I love when a writer falls for their own character and brings them back in multiple short stories. Here’s the debut of Fidelman, a “self-confessed failure as a painter” who arrives in Rome to work on a monograph on Giotto. Almost immediately, he’s targeted by Susskind, a Jewish-Italian scrounger who wangles a few bucks from the scholar – although not the “spare suit” he hopes for as he eyes Fidelman’s suitcase. This first encounter is not to be their last, and Fidelman’s project is about to go very far wrong. The two are intractable opposites, as signified in their initial exchange, in which Fidelman’s lofty false modesty (“He coughed a little … ‘I’ve given a great deal of time and study to his [Giotto’s] work’”) is brought low by Susskind’s ambiguous but wonderfully skewering response: “‘So I know him too.’” Fidelman is the classic Malamud mensch who, believing himself well-meaning, is about to discover the limits to his good humour; Susskind is his mirror image, his tormentor, but maybe also his conscience, and his educator. When Fidelman’s briefcase, containing the invaluable first chapter of his manuscript, goes missing, he immediately suspects the several times denied Susskind and, abandoning his wallowing in classical history, pursues his quarry through signifiers of a much more recent history: the ghetto, its synagogue, Rome’s Jewish cemetery. What the two men reach is not an accord or mutual respect, maybe not even an understanding, but something more complex and nuanced, a kind of merging.
First published in the Paris Review, 1958 and collected in The Magic Barrel, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1958 and The Stories of Bernard Malamud, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983
A Personal Anthology 