Idiots First

Idiots First

Major Characters:

Mendel: A sick old man, informed by Ginsburg the day before that he will die the next day, desparately tries to send his "half-wit" son Isaac to his eighty-one-year-old Uncle Leo in California. He does not have enough money to buy a train ticket for Isaac. He needs "thirty-five dollars" more.

Isaac: Mendel's son, thirty-nine, mentally retarded, who seems to keep eating peanuts.

Ginzburg: The death, personified in the end of the story as "uniformed ticket collector," who would not let Mendel take Isaac to the train to California because it is "Already past twelve."

Mr. Fishbein: A rich Jew who won't give Mendel the money he needs: "Private contributions I don't make--only to institutions."

"Yascha": A poor old rabbi, who gives Mendel "a fur-lined caftan": "I got my old one. Who needs two coats for one body?"

Chronology of Events:

On a Friday night in November: Mendel awakes in fright at suppertime. The clock has stopped. He takes Isaac to a pawnshop and gets eight dollars for his "worn gold watch." Then they go to Mr. Fishbein's to ask for thirty-five dollars in vain. At a park, Mendel is almost mugged. He took a trolley with Isaac to a former friend, who turns out to be dead for years. At about eleven ("What can I do...in one short hour"), he thinks of getting money for his furniture at the pawnshop but it is closed. Mendel goes in a synagogue and calls for a rabbi. A sexton tells him that he is asleep in his house next door. Mendel goes to the rabbi's house. Despite his wife's protest, he gives Mendel his new coat. Mendel practically snatches it away from his wife and runs with Isaac. "After them noiselessly ran Ginsburg."

Around the midnight: Somehow Mendel has changed the rabbi's coat into money and buys the train ticket "in the only booth open." He hurries to the gate to the platform with Isaac. Ginzburg appears in the uniform of a ticket collector and stops them. After the argument and struggle, Mendel manages to board Isaac on the train. "When the rain was gone, Mendel ascended the stairs to see what had become of Ginsburg." (Italics mine)

This collection contains a great story, "The Jewbird." Definitely not a raven intoning, “Evermore!” No, this is a skinny and scraggly black bird that is fully anthropomorphized and physically unattractive, a New Yorker talking incessantly with Yiddish syntax and idioms, the unwelcome (to Harry Cohen) and intrusive houseguest who won’t leave. Harry would never have let the Jewbird stay at all but for the pleadings of his wife, Edie, and 10-year-old son Morris. Nonetheless he does everything he can to make the Jewbird, Schwartz, thoroughly unwelcome, and Schwartz ultimately leaves.

Schwartz, convinced that he is threatened by “Anti-Semeets,” is thoroughly Jewish, and Harry definitely tries not to be, rejecting prayer and Kosher food (one irony being that Harry is probably as Anti-Semitic as the vague enemies that Schwartz fears). Schwartz does, though, have a positive influence on Morris, improving his weak study habits, but Morris’s eventual acquisition of a cat proves disadvantageous.

The story is really very funny, a mixture of fantasy and realism, combining the humanized bird with accurate details in the lives of the truly human protagonists. Malamud pokes fun at ethnic stereotypes even as he skillfully explores issues such as intolerance, the rejection of those parts of ourselves that we find unattractive, hospitality, and the eagerness with which most of us define ourselves by what we are not or wish not to be. An irony within an irony is the fact that this Jewish author satirizes the Jewbird and Jewish family whom he creates