SOURCE: Baris, Sharon Deykin. “Intertextuality and Reader Responsibility: Living On in Malamud's ‘The Mourners.’” Studies in American Jewish Literature 11, no. 1 (spring 1992): 45-61.

In the following essay, Baris discusses the ways in which “The Mourners” highlights collective responsibility in the plight of others.

The purpose of the writer … is to keep civilization alive … My premise is that we will live on.

—Malamud

And to go write-on-living? If that were possible, would the writer have to be dead already, or be living on?

—Derrida

Bernard Malamud's “The Mourners” is a tale of boarders and border crossings. It tells of immigrant boarders in an American house of fiction whose postwar stories must be heard and understood. It also challenges us as readers to define the physical and mental borders that must be both recognized yet somehow crossed over in order to test ourselves as human beings in a postmodern and post-Holocaust...