The Assistant (1957), Bernard Malamud's second novel, is the story of Morris Bober, a grocer in postwar Brooklyn, who "wants better" for himself and his family. First, two robbers appear and hold him up; then things improve when the broken-nosed Frank Alpine becomes his assistant. But there are complications: Frank, whose reaction to Jews is ambivalent, falls in love with Helen Bober; at the same time, he begins to steal from the store.
Like Malamud's best short stories, The Assistant unerringly evokes an immigrant world of cramped circumstances and great expectations. In it Malamud defines the immigrant experience in a way that has proven vital for several generations of readers.
Editorial Reviews
"His best novel . . . The Assistant is as tightly written as a prose poem." --Morris Dickstein in Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction 1945-1970
"Rightness...permeates this book...Malamud's people are memorable and real as rock." --William Goyen, The New York Time
"There is a binding theme throughout the book, a search for fundamental truths through the study of ordinary people, their everyday ups and downs, their mundane pleasures and pains ... Malamud's vision, style and world are distinctively original." -- San Francisco Chronicle
About the Author
Bernard Malamud (1914–86) wrote eight novels; he won the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for The Fixer, and the National Book Award for The Magic Barrel. Born in Brooklyn, he taught for many years at Bennington College in Vermont.
