Black Is My Favorite Color by Bernard Malamud
About the short story
The short story Black is My Favorite Color by Bernard Malamud is about Jewish-Black relationships in America similarly to several of his other novels (such as The Assistant, 1957) and short stories.
Bernard Malamud (1914-1986) was born in Brooklyn as an offspring of Russian Jewish immigrants. Along with Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Paul Auster, Malamud is one of the most important Jewish-American writers. Black is My Favorite Color deals with prejudice in general and positive prejudice on the part of a liberal humanist in particular, as well as with difficult relationships between people of different ethnic and social origins. It's also about self-image, self-deception and the way people are perceived by others.
The story is told by a middle-aged bachelor who portrays his present situation of failed relationships with black people, which he illustrates by telling a story about past confrontations with a former friend of his, Buster, and a former lover, Ornita. The main character, Nat Lime, tries to make his cleaning woman feel at ease, who, however, turns down his offer to sit at one table with him. This reminds him of past mischief.
Black is My Favorite Color is also a story of changed relationships between African-Americans and Jews in the wake of the events of the 1960's.
Preliminary remarks
Israel Zangwill in his play The Melting Pot (1908) evokes associations of redemption and rebirth into an Edenic age where a new American species is born. This idyllic melting pot concept has been replaced by concepts of multi-ethnicity, hybridity, etc. Ethnic writers assert themselves and have called for rewriting American history and socialisation from non-European, African-American, Native American, Chicano / male and female / perspectives, as challenges to white Anglo-Saxon protestant (WASP) visions. However, utopian views of American life free of the restrictions of history, intolerance, racism, have persisted into optimistic
The short story Black is My Favorite Color by Bernard Malamud is about Jewish-Black relationships in America similarly to several of his other novels (such as The Assistant, 1957) and short stories.
Bernard Malamud (1914-1986) was born in Brooklyn as an offspring of Russian Jewish immigrants. Along with Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Paul Auster, Malamud is one of the most important Jewish-American writers. Black is My Favorite Color deals with prejudice in general and positive prejudice on the part of a liberal humanist in particular, as well as with difficult relationships between people of different ethnic and social origins. It's also about self-image, self-deception and the way people are perceived by others.
The story is told by a middle-aged bachelor who portrays his present situation of failed relationships with black people, which he illustrates by telling a story about past confrontations with a former friend of his, Buster, and a former lover, Ornita. The main character, Nat Lime, tries to make his cleaning woman feel at ease, who, however, turns down his offer to sit at one table with him. This reminds him of past mischief.
Black is My Favorite Color is also a story of changed relationships between African-Americans and Jews in the wake of the events of the 1960's.
Preliminary remarks
Israel Zangwill in his play The Melting Pot (1908) evokes associations of redemption and rebirth into an Edenic age where a new American species is born. This idyllic melting pot concept has been replaced by concepts of multi-ethnicity, hybridity, etc. Ethnic writers assert themselves and have called for rewriting American history and socialisation from non-European, African-American, Native American, Chicano / male and female / perspectives, as challenges to white Anglo-Saxon protestant (WASP) visions. However, utopian views of American life free of the restrictions of history, intolerance, racism, have persisted into optimistic
Bibliography: ) * I owe some of the above examples to my colleague Uta Schmohl, to the project ICCinTE coordinated by Ildikó Lázár and colleague Martina Huber-Kriegler, and to my Polish partners in the Comenius project Sprachreflexion im interkulturellen Kontext, Anna Przybylowska, Urszula Boszulak and Wolfgang Bohusch, Coordination: Gerlind Vief-Schmidt