Throughout his fiction, Malamud has shown himself to be preeminently concerned with all kinds of relationships, but especially those that involve close personal relationships between men or between man and woman. Several of Malamud's earliest published stories reveal this concern. For example, in "Take Pity," the first story in the collected edition, Rosen, an excoffee salesman, shows extraordinary compassion for Axel Kalish, a Polish refugee, and his family, who try unsuccessfully to eke out a living from a little grocery store in a poor neighborhood. When Axel dies, Rosen tries to help his widow, Eva, and her two little girls, but Eva's stubborn pride resists all attempts, driving Rosen finally to suicide. In a later story, "Man in a Drawer," the Russian-Jewish writer, sometime taxicab driver, Felix Levitansky, is not driven to such lengths to enlist.....
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