Bernard Malamud's The Refugee - Refugee series # 1

This week in Books and Authors, I would like to introduce six literary pieces based on the theme of refugees. The first in the series is a short story by Bernard Malamud. In his interview with the Paris Review, the author says that he wants his books to speak for themselves. He asks the reporter “You can read? All right, tell me what my books mean. Astonish me”.  He talks about his parents, who were not educated but ‘their values were stable’. He fondly remembers how his father gifted him the twenty volumes of The Book of Knowledge and received a radio from him when he was in high school. He enjoyed ‘watching movies and reading the dime novels’. He had made up his mind regarding what he wanted to become in life when he took to literature. As early as eight or nine, he used to write little stories in school. Bernard Malamud shares his wonderful perspective on learning and teaching. He says, “You learn what you teach, and you learn from those you teach” He enjoys writing more than talking because he loved the privileges of the form. The Refugee is the story of Oskar Gessner and Martin Goldberg. The former is a refugee from Germany in the US and the latter is a teacher of English Language. The former tries ‘to hide his despair but not his pain’. The latter made a little living from the poor refugees. Bernard Malamud has invested heavily on this student-teacher duo. I was reminded of the movie – The King’s Speech which again presented to us the guru-shishya bonding but in a highly power centric manner. The student is a king and the teacher is an ordinary phonetician. Even the movie “Anna and the King brings the teacher-student bonding based on power. One of the interesting notions that are presented in The Refugee is about the powerlessness of the tongue. Oskar can speak, read and write only German and using this the author represents the sad plight of refugees in a foreign land. “To many of these people, articulate as they were, the great loss was the loss of the language – that they could no longer say what was in them to say”. One character further says that – ‘I felt like a child or worse often like a moron, I am left with myself unexpressed. What I knew, indeed, what I am becomes to me a burden. My tongue hangs useless.’ The story has a tagline – ‘I thought I knew his story. But there was some deep secret he had never told me’