Bernard Malamud was like a second father to [my husband] Clark and me: he was Clark's teacher and when I got married that event also meant our friendship. I loved his writing but I didn't think it had anything to do with my own literary vision, with my world, until I had a very low moment in my life, in 1984. I had then very little money left because of a racist wave in Canada, I was not allowed there any more and legally I could not even have a job; and I was sitting in the kitchen reading Bernard Malamud's Selected Stories (1983) that the writer had sent me himself and suddenly, out of my self-despair, I said, My God, he is writing about the Jewish community, about their attempts to accommodate to and assimilate American culture or about their failing to do so, which is precisely what I want to write about my own community. And that was my inspiration, in a way, for Darkness (1985), my first collection of stories.