonderful teacher and that this story offers a salutary lesson to young
Israelis about the universalism of the immigrant experience; that feelings of
loss, dislocation and alienation were suffered not only by their own wandering
forebears but continue to be faced by all leaving their birth country for a new
culture.
The
characters in A Summer’s Reading are like inert matchstick figures in a tableau;
stifled and dazed by the airless heat in their dreary, dingy Brooklyn, New York
working-class backwater, their impoverished routine makes them marginalised witnesses
to, rather than active players in daily
life.
Evening
after evening, for example, Mr Cattanzara sits outside his apartment reading a newspaper
from cover to cover by the light of a shoemaker's window while his sick, fat, ghostly
white wife leans over the window behind, silently watching him.
Is
George, the central character, based on Malamud’s younger brother, Eugene, who
died relatively young after a deeply troubled life marred by handicap? Certainly
the fictional George is depicted as being so frightened of
life, that he prefers to remain hidden at home during the day, venturing out
after dark like a lonesome spirit seeking he knows not quite what
.
In
the real world – wherever that is for a genius writer - it was left to the
author to understand very young that knowledge is power, something to be gained
only by a diligent application to study.
Bagrut
students - read on. Do!
©
Natalie Wood (22 March 2019)
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