Paul Malamud – 50th Reunion Essay

Paul Malamud

malamudp@yahoo.com

College: Silliman

Well, here we are at the 50th anniversary, and sometimes I feel I’m still trying to organize my 20-year-old life. How time flies.

What did Yale mean to me? I had grown up in the ’50s and ’60s, the son of a father who had taught English in college, as well as making a career as a novelist, so I was an English department brat. And, like many in my class, I read a lot of books as a kid. Given that, the Yale English major—and French minor—were a great academic experience—I have to believe among the best of their day. Both departments were outstanding. With other offerings such as introductory courses in Greek art and classic Greek drama, it was a great time to get a humanities degree. The Yale Dramatic Association was my extracurricular activity, and for whatever reason the people in that organization in the ’60s got along very well. A group is still in touch over the Internet. And I liked being tapped for Manuscript senior year.

So, all in all, I felt a school as good as Yale was the (early) reward of a lifetime. Most students and faculty I met were open, friendly people, and I found the days from morning Intensive German to dinner at Commons exciting, challenging, even dramatic.

After Yale, I went on to Manhattan in the early ’70s and earned a PhD in English at Columbia in the latter part of the decade, but by then lectureships in the humanities were harder to get, and the profession was contracting. I ended up moving to Washington, DC, in 1980 and settling down as a civil service writer/editor in foreign affairs agencies. I retired in 2008. DC has become a more cosmopolitan and foodie place over the years I’ve lived here, and the National Gallery of Art is a major institution, with fine special exhibits, like the Met in New York. Partly because I had lived in Rome with my parents for a year in the 1950s, art has also been a major interest.

During the DC years, vacations left two or three weeks in the summer to revisit Europe. In retirement, I’ve enjoyed making translations of Latin and Renaissance French poetry, which sometimes get published in little magazines, and have time to read what I want to. So, I’d say Yale was a big boost in the direction my family had begun—as well as a thrill in and of itself.