Bernard Malamud

Quotes

1. Jesus cried out help to God but God gave no help. There was a man crying out in anguish in the dark, but God was on the other side of his mountain. He heard but he had heard everything. What was there to hear that he hadn’t heard before?

2. 

   Yakov Shepsovitch, what more can I tell you? Take heart in the truth and endure your trials. Sustain yourself in your innocence. (Bibikov)

3. 

   His fate nauseated him. Escaping from the Pale he had at once been entrapped in prison. From birth a black horse had followed him, a Jewish nightmare. What was being a Jew but an everlasting curse? He was sick of their history, destiny, blood guilt.

4. 

   Yakov counted. He counted time though he tried not to. Counting presupposed an end to counting, at least for a man who used only small numbers. How many times had he counted up to a hundred in his life? Who could count forever? – it piled time on. The fixer had torn some splinters off sticks of firewood. The long splinters were months, the short, days. A day was a bad enough burden of time but within the day even minutes could do damage as they piled up. When one had nothing to do the worst thing to have was an endless supply of minutes. It was like pouring nothing into a million little bottles.

5. 

   There’s no bottom to my bitterness, he thought.

6. 

   [N]o was Jew innocent in a corrupt state, the most visible sign of its corruption its fear and hatred of those it persecuted. Ostrovsky had reminded him that there was much more wrong with Russia than its anti-Semitism. Those who persecute the innocent were themselves never free. Instead of satisfying him this thought filled him with rage.

7. 

   It tasted bitter and he blamed existence.

8. 

   Nobody can burn an idea even if they burn the man.

9. 

   The truth is I’m a half-ignorant man. The other half is half-educated.

10. 

    He beats his chains against the wall, his neck cords thick. He is in a rage to be free, has at times glimmerings of hope, as though imagining creates it, thinks of it as close by, about to happen if he breathes right, or thinks the one right thought. Maybe a wall will collapse, or sunrise burn through it and make an opening as large as a man’s body. Or he will remember where he has hidden a book that will tell him how to walk with ease through a locked-and-twelve-times-bolted door.

    ‘I’ll live,’ he shouts in his cell, ‘I’ll wait, I’ll come to my trial.’

    Berezhinsky opens the spy hole, inserts his rifle, and sights along the barrel at the fixer’s genitals.

11. 

    He waited for an unknown time, a time different from all the time on his head. It was unending waiting for something that might never happen. In the winter, time fell like hissing snow through the crack in the barred window, and never stopped snowing. He stood in it as it piled up around him and there was no end to drowning.

    ‘You can deny it all you want, we know the truth,’ Gorbeshov shouted. ‘The Jews dominate the world and we feel ourselves under their yoke. I personally consider myself under the power of the Jews; under the power of Jewish thought, under the power of the Jewish press.’

12. 

    You wait. You wait a minute of hope and days of hopelessness. Sometimes you just wait, there’s no greater insult. You sink into your thoughts and try to blot out the prison cell. If you’re lucky it dissolves and you spend a half hour out in the open, beyond the doors and walls and the hatred of yourself. If you’re not lucky your thoughts can poison you.