Customer Reviews

Idiots First (Vintage Classics)

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I happened to be assigned this book for a college lit class, and knew nothing of Malamud at the time. After reading the story for which the book is named, Idiots First, I could not stop reading. His stories are so deeply insightful into the complexities of the human soul, and the painful and paradoxical nature of everyday life. Aside from the philosophical aspects, he writes with the voice of a true New Yorker, and reflects the universal experience of growing up as an immigrant in a big city. Read it! You'll love it!

Malamud was one of the major American short- story writers of the twentieth- century. This collection contains a number of his most wonderful stories.The title story 'Idiot's First' is the tale of a dying father's efforts to get train - fare to California for his severely retarded - son. This is a story of that poor Yiddish speaking Jewish world which Malamud was a master in relating stories of. Yet another story from this world is probably the most well- known of this collection, 'The Jewbird'. This story of the talking bird who comes to live with the poor Jewish family and suffers in the end from Anti- Semitism has with it Malamud's characteristic irony and awareness of human suffering. In another of the key stories of the work a German refugee who is trying to make a new life in America comes to a tragic ending when he learns that the German wife he left behind has rather than abandon him in spirit been converted to Judaism and for this been murdered by the Nazis. Malamud's effort here is to universalize the suffering, and make that suffering the key to what unites Humanity. In other stories set in Italy the Malamud alter ego the artist Fidelman goes through a series of adventures which I found very much less moving than the stories set in New York. But with them too we have the sense of a literary master at work who knows the kind of ironies, of disappointments, of insights into the human heart he is aiming to portray.

I picked this up when I was out on my bike and stopped at a sidewalk bookseller. A warped gem caught my eye among the assorted unrelated new age fare. Planned to take it all the way home to read, but ended up in the sun, bike aside on the grass in a park, riveted. Idiots First is shiksas, sex, lies, crime, sadness, poverty, pride -- life twisted and yet too real. Italians, Jews -- one is even a bird. Think Edgar Allan Poe mixed with I.B. Singer. Step right up, idiots first!