Bernard Malamud , along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, holds a preeminence among Jewish American writers that has consistently been reaffirmed by recent critical assessments. Early in Malamud criticism, Alfred Kazin and Leslie Fiedler acknowledged the richness of Malamud 's literary imagination in their responses to The Assistant (1957) -- Kazin had praised Malamud in his review "Fantasist of the Ordinary" for his vivid characterization of his suffering schlemiels, and Fiedler's review "The Commonplace as Absurd" observed that the gray lives of Malamud 's characters had their own kind of poetry. Over thirty years later, just after The Stories of Bernard Malamud (1983) appeared, Mark Shechner in "Malamud: The Still Sad Music" (reprinted in Joel Salzberg's Critical Essays on Bernard Malamud , 1987) compared Malamud 's melancholic voice to the bleak pre-Holocaust photographs collected in Roman Vishnic's Polish Jews (1947):

In his modest and laconic style of narrative, Malamud has found the exact...