“We have two lives … the life we learn with and the life we live after that. Suffering is what brings us towards happiness.” These words by the great Jewish novelist Bernard Malamud express a profound truth about his remarkable life.

Bernard Malamud was born on April 26, 1914, in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrants who had fled the hardships of tsarist Russia. His father, Max, ran a series of small, failing grocery stores, while his mother suffered from mental illness and died in an institution when Malamud was fifteen. These early years of struggle, resilience, and sorrow left a mark on his imagination. Malamud did not romanticize poverty; instead, he observed it closely and transformed it into the raw material of moral fiction. He earned a bachelor’s degree from City College of New York and a master’s from Columbia University, then taught evening high school classes in New York before moving in 1949 to Oregon State University. Later he joined the faculty at Bennington College in Vermont.

Malamud’s style was distinctive: spare and compressed prose that reflected the terse, accented speech of immigrant shopkeepers and tailors. He blended gritty realism with elements of fantasy and myth. His characters—aging grocers, failed artists, lonely rabbis, down-on-their-luck handymen—were flawed, but capable of small gestures of decency.

His debut novel, The Natural, surprised many who expected another immigrant tale. On the surface, it is a baseball story about Roy Hobbs, a supremely gifted player who emerges from obscurity, succumbs to temptation, and confronts the ruin of his ambitions. In 1984, the novel was adapted into a brilliant film starring Robert Redford.

The Assistant returned to more intimate territory. Morris Bober, an aging Jewish grocer barely surviving in a declining Brooklyn neighborhood, hires Frank Alpine, a young Italian drifter with a criminal past. What starts as a tale of petty theft and economic desperation evolves into a profound study of moral awakening. Frank does not simply repent; he earns decency through repeated failure and self-confrontation.

Malamud was also renowned for his short stories. The Magic Barrel, which won the National Book Award, remains a landmark collection. Its title story is a small masterpiece: a rabbinical student seeks a bride through a matchmaker whose troubled daughter becomes the unexpected answer to his deeper longings. Other tales feature ghostly visitations, talking birds, or sudden acts of charity. Malamud loved the short story for its “fast payoff” and its demand for formal precision. He revised relentlessly, observing: “I write a book at least three times—once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.”

The Fixer marked a high point in his career and broadened his scope. Inspired by the real-life Beilis blood libel case in tsarist Russia, it follows Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman falsely accused of ritual murder. Much of the novel unfolds in prison, where Yakov—initially eager to shed his Jewish identity—endures physical and psychological torment. Through suffering, he gains a hard-won sense of solidarity and humanity. Malamud insisted that the story represented anyone crushed by ideology or prejudice. The book won the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize, confirming his place alongside Saul Bellow and Philip Roth in the postwar American literary landscape.

Later works showed continued experimentation. A New Life drew on his Oregon years, transplanting an urban Jew into the gentile Northwest and exploring cultural displacement with wry humor. The Tenants tackled Black-Jewish tensions in a decaying New York building with unflinching honesty. Dubin’s Lives probed middle-aged desire and the struggles of the writing life. His final completed novel, God’s Grace, took an apocalyptic turn: a lone Jewish survivor of nuclear war finds himself among chimpanzees and attempts to renew civilization under a revised covenant.

Malamud died of heart disease on March 18, 1986. His legacy lives on in his work and in the PEN/Malamud Award, “established in 1988 and awarded annually to a writer who demonstrates dedication to the craft of the short story.” Malamud turned personal pain into stories that speak to anyone who has ever felt trapped by circumstance yet called to something better.

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Michael F. Bishop, a writer and historian, is the former executive director of the International Churchill Society and the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission.