The Jewbird (1963). Content and Description

According to Malamud’s account, the story was suggested by reading a poem, “Digressions upon a Crow,” by his friend and Bennington colleague Howard Nemerov. It seems likely that the mysterious irruption of Edgar Allan Poe’s talking bird in “The Raven” had a role, too. Malamud changes the crow to an old Jew, and, unlike Poe’s raven, the Jewbird has a large vocabulary, a prayer life, touchy emotions, and mathematical skill.

The story begins with abrupt action and homespun philosophy as a narrator, whose demotic, slightly Yiddish-inflected language sounds a bit like that of the Jewbird itself, announces, “The window was open so the skinny bird flew in. Flap- pity-flap with its frazzled black wings. That’s how it goes. It’s open, you’re in. Closed, you’re out and that’s your fate” (144). The skinny bird has flown into the Cohen household, where Cohen, his wife, Edie, and their unpromising son, Maurie, are eating dinner, and unfortunately almost lands on Cohen’s lamb chop. As he swipes at it, driving the bird to the top of the door, the story reveals its fantastic dimension: The bird cries out, “Gevalt, a pogrom!” (145).

From the beginning the bird proves a register of character, as the three Cohens react in different ways. Edie is surprised by the talking bird; Maurie notes that it is Jewish; Cohen’s annoyed response is “Wise guy.” Asked what he is running from, the bird (later identified as Schwartz) says, “Anti-Semeets,” and in the ensuing conversation, “proves” that he is a Jew- bird by divining, or praying in Hebrew. Again, Edie and Maurie, who rocks back and forth with the praying, show respect; Cohen, by contrast, is suspicious: “No hat, no phylacteries?” (146).

What the Jewbird wants are a refuge and feeding. Cohen grudgingly permits Schwartz to stay, though at first only overnight and later only because he is a companion to Maurie. Eventually, Schwartz earns his keep by helping Maurie with his mathematics homework. Still, Cohen resents his presence and the food he eats and insists on his living in an outdoor birdhouse on the ledge. Schwartz is not always even- tempered, reacting to his unwilling host’s provocation by calling him “Grubber yung” (Yiddish for “coarse young man”) or occasionally complaining:

I would rather have a human roof over my head. You know how it is at my age. I like the warm, the windows, the smell of cooking. I would also be glad to see once in a while the Jewish Morning Journal and have now and then a schnapps because it helps my breathing, thanks God. But whatever you give me, you won’t hear complaints. (148)

Cohen simmers with anger: The bird smells bad, he snores noisily, he refuses to migrate, and he eats human food rather than corn. In a clear sign of alpha-male rivalry, Cohen even accuses Schwartz of wanting to sleep in the bed with his wife. Unwilling simply to banish the bird, he tries to drive him out by tampering with his food, making noises to disturb his sleep, and even taking home a cat to torment Schwartz.

The story builds on an occult relationship between the bird and Cohen’s mother. When it begins, the Cohens are in the city only because the older Mrs. Cohen is ill; it rises to its climax after she dies— perhaps freeing her son from some lingering respect for a bird who is also an elderly Jew. Unfortunately at this time Maurie receives a zero on a test. Cohen attacks the bird, which fights back by seizing his nose in its beak; eventually the man wins and throws the battered bird from the window, followed by his birdhouse.

The melancholy conclusion occurs in the spring; Maurie finds the dead bird in the melted snow and weeps, “Who did it to you, Mr. Schwartz?”
“Anti-Semeets,” Edie said later (154).

The role of anti-Semitism in this story is complicated. Schwartz is, finally, a victim of Cohen’s intolerance, but Cohen is the one who refuses to accept the existence of a Jewbird and declares, “He’s a foxy bastard. He thinks he’s a Jew” (147). Robert Solaratoff comments that “to an unusual degree for a Malamud story, ‘The Jewbird’ deals with that great theme of twentieth-century Jewish-American fiction, assimilation. Malamud’s usual position is that the degree to which a Jew is assimilated corresponds to the degree that he has been corrupted by contemporary American society, and he does not deviate from this stance in the story” (79).

By this standard, Cohen’s assimilationist aspirations are shown by his successful, modernizing job, selling frozen foods; his ambitions (ludicrous, based on his obtaining C minus grades) to get Maurie into an Ivy League college; and, thus, his furious resentment of the Old World Jewish presence in his life represented by the bird. Cohen, then is the anti-Semeet named in Edie’s final comment.

Power relationships are also unequally distributed along gender lines. Edie is a kind woman, who gives Schwartz the herring he likes, potato pancake, “and even a bit of soupmeat when Cohen wasn’t looking” (148). While Cohen suspects the bird of being a dybbuk, or a ghost, and later possibly a “goddamn devil,” Edie advances the theory that he might be “an old Jew changed into a bird by somebody” (146). But, she is cowed and helpless.

The first description of the couple makes this clear, oddly enough by describing their clothing: “Cohen, a heavy man with hairy chest and beefy shorts; Edie, in skinny yellow shorts and red halter” (145). How can skinny shorts and reverent sympathy compete with beefy shorts, a hairy chest, impatience, and violence?

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Do you consider Schwartz an anti-Semite (or “anti-Semeet,” a pronunciation suggestive of Yiddish)? If so, does this story comment on Jewish self-hatred, and what does it say?

2. Read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” which contains a bird messenger. Then, evaluate Malamud’s use of the same device in “The Jewbird.” What value does the messenger bird add in each case? How are both integral to the narration?

3. After Cohen’s unsuccessful attempt to swat the bird off his table, Schwartz says, “Gevalt, a pogrom” (his first words). A pogrom is an organized act of genocide against Jews. Is this comic overstatement or a symbolic identification of Cohen versus Schwartz as reenacting the modern history of European Jews?

4. Some masters of the modern American short story share Malamud’s attraction for the supernatural or implausible, in the American tall-tale tradition, for instance, Flannery O’Connor in “Revelation” and William Faulkner in As I Lay Dying. With these works in mind, consider the value of using nonrealistic or fantastical elements. On one level, we can ascertain that these authors share a worldview that encompasses metaphysical notions. How do these metaphysical ideas affect the way we understand not only their works but also the notions of truth each enshrines?

Works Cited and Additional Resources:
Abramson, Edward A. “Malamud and the Jews: An Ambiguous Relationship.” Yearbook of English Studies 24 (1994): 146-156.

Alter, Robert. “Jewishness as Metaphor.” In Bernard Malamud and the Critics, edited by Leslie A. Field and Joyce W. Field, 29-42. New York: New York University Press, 1970.

Baker, Kevin. “Introduction.” In The Natural, by Bernard Malamud. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003.

Bernard Malamud Papers. Available online. URL: http:// osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/specialcollections/coll/ malamud/index.html. Accessed March 25, 2009.

Bluestone, Stephen. “God as Matchmaker: A Reading of Malamud’s ‘The Magic Barrel.’” CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 41 (Summer 2000): 403-410.

Carino, Peter. “History as Myth in Bernard Malamud’s The Natural.” Nine: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture 14 (2005): 67-77.