It’s the birthday of fiction author Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), who often wrote about Jewish immigrant life in stories that combined fantasy and reality, though his first novel, The Natural (1952, made into a Robert Redford movie in 1984), had no Jewish characters. His stories are often considered fables or morality plays, and his friend Philip Roth said of his work that “What it is to be human, and to be humane, is his deepest concern.”

Malamud was born to Russian Jewish immigrants and grew up in Brooklyn in a home with no books. His father was a grocer who worked long hours and would later be Malamud’s inspiration for the grocer in his second novel, The Assistant (1957, made into a movie in 1997). Malamud got his B.A. from City College of New York in 1936, worked factory and odd jobs for several years, and then taught at evening high schools from 1940 to 1949, earning an M.A. in 1942. WWII and the Holocaust convinced him to be a writer and to explore his Jewish roots.

In 1949 Malamud started teaching at Oregon State University, where he wrote his first four books, switching to Bennington College in Vermont in 1961. There he wrote The Fixer (1966), the story of a Jewish man in tsarist Russia wrongly convicted of the ritual murder of a Christian boy. This novel won him a Pulitzer and a National Book Award, and many years later The Guardian called it a novel that “belongs to the very upper echelons of fiction: a novel that could change your life” (Stuart Evers, “Bring Back Bernard Malamud,” The Guardian, July 2008).

I’m pretty sure that right now we all need to stop whatever we’re doing including reading this post and run out and get a copy of The Fixer and read it immediately.

Malamud wrote seven novels and 54 short stories. His first story collection, The Magic Barrel (1958), also won the National Book Award. He led a very private life and upon his death was survived by his wife and two children.

(Are you still here? Are you still reading this? Chop chop! Go! Get the book!)

Have a redemptive Thursday in this hard, hard world and stay scrupulously honest to the data.