The Mourners by Bernard Malamud

Kessler, the egg candler.

Bernard Malamud is such a natural storyteller. Even when his stories are steeped in hardship and suffering, there’s almost always a deep current of compassion running underneath. A belief that flawed people are still capable of moral awakening or spiritual change. We see all of that on full display in The Mourners, a deceptively simple story about an elderly, retired egg candler named Kessler who is being evicted by his landlord, Gruber. Kessler lives alone in his small apartment, keeping mostly to himself. Early on, we learn that he abandoned his wife and children over thirty years ago. It's a small detail that seems almost incidental at first but as the story progress, seems to weigh heavily on him, suggesting a long history of guilt and regret.

After a petty argument involving the janitor, Gruber seizes what he’s clearly been waiting for: an excuse to get rid of the old man so he can jack up the rent for the next tenant. Gruber is small-minded, cruel, and rigidly focused on rules when they benefit him. Malamud makes it clear that this eviction isn’t really about policy. It’s more about power, convenience, and a total lack of empathy. Perhaps even some antisemitism as well. 

As the story progresses, the title takes on deeper meaning. Mourning here isn’t just about death in the literal sense. Kessler mourns the family he abandoned and almost certainly lost forever. He mourns the life he never lived and the moral failures he can’t undo. But the mourning doesn’t stop with him. There’s also a unsettling suggestion that Gruber himself is something to be mourned. He's morally and spiritually hollow, alive but inwardly dead.

This idea comes to a head during the story’s powerful climax, when Gruber storms into Kessler’s apartment yet again, threatening eviction. In a moment that’s both shocking and deeply symbolic, Kessler asks him, “Are you a Hitler or a Jew?” It’s a blunt, uncomfortable question, but that’s exactly the point. Malamud strips the situation down to its moral core. Gruber is being asked to choose: will he align himself with cruelty, authoritarianism, and indifference to suffering, or will he recognize his shared humanity and take responsibility for the harm he’s causing?

What makes this moment so effective is that it shifts the moral weight of the story. Kessler, for all his past failures, emerges as someone capable of moral and spiritual clarity, while Gruber is exposed as the one truly lacking it. The irony of the ending and the subtle shift in perspective towards Gruber, underscores Malamud’s belief in spiritual transformation. Redemption is possible, but only if one is willing to confront their own inhumanity.

By the end, The Mourners becomes a story not just about eviction or poverty, but about moral responsibility. It's about who we choose to be when faced with another person’s vulnerability. Kessler mourns his past, his family, and his losses, but he also ironically mourns Gruber, a man who still has time to change yet seems tragically unaware of how spiritually empty he has become.

You can read this story HERE.