My Father Is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud
Janna Malamud Smith, . . Houghton Mifflin, $24 (292pp) ISBN 978-0-618-69166-1
No biography of Malamud, one of the great Jewish-American writers, has appeared since his death in 1986, at age 72, so his daughter's beautiful memoir offers the first intimate look at his life. And it is intimate, drawing on correspondence and early journals that describe Malamud's struggle to define himself as a writer and express the anguish that afflicted him all his life: insecurity about his talent, sadness and shame over his childhood as the son of an unsuccessful and unimaginative immigrant grocer and a mother who went mad. Smith (
Reviewed on: 01/23/2006
Genre: Nonfiction
Paperback - 292 pages - 978-0-618-87263-3