{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.042801556420233464, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0062256809338521405, 'mean_word_length': 5.123809523809523, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 1, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
"In Defense of the Human": Compassion and Redemption in Malamud's Short Fiction

"You bastard, don't you understand what it means human?" With this challenge, Malamud's desperate character Mendel, in "Idiots First," demands from Ginzburg, the anthropomorphized figure of death, a commitment to compassion and pity.1 Mendel's defiance of death's merciless indifference reaffirms rachmones, the Yiddish term for compassion, a fundamental concern of Jewish ethics.2 Rachmones is emphatically preoccupied with human motives and choices. It is the singular distinctive feature of Malamud's authorial voice. Moreover, this emphatic plea for compassion is nowhere more apparent than in his short stories, where formal constraints show his characters in the stark, unadorned, and precarious conditions that define and delimit their moral choices. As Mark Shechner points out with reference to Malamud, "the short story remains the purest distillation of his abiding leitmotif: the still, sad music of humanity."3 In story after story, Malamud, like his character Mendel, demands that we "understand what it means to be human." As Malamud himself put it, in a 1966 interview with Haskell Frankell: "My work, all of it, is an idea of dedication to the human. . . . I'm in defense of the human."4