Bernard Malamud
- American novelist and short story writer
- Wrote about jewish immigrant life
- His «Russian» parents escaped from Tsarist Russia
- His stories portray immigrant characters through emotional language
Though he tried not to think of it, at twenty-nine Tommy Castelli’s life was a screaming bore. It wasn’t just Rosa or the store they tended for profits counted in pennies, or the unendurably slow hours and endless drivel that went with selling candy, cigarettes, and soda water; it was this sick-in-the-stomach feeling of being trapped in old mistakes, even some he had made before Rosa changed Tony into Tommy. He had been as Tony a kid of many dreams and schemes, especially getting out of this tenement-crowded, kid-squawking neighbourhood,
with its lousy poverty, but everything had fouled up against him before he could. When he was sixteen he quit the vocational school where they were making him into a shoemaker, and began to hang out with the gray- hatted, thick-soled-shoe boys, who had the spare time and the mazuma and showed it in fat wonderful rolls down in the cellar clubs to all who would look, and everybody did, popeyed. They were the ones who had bought the silver caffe espresso urn and later the television, and they arranged the pizza parties and had the
girls down; but it was getting in with them and their cars, leading to the holdup of a liquor store, that had started all the present trouble. Lucky for him the coal-and-ice man who was their landlord knew the leader in the district, and they arranged something so nobody bothered him after that. Then before he knew what was going on – he had been frightened sick by the whole mess – there was his father cooking up a deal with Rosa Agnello’s old man that Tony would marry her and the father-in-law would, out of his savings, open a candy store for him to
make an honest living. He wouldn’t spit on a candy store, and Rosa was too plain and lank a chick for his personal taste, so he beat it off to Texas and bummed around in too much space, and when he came back everybody said it was for Rosa and the candy store, and it was all arranged again and he, without saying no, was in it.
- Describe the protagonist (especially focus on his feelings)
- What happened to his dreams as a boy?
- What happened while he was a teenager?
- After that event in his teenage days, people started to take decisions for him. Did he tried to take his own decisions?
- Tony used to be a bad boy, he made many mistakes that affected his present as a new man that fails in life called Tommy. When he was a kid he ruined his life, he was a loser, he didn’t have the possibility to have a good future. His life in the present is a fail, a screaming bore, a lame. He has married a woman for convenience, to have a job and a better social life, a life that is a complete lie and a mess.
- Tony was despised in society as most of the immigrants. He was poor, and also Italian so he had the dream to go away from his neighborhood and have more money.
- He was a rebel with friends that encouraged him to do things that were completely wrong. His phase of a teenanger was the worst thing that could have happened to him. Tony committed crimes, he had many dreams that couldn’t come true, and a future that couldn’t have been possible to success. He committed crimes with his gang.
- His life was failing and everybody knew it. Tony’s family was trying to show him the right path, to point out the way in which life should be. They found a woman called Rosa that Tony could marry, and a woman that could find a job for him. The woman changed his name, and this led to his loss of identity. He was now working in in a candy shop and married to a woman he isn’t in love with. Although he tried to make his own decisions by escaping, but he failed.
