Department of English

Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

The German Refugee

(1963)

Bernard Malamud

(April 26, 1914 – March 18, 1986)

Notes

357  Danzig: a free city-state on the coast of the Baltic sea bordering Poland that was annexed to Germany in September 1939

• Europe, 1919 to 1938 (map of Europe; see the note on Danzig and the Polish Corridor by pointing your cursor at the red "(note)" text under the name Danzig)
• Danzig History
• Danzig, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• History of Danzig (with time maps)
• Gershon C. Bacon, "Danzig Jewry: A Short History," Danzig 1939: Treasures of a Destroyed Community (1980)
  

357–58  Acht Uhr Abendblatt:

358  Kristallnacht: 

358  Bauhaus: 

358  gentile: a person who is not Jewish

• gentile (Merriam-Webster)
  1 often capitalized: a person of a non-Jewish nation or of non-Jewish faith; especially: a Christian as distinguished from a Jew
  2: heathen, pagan
  3 often capitalized: a non-Mormon
  

358  Stettin: 

359  Weimar Republic: 

359  Ich weiss nicht, wie ich weiter machen soll: 

360  Macy's: flagship location of a well-known U.S. department store chain

• Macy's (official webpage)
• Macy's, Inc. History
  

360  Automat: vending machine operated fast food restaurants popular in the United States in the first half of the 20^th century

• The Automat, New York Public Library (brief description and history)
• Carolyn Hughes Crowley, "Meet Me at the Automat," Smithsonian Magazine (2001)
• Lorraine B. Diehl and Marianne Hardart, The Automat: The History, Recipes, and Allure of Horn & Hardart's Masterpiece (2002 book website)
  

362  the Palisades: scenic steep cliffs west of the Hudson River stretching from northeastern New Jersey to southern New York

• The Palisades—New Jersey—Hudson River (photographs)
• Hudson River and the Palisades in Autumn, New York (photograph)
  

362  Life on the Mississippi: an 1883 memoir by Mark Twain

• Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1883; e-text with scanned illustration)
• "Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain," The Atlantic Monthly (1883 review)
  
• "The Mississippi River," Mark Twain at Large: His Travels Here and Abroad, University of California, Berkeley (online exhibit)
  
• Ken Burns, dir., Mark Twain, PBS (2001 documentary)
  

362  peacogs: Oskar's mispronunciation of peacocks

362  barbiturates: sedative drugs first introduced in the early 1900s and popular until the 1970s

• Barbiturate intoxication and overdose
• Barbiturates, University of Washington
  
• Barbiturate Drugs, Elmhurst College
  

363  Ich bin dir siebenundzwanzig Jahre treu gewesen: 

364  Walt Whitman: 19^th century American poet

• Walt Whitman (brief bio)
  
• The Walt Whitman Archive: Biography
  

365  Soviet-Nazi nonaggression pact: signed on August 23, 1939

• German-Soviet Pact, United Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Treaty of Nonaggression Between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, The Avalon Project, Yale Law School (text of the treaty)
  

Quotes

I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times—once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose and a third to compel it to say what it still must say. (Lecture, Bennington College; source)

Review Sheet

Characters

Oskar Gassner – "Oskar was maybe fifty, his thick hair turning gray. He had a big face and heavy hands. His shoulders sagged. His eyes, too, were heavy, a clouded blue" (358); "meaty hand" (358); "he had lost close to twenty pounds" (366);

Martin Goldberg – the narrator; "a poor student" (357); "Mostly I gave English lessons to recently arrived refugees." (357); "just twenty, on my way into my senior year in college, a skinny, life-hungry kid, eating himself waiting for the next world war to start." (357); "thin, elongated, red-headed" (359); speaks pidgin-German and Yiddish (358)

Time 

1939 –

        end of May – "He [Oskar] was living, at the end of May, in a small hotel, and had one night filled himself with barbiturates" (362)

    Summer –

        late June – "I had met Oskar at the end of June" (361); "Outside, across the sky, a late-June green twilight fades in darkness." (357)

        July – "It was a sticky, hot July" (361); "by the seventeenth of July we [the narrator and Oskar] were no longer doing lessons" (361)

        mid-August – "It was by then mid-August and things were growing steadily worse wherever one looked. The Poles were mobilizing for war. Oskar hardly moved." (364)

        end of August – "toward the end of August, I brought Oskar what I had written" (365)

        early September – "Oskar completed his lecture—wrote and rewrote it—during the first week in September." (366)

        early October – "the lecture he [Oskar] had to give early in October" (361)

Places 

New York – "His [Oskar's] new job was in the Institute for Public Studies, in New York" (359)

    West Tenth Street – "his stuffy, hot, dark hotel room on West Tenth Street" (357)

    West Eighty-fifth Street – "Oskar moved to a two-room apartment in a house on West Eighty-fifth Street, near the Drive" (360)

    Seventy-second Street – "[the narrator and Oskar] had supper at the Seventy-second Street Automat" (360)

Germany –

    Danzig –

    Stettin – 

Sample Student Responses to Malamud's "The German Refugee"

Response 1:

Response 2:

Reference

Reference

Malamud, Bernard. "The German Refugee." The Complete Stories, edited by Robert Giroux, Noonday, 1997, pp. 357–68.

Further Reading

The Best American Short Stories of the Century. Edited by John Updike and Katrina Kenison, Houghton Mifflin, 2000. (Arts Library)

Malamud, Bernard. The Complete Stories. Edited by Robert Giroux, Noonday, 1997. (CL 813.54 M236C)

Walden, Daniel, and Eileen H. Watts. "Prospects for the Study of Bernard Malamud." Resources for American Literary Study

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Last updated March 13, 2019