(Editor’s note: Bernard Malamud passed away in 1986, at the age of 72.  The following is an excerpt from an interview Leslie and Joyce Field conducted with Malamud in 1973.  The interview originally appeared in Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall, 1975, pp.8-17.)

Leslie and Joyce Field: It has been reported that you once said: “A Malamud character is someone who fears his fate, is caught up in it, yet manages to outrun it.  He’s the subject and object of laughter and pity.”  Could you elaborate on this statement?
Bernard Malamud: I can’t work up any great enthusiasm for the statement but what I imagine it means is that my characters often outwit their predictable fates.  I’d say that holds for Fidelman, Yokov Bok, and even Harry Lesser.
The Fields: One popular view has it that the schlemiel as metaphor is an uneasy transplant from East European Yiddish fiction to modern American fiction.  Critics say, for example, that an America that has gone through Vietnam and civil strife, a country that is no longer considered a “winner,” cannot accept with equanimity a fictional depiction of a “loser.”  How do you react to this commentary on the use of the schlemiel in fiction?
Malamud: With many apologies, I don’t much care for the schlemiel treatment of fictional characters.  Willy-nilly, it reduces to stereotypes people of complex motivations and fates – not to mention possibilities.  The literary critic who wants to measure the quality and depth of a fictional character has better terms to use.
The Fields: In one of your early, infrequent interviews, we believe you said that Kafka was one of the modern authors who had influenced you.  How?
Malamud: He writes well.  He moves me.  He makes me want to write well and move my readers.  Other writers have had a similar effect.  I guess what I’m trying to say is that I am influenced by literature.
The Fields: There has been much critical commentary concerning a statement you are alleged to have made:  “All men are Jews.”  Did you ever actually make this statement?  Do you believe it is true?  It is, of course, a view one cannot take literally.  In any event, would you elaborate on the “All men are Jews” statement?
Malamud: I think I said, “All men are Jews except they don’t know it.”  I doubt I expected anyone to take the statement literally.  But I think it’s an understandable statement and a metaphoric way of indicating how history, sooner or later, treats all men.
The Fields: Some have seen parallels between your work and painting, especially the spiritual, mystical works of Chagall.  This has been observed, for instance, in your short story, “The Magic Barrel.”  Elsewhere readers have remarked on your concern with the plastic arts in general – in Pictures of Fidelman, for example.  What influence has painting had on your fiction?  Have you consciously tried to fuse one art form with another?
Malamud: It’s true that I did make use of what might be called Chagallean imagery in “The Magic Barrel.”  I did so intentionally in that story, but I’ve not done it again in any other piece of fiction, and I feel that some critics make too much of Chagall as an image maker in my work.  Chagall, as a painter, doesn’t mean as much to me as Matisse, for instance.  Painting helps me to see with greater clarity the multifarious world and to depict it simply.
The Fields: Philip Roth and other American novelists have rejected the label “Jewish-American Writer.”  In one way or another you have also.  It is our impression that the responsible people who place you and others in this category do not intend to disregard the universalism in your work.  They have simply categorized, as scholars are prone to do.  Do you reject the term “Jewish-American Writer” categorically?
Malamud: The term is schematic and reductive.  If the scholar needs the term, he can have it, but it won’t be doing him any good if he limits his interpretation of a writer to fit a label he applies.  Bellow pokes fun at this sort of thing by calling “Bellow-Malamud-Roth” the Hart, Schaffner, and Marx of Jewish-American literature.
The Fields:  Whether or not you accept the label of Jewish-American writer, would you not agree that your writing reveals a special sense of a people’s destiny that more often than not cannot be fully grasped in all its nuances and vibrations by those who are not fully sensitized to that people or its destiny?
Malamud: I’m sensitive to Jews and Jewish life but so far as literature is concerned I can’t say that I approve of your thesis: that one has to be of a certain nationality or color to “fully grasp” the “nuances and vibrations” of its fiction.  I write on the assumption that any one sensitive to fiction can understand my work and feel it.
The Fields: It has been noted that if one is to interpret your work correctly, one must not weigh Judaic interpretations too heavily. One must rather look to the Christian symbolism or perhaps the Judaic-Christian.  How do you respond to this?
Malamud: I don’t know whether there is a “correct” interpretation of my work.  I hope not.
The Fields: Some have remarked that you are not interested in a novel of ideas as such, but in a depiction of human nature.  Henry James, for example, was quite vocal in explaining his fictional approach (which he attributed to Turgenev’s influence).  That is, he would start out with a clearly defined character thrust into a specific situation.  How that character responded to the situation became all-important.  Do you believe your own fictional approach follows this Jamesian-Turgenev method?
Malamud: Basically, that’s it, but I don’t think I would limit my “fictional approach” to the “Jamesian-Turgenev method.”  One learns from Shakespeare as well.  My novels are close to plays.  I had once, as a young writer, wanted to be a playwright.
The Fields: Are you very concerned with drawing prototypes and archetypes in your fiction as opposed to depicting realistic human beings?  In other words, do you find yourself deliberately flattening out some of your characters much as a Stephen Crane would do or as a Cezanne would do in painting because you are at times much more interested in something beyond the depiction of a recognizable three-dimensional character?
Malamud:  I would never deliberately flatten a character to create a stereotype.  Again – I’m not much one for preconceptions, theories – even E. M. Forster’s “flats and rounds.”  Most of all I’m out to create real and passionate human beings.  I do as much as I can with a character.  I may not show him in full blast every moment, but before the end of a fiction he has had a chance to dance his dance.
The Fields: Would you agree that yours is basically a comic vision of life?
Malamud:  There is comedy in my vision of life.  To live sanely one must discover life – or invent it.  Consider the lilies of the field; consider the Jewish lily that toils and spins.