Realistic Fabulist

IDIOTS FIRST by Bernard Malamud. 212 pages. Farrar, Straus. $4.50.

Bernard Malamud is a poet of the victim. Not the tragic or the hopeless victim, but the absurd victim. In his stories, fate is clearly placable, but his heroes never get the hang of it. They make fools of themselves instead, and, by robbing themselves of dignity, they become somehow more poignantly human.

Malamud's own case is less clear. Ever since The Assistant and his collection of stories The Magic Barrel, which won the National Book Award in 1959, Malamud has been recognized as a unique voice in U.S. literature. He catches his vulnerable characters in lurid movement and mid-passion--as if frozen in the light of a signal flare. His ear for Jewish idiom is unfailingly exact. ("We didn't starve, but nobody ate chicken unless we were sick or the chicken was.") But the very quality that makes him an original talent--his feeling for the expressive, flaringly emotional reaches of the Jewish temperament--sometimes leads him astray, causing him to inject into a purely naturalistic story the stylized emotional patterns of the Jewish folk tale, told and retold through generations of racial experience.

That failing is too often apparent in this collection of short stories. The title story, for instance, tells of a dying man who travels about the city visiting friends, pawnbrokers, even a synagogue, trying to raise money to send his idiot son to relatives in California. He gets the money, but before he can put his son on the train he has to struggle with a ticket collector named Ginzburg--who turns out to be Death.

The Jewbird tells of a talking bird named Schwartz, who flies into the Lower East Side apartment of Salesman Harry Cohen, seeking refuge from the "anti-Semeets" (eagles, vultures and hawks who pick out the eyes of other birds). Schwartz settles down, helps Cohen's small son with his lessons, and reads him comics when the boy is sick. But Cohen cannot stand the bird, finally drives him out into the winter snow. In the spring the boy finds him in a lot, both eyes plucked clean, presumably by "anti-Semeets."

As a parable of prejudice, the story is a little too pat, almost embarrassingly funny--but also unforgettable.

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