Witcover is an editor and writer whose fiction, book reviews, and critical essays appear regularly in print magazines and online media. In the following essay, Witcover discusses fantasy, realism, and race in Bernard Malamud's short story.

Bernard Malamud was a writer whose work explored questions and themes of Jewishness in a humanistic and often fantastic fashion. Jewish identity and experience had both a specific and a universal meaning for Malamud. He filled his fiction with characters like Nat Lime, from the short story "Black Is My Favorite Color,"—characters who, while retaining their essential Jewishness, also represent humanity in general. As Malamud noted in a 1968 interview with the Jerusalem Post quoted by critics Leslie and Joyce Field in the introduction to Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays, "[p]ersonally, I handle the Jew as a symbol of the tragic experience of man existentially. I try...