Malamud, in his daughter's eyes

Novelist and storyteller Bernard Malamud's daughter begins this moving, unostentatiously eloquent book by explaining a radical change of heart she underwent over the past decade and a half.

In 1989, Janna Malamud Smith believed so strongly in the right to privacy, she published an article in the New York Times Book Review outlining her - and what she also believed would have been her late father's - feelings on the subject.

"Troubled by 'pathographies' - biographies that gain their sales by demeaning their subjects - I applauded James Joyce's grandson, Stephen Joyce, for publicly claiming a family's right to destroy material as they saw fit."

She recalled how her dad had always admired Shakespeare's "relative biographical anonymity."

Now, however, in the preface to My Father Is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud, she sets forth the reasons she changed her mind with admirable directness and clarity: "In part, I have to laugh at myself: When I finally read [my father's] notebooks, I realized their content didn't require my protection. But the larger reason is that time has passed. Dad has been dead for nearly two decades.... One day I realized that my father's life had shifted from something overshadowing to something disappearing from view ... [and that] my own [ability to bear] witness had become one of a few remaining membranes holding the boundary between life and void."

With equal candor, she also admits that she wants to commemorate and shore up her father's literary reputation: "What once was a trio - Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth - became a dyad, partly because Malamud died first, but also because biographies are a way we designate writers as significant and keep their fiction alive."

Like his near-contemporary Bellow, Malamud (1914-1986) emerged on the literary scene in the years just after World War II, with the publication of a searching, mildly melancholy novel about a baseball player called "The Natural." It was the same year, 1952, in which Janna was born - the Malamuds' second child and only daughter.

Although Bernard Malamud was the son of poor Russian Jewish immigrants, himself unable to speak much English until kindergarten, he eagerly immersed himself in American culture and in the riches of the English language.

Indeed, as one reads about the truly superlative education this child (and others like him) received in the New York City public school system, it makes one sad, even angry, to reflect upon the extent to which our public schools have fallen. And young Bernie had a lot to contend with.

His father, Max, was a grocer who never made much of a living. Worse yet, as Smith informs us, "Dad was thirteen years old when he came home from school one day to find his mother, Bertha, alone, insane, sitting on the kitchen floor, an empty bottle of disinfectant ('something like Drano') in one hand, the poison foaming from her mouth."

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