Kafka’s Jewbird, Malamud’s Metamorphosis: Race, Self-Hate, and Antisemitism in Modern Jewish Fiction

ABSTRACT: Bernard Malamud’s short story “The Jewbird” (1963) has been read as a parable of Jewish assimilation, and it exemplifies the Malamudian themes of compassion, suffering, and moral ambiguity. However, critics have failed to recognize the antisemitic origins of the figure of the Jewbird. This essay examines the genealogy of the Jewbird and asks how this history affects our understanding of Malamud’s story. Comparison is made with Franz Kafka’s story The Metamorphosis (1915), in which a middle-class family confronts a monstrous insect, which can be interpreted as an antisemitic image of the traditional Jew ( Ostjude ) in their German-speaking assimilated home. In both stories an assimilated Jewish family finds in their midst the hated stereotype of the East European Jew. This essay investigates how the “Jewbird,” among other animal images, is used to write back to antisemitism and externalize racist prejudices but is also internalized in the self-image of the modern Jewish writer who holds the antisemitic stereotype to the mirror of the assimilated Jew.