Quote Of The Day: Walk Through A Wall (Continued)

Image by photosforyou from Pixabay

Quote Of The Day #71

This is the 2nd half of the post. The 1st half is here.

I’ve had “The Complete Stories” by Bernard Malamute for many years, but I didn’t like it before. I don’t know why. I didn’t read it for a long time, but recently I started to read it (sorry, listen to it) and found that I like it. I guess the content of the stories interests me since it is mostly about Jewish immigrants in New York and Newark. Many of their struggles echo my own experiences. I especially like those arguments between husband and wife, parents and children. For example, in the short story “Suppose A Wedding”:

“Suppose A Wedding”

It’s about a family, in which the daughter is engaged, but the father doesn’t like his daughter’s fiancé. He tries to fix her up with a boy with a college degree. So the daughter tries to go out for a walk with the college boy, her fiancé arrives to try to put a stop on that, and the father and mother argues about the whole incident. It is a very small and common scene, but the conversations really make the story alive. The daughter and her fiancé talk back and forth about the appropriateness of the walk with the college boy–the daughter tries to make it sound like nothing while her fiancé tries to control the walk by showing up before and after the walk. The girl’s parents discuss this too, and obviously the father is quite bad tempered and was not very responsible when he was young. The parents’ argument is very real and very engaging too. The father is at least mildly narcissistic and the mother tries her best to cope with him…

“The Lady Of The Lake”

After WWII, An American art student inherited some money and traveled to Italy to learn art. He met a beautiful Italian girl, whose family were tourist guides. He tried to hide his Jewish heritage and pretended to be a gentile. And the ending is quite surprising. The girl was not what she tried to project to be…

“Black Is My Favorite Color”

A Jewish store owner fell in love with a beautiful black girl, who frequented his store. They went out several times. This was in 1950s and interracial relationships were illegal. The store owner tried to persuade his girlfriend to go to San Francisco, where people were more liberal and tolerant than New Yorkers, but the girl refused. She couldn’t leave her friends and family.

“Life Is Better Than Death”

A man and a woman met in a graveyard, each mourning his or her partner, who had died. The man tried to convince the woman to move on by saying, “life is better than death.” And finally the woman was convinced and ready to move on to the next chapter… The ending is quite surprising.