Next month, the Library of America will publish the third and final volume of the collected works of the Brooklyn-born Jewish author Bernard Malamud (1914–1986). Vivian Gornick considers Malamud’s oeuvre, and compares it to that of the two figures whose names are often uttered in the same breath as his: Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.

Whereas Bellow and Roth took as their subjects the lives of educated Jews emerging into full assimilation, Malamud took for his the homegrown shtetl Jews living in Brooklyn and the Bronx, those paralyzed by poverty and ignorance, and touched them with a kind of literary magic that sent the metaphor diving into depths hitherto unreached. As Bellow said of Malamud after his death, he was an “original of the first rank” in whose work one always heard the “accent of a hard-won . . . emotional truth.”

But if ever a set of characters embodied the patience of the oppressed, it is surely his shopkeeper Jews, for whom Brooklyn or the Bronx is forever Poland, 1932. These are people who are perpetually rolling a rock up a hill: the rock of sheer survival. They neither prosper nor perish; they simply do not die. Their strength and their punishment is knowing how to cling to life under circumstances so extreme that they often seem allegorical. If you asked what they mean by “survive,” they would, in all likelihood, tell you: “Just to make a living.” If you then asked, “What kind of living?,” they might, like Morris Bober in Malamud’s early novel The Assistant, reply, “What kind of living?—a living; you lived.”

While conventional wisdom in the Western press believes that the war with Hamas has left Jerusalem more isolated and scuttled chances of expanding the Abraham Accords, Gabriel Scheinmann points to a very different reality. He begins with Iran’s massive drone and missile attack on Israel last month, and the coalition that helped defend against it:

America’s Arab allies had, in various ways, provided intelligence and allowed U.S. and Israeli planes to operate in their airspace. Jordan, which has been vociferously attacking Israel’s conduct in Gaza for months, even publicly acknowledged that it shot down incoming Iranian projectiles. When the chips were down, the Arab coalition held and made clear where they stood in the broader Iranian war on Israel.

The successful batting away of the Iranian air assault also engendered awe in Israel’s air-defense capabilities, which have performed marvelously throughout the war. . . . Israel’s response to the Iranian night of missiles should give further courage to Saudi Arabia to codify its alignment. Israel . . . telegraphed clearly to Tehran that it could hit precise targets without its aircraft being endangered and that the threshold of a direct Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear or other sites had been breached.

The entire episode demonstrated that Israel can both hit Iranian sites and defend against an Iranian response. At a time when the United States is focused on de-escalation and restraint, Riyadh could see quite clearly that only Israel has both the capability and the will to deal with the Iranian threat.

It is impossible to know whether the renewed U.S.-Saudi-Israel negotiations will lead to a normalization deal in the immediate months ahead. . . . Regardless of the status of this deal, [however], or how difficult the war in Gaza may appear, America’s Arab allies have now become Israel’s.