The Prison Study Guide

Bernard Malamud was a Jewish American author born in Brooklyn, New York. Malamud’s parents fled tsarist Russia and immigrated to the United States before Malamud was born, but their experiences shaped his childhood and upbringing. Their family was poor and relied on a small grocery store his father owned as their primary income. When Malamud was 15, his mother died while in a mental institution, and Malamud took on responsibility for his older brother, Eugene, who struggled with the same mental illness as their mother. Though Malamud’s father was barely literate in English, Malamud valued education and sought out opportunities to learn. He graduated from City College of New York and continued his education at Columbia University. In 1945, Malamud married Ann De Chiara, an Italian American Catholic woman, and together they had two children. He taught at various high schools in New York City, after which he taught at Oregon State University and Bennington College in Vermont. While living and teaching in Oregon, he prioritized making time to write, and during this time he published his first novel, The Natural, which would later become an emblem of his literary style. In addition to novels, Malamud also published several short story collections, one of which, The Magic Barrel, earned a National Book Award. Malamud received a second National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his fourth novel, The Fixer, in 1967. Much of his work, including The Fixer, explores the Jewish American immigrant experience and addresses antisemitism after the Holocaust. Before he died in 1986, Malamud published a total of eight novels and four collections of short stories.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, thousands of Jewish immigrants entered the United States to flee tsarist leadership, religious persecution, and antisemitism present throughout Eastern Europe, particularly Russia. Beginning in the 1880s, Soviet leaders implemented anti-Jewish pogroms, which led to over two million Jews fleeing the country between 1880 and 1920. Many Russian Jews fled to the United States, including Malamud’s parents, and entered through Ellis Island. Few resources and discrimination in America limited them to settling in the Lower East Side of New York, where they lived in overcrowded, often dilapidated tenement homes. The Great Depression, though most detrimental to rural Americans, exacerbated poverty amidst immigrants and the resulting global economic crisis impacted both their jobs and quality of life. As the Depression led into World War II, Jewish immigrants in particular endured countless tragedies and injustices. Many Jewish Americans fought in WWII, defending both their new home in America and their relatives facing the horrors of the Holocaust in Europe. Though Malamud was exempt from fighting in WWII as the sole provider for his family, he certainly encountered pro-Nazi movements in the United States, and his identity as a Jewish American, the legacy of his parents as Russian Jewish immigrants, and his upbringing in impoverished, tenement neighborhoods informed his writing about Americans of various backgrounds struggling with poverty and limited aspirations.

“The Prison” stands in the context of The Magic Barrel, Malamud’s debut short story collection that centers on stories of similarly poor people in urban settings. The collection includes 12 more stories on these subjects, which, when read together, create a more comprehensive vision of Malamud’s aim to highlight stories from impoverished, multi-ethnic urban communities. Though Malamud drew from his own experiences growing up in poverty and running a family store in the creation of “The Prison,” Tommy’s experiences are not overtly autobiographical. But Malamud’s second novel, The Assistant, explores such ideas more directly. The Assistant, published in 1957, follows a Jewish immigrant who runs a small Brooklyn grocery store—much like Malamud’s own father. Similarly, Malamud’s novel The Fixer, published in 1966, tells a fictionalized account of Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Jew wrongfully imprisoned for murder in 1913 Tsarist Russia. Both novels offer glimpses of Malamud’s identity as a child of Russian Jewish immigrants and as Jewish American. A generation younger than Malamud, Chaim Potok also explored the immigrant Russian Jewish experience and the spiritual and cultural lives of Jewish American communities in novels like The Chosen (1967) and My Name is Asher Lev (1972). More broadly, Malamud’s realist focus on the lives of impoverished families and communities can be found in works such as James Joyce’s 1914 short story collection Dubliners and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939).