More on Malamud

So, here I am a junior high school student. I had a fairly large number of friends, and I knew all of their parents. All of them had fathers who worked and mothers who didn't. Even mothers who were trained to work, like my mother the lawyer, did not work when their children were in school.

So, imagine my surprise, when my friend told me that his mother was going to open a book store, in Clayton MO, and that it was going to be called The Magic Barrel.

The mother/bookseller was unique in a number of ways, to my experience. In the first place, she was not American. She was born in Russia (or in what I thought was Russia; maybe it was Poland or Romania, who knows?) and spoke with a heavy accent. She was very small, and very, very tough. A tough, tough cookie. Even I knew that.

She was clearly an intellectual (also a rarity among parents of my friends) and looked down on American pop culture of the 1950s. Rock and roll music was not allowed in her house.

So she opened this book store (I think it stayed in business about 5 years). The name The Magic Barrel meant nothing to me, and I was told it was named after Bernard Malamud's book. The name Bernard Malamud meant nothing to me. When the store opened, I bought (rare in those non-monied days) a paperback copy of The Magic Barrel, and although I can't tell you what any of the stories were about today, I remember that I thought they were all right. A little later, I read The Fixer, which I thought was phenomenal; this one I sorta remember: it took place in Russia and was based on the Beilas ritual murder trial. This was all new to me and unbelievably exciting.

I never read The Natural, his Robert Redford book, nor, to my memory, anything else. Perhaps, I should, but......with everything else, I don't think I will. I'd be happy to post your thoughts.