Malamud's blend of realism and fantasy is an outstanding feature of many of his most effective stories, as in "The Jewbird" or "Angel Levine." In "Idiots First" he contrives to present death in the guise of one Ginzburg, who repeatedly turns up as Mendel frantically tries to raise the necessary money to send his son to an uncle in California. Here, as in his use of symbolic representation, he appears to follow in the tradition of I. L. Peretz, Sholem Aleichem, and I. B. Singer. In "Take Pity," for example, it only gradually emerges that the scene is not a room in a mental institution where Rosen is confined for attempted suicide, but the next world, and Davidov, the census-taker, is the recording angel. In "The Loan," the charred loaves that Lieb forgets during his talk with Kobotsky become "charred corpses," whether of the...