Department of English
Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University
The German Refugee
(1963)
Bernard
Malamud
(April 26, 1914 – March 18, 1986)
Notes
357 Danzig: a free city-state on the coast of the Baltic sea bordering Poland that was annexed to Germany in September 1939
357–58 Acht Uhr Abendblatt:
358 Kristallnacht:
358 Bauhaus:
358 gentile: a person who is not Jewish
358 Stettin:
359 Weimar Republic:
359 Ich weiss nicht, wie ich weiter machen soll:
360 Macy's: flagship location of a well-known U.S. department store chain
360 Automat: vending machine operated fast food restaurants popular in the United States in the first half of the 20th century
362 the Palisades: scenic steep cliffs west of the Hudson River stretching from northeastern New Jersey to southern New York
362 Life on the Mississippi: an 1883 memoir by Mark Twain
362 peacogs:
Oskar's mispronunciation of peacocks
362 barbiturates:
sedative drugs first introduced in the early 1900s and popular until the
1970s
363 Ich bin dir siebenundzwanzig Jahre treu gewesen:
364 Walt Whitman: 19th century American poet
365 Soviet-Nazi
nonaggression pact: signed on August 23, 1939
Quotes
I would write
a book, or a short story, at least three times—once to understand it, the
second time to improve the prose and a third to compel it to say what it
still must say. (Lecture, Bennington College; source)
Study Questions
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Review Sheet
Characters
Oskar Gassner – "Oskar was maybe fifty, his thick hair
turning gray. He had a big face and heavy hands. His shoulders sagged.
His eyes, too, were heavy, a clouded blue" (358); "meaty hand" (358);
"he had lost close to twenty pounds" (366);
Martin Goldberg – the narrator; "a poor student" (357);
"Mostly I gave English lessons to recently arrived refugees." (357);
"just twenty, on my way into my senior year in college, a skinny,
life-hungry kid, eating himself waiting for the next world war to
start." (357); "thin, elongated, red-headed" (359); speaks
pidgin-German and Yiddish (358)
Time
1939 –
end of May – "He [Oskar] was living, at
the end of May, in a small hotel, and had one night filled himself with
barbiturates" (362)
Summer –
late June – "I had met Oskar at the end of June" (361); "Outside, across the sky, a late-June green twilight fades in darkness." (357)
July – "It was a sticky, hot July" (361); "by the seventeenth of July we [the narrator and Oskar] were no longer doing lessons" (361)
mid-August – "It was by then mid-August and things were growing steadily worse wherever one looked. The Poles were mobilizing for war. Oskar hardly moved." (364)
end of August – "toward the end of August, I brought Oskar what I had written" (365)
early September –
"Oskar completed his lecture—wrote and rewrote it—during the first week in
September." (366)
early October –
"the lecture he [Oskar] had to give early in October" (361)
Places
New York – "His [Oskar's] new job was in the Institute
for Public Studies, in New York" (359)
West Tenth Street – "his stuffy, hot, dark hotel room on West Tenth Street" (357)
West Eighty-fifth Street – "Oskar moved to a two-room apartment in a house on West Eighty-fifth Street, near the Drive" (360)
Seventy-second Street
– "[the
narrator and Oskar] had supper at the Seventy-second Street Automat"
(360)
Germany –
Danzig –
Stettin –
Poland –
Sample Student Responses to Malamud's "The German Refugee"
Response 1:
Student Name 2202234 Introduction to the Study of English Literature Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri August 31, 2012 Reading Response 3
Title Text. Text.
Works Cited Book Article |
Response 2:
Rawida Komkai 2202234 Introduction to the Study of English Literature Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri September 6, 2011 Reading Response 3
Title <Text of
reading response>
|
Reference
Links | German Immigration
|
Bernard Malamud
|
Interviews |
Reference
Malamud, Bernard. "The German Refugee." The
Complete Stories, edited by Robert Giroux, Noonday, 1997, pp.
357–68.
Further Reading
The Best American Short Stories of the Century. Edited by John Updike and Katrina Kenison, Houghton Mifflin, 2000. (Arts Library)
Malamud, Bernard. The Complete Stories. Edited by Robert Giroux, Noonday, 1997. (CL 813.54 M236C)
Walden, Daniel, and Eileen H. Watts. "Prospects
for the Study of Bernard Malamud." Resources for American
Literary Study
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Last updated March 13, 2019