The Assistant

by Bernard Malamud

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  INTRODUCTION

  By Bernard Malamud

  Copyright Page

  For Ann with love

  INTRODUCTION

  BY JONATHAN ROSEN

  We are told in the first sentence of The Assistant that the street “was dark though night had ended.” This description in many ways captures the larger condition of Bernard Malamud’s fiction. Writing after the grimmest struggles of immigrant life, after the Holocaust, after Saul Bellow had, with The Adventures of Augie March, made Jewish writing synonymous with American exuberance, Malamud conjured a world in which the long shadow of suffering still blotted out the sun.

  Though he dabbled in magical realism, spread his wings in novels like A New Life, and occasionally sent a character to Italy following his own Fulbright there, Malamud’s most memorable fictions are set in an outer borough of Stygian darkness where the inner light of the soul is in constant danger of winking out. When the psalmist cries, “O Lord, do not let me go down into the pit,” he may have in mind something like Morris Bober’s grocery store.

  Morris groans as he drags in the heavy milk bottles from the freezing sidewalk. He seems, as well, to have a kind of spiritual hernia simply from bearing the injustice of the world. He is poor and his family is poor through his bad luck, uncompromising honesty, and trusting nature. There is no margin for error in his elemental world, where a man’s life is measured in nickels and dimes and in the long silences between the ringing of the cash register.

  “You should sell long ago the store,” Morris’s nagging wife says, the impossibility of their lives captured in the tenseless broken English that is, alongside moral stamina, the unwitting wealth of Malamud’s characters.

  Not only is there the likelihood of “holdupniks” taking your money and hitting you on the head, there is the danger of the shrunken self vanishing altogether. In the dark, tribal world that Malamud evokes, names are often secondary to ethnic labels—the German, the Norwegian, the “Poilisheh,” the “Italyener,” and, of course, the Jew, which is how Morris is known to many in his non-Jewish neighborhood.

  Malamud was a master of the short story, and it sometimes seems that his characters are too poor to live in longer fiction. Tsuris—a Yiddish word for trouble that derives from an ancient Hebrew word meaning “narrow place”—is their true homeland. They can only dream of living in novels as they dream of abandoning their candy shops and grocery stores for something better. Morris’s daughter, Helen, who has submerged her own hopes for an education under a dreary job that keeps her parents afloat, hides behind Don Quixote on the subway. She gives the drifter Frank Alpine fat books to read—Anna Karenina and Crime and Punishment—as a way of enlarging his life and sparking big dreams.

  The Assistant itself can feel like a short story with epic dreams. Though Malamud had already published The Natural, this was the first time he had given the humble figures of his early fiction a novelistic home. The result is a book with hybrid energy. Structured like a long short story and ending with a sudden epiphanic stab of truth, this circumscribed shadow play nevertheless contains a robbery, a beating, a rape, a death by fire, and a death by sudden illness. It is a shock to realize how much happens, since most of the tension in this peculiarly gripping novel comes from the inner struggles of its characters—to trust, to love, to change.

  Morris is not merely a grim loser; he has a kind of flinty righteous force that shines in the dark. In keeping with the Jewish tenet to help the stranger because “you were strangers in the land of Egypt,” the grocer opens up his life to Alpine, a shady young Italian American who has in fact helped rob him. Morris sees past the battered exterior of the “Italyener” to the soul within.

  The Assistant is all about conversion. There is no way to write about the book without revealing its shocking conclusion, so finish the novel before you finish this sentence: On the last page, Frank Alpine—guilty Catholic, drifter, thief, and rapist—becomes a Jew. And yet the question of who is converting whom, and to what, haunts this novel even now, nearly fifty years after it was published, and raises profound questions about the nature of “Jewish” writing and of Judaism itself.

  “The stranger had changed, grown unstrange,” Helen Bober thinks as she finds herself falling in love with Frank. Suddenly, his “crooked nose fitted his face.” But in many ways, Frank, the dark, hungry outsider with the crooked nose, who craves Helen and hates himself for it, has been converted by Malamud long before the last page of the book. While Helen, with her aloof manner and blue eyes and pagan name, is the unattainable shiksa in this morality play.

  In a novel that makes being Jewish a grim and dyspeptic business, full of guilt and longing, Frank is already a member of the club. His talent for suffering rivals Morris’s own. He keeps recalling the stories about St. Francis he learned as a boy in a Catholic orphanage—parables in which temptation is vanquished and goodness prevails. He lacerates himself for his misdeeds and struggles to liberate his higher self, even as he takes an almost perverse pleasure in his suffering.

  Morris weeps when he hears Frank’s hard-luck story of abandonment and neglect. This show of pity fascinates and repels Frank: “That’s what they live for, Frank thought, to suffer. And the one that has got the biggest pain in the gut and can hold onto it the longest without running to the toilet is the best Jew.” But Frank learns—from Morris—to treasure his misery as if it were a token of God’s presence. Frank mistakes suffering for Jewishness; whether the novel makes the same mistake is a question worth examining.

  “Why do Jews suffer?” Frank asks Morris one day in the back of the store.

  “They suffer,” the grocer replies, because they are Jews.

  “What do you suffer for?” Frank asks Morris.

  “I suffer for you,” the grocer replies.

  Earlier in this conversation, Frank has asked Morris what the essence of Judaism is and is told: “The important thing is the Torah. This is the Law—a Jew must believe in the Law.” But since Morris goes on to defend his neglect of the Jewish holidays and his failure to keep kosher or, in fact, to observe any articulated Jewish laws at all, his definition of Torah becomes an answer worthy of St. Paul.

  The law is not a matter of commandments; it is exclusively a matter of doing the right thing. It is universal, not particular: “I suffer for you.” This is a conversation Judaism has had with itself for a long time, but The Assistant is also Malamud’s dialogue with Christian culture, perhaps his quarrel with Christianity. The novel seems, paradoxically, to be half an act of post-Holocaust revenge against Christianity and half a capitulation to it. For Malamud makes his outsider, Morris—with his broken English and Russian boyhood and anti-Semitic neighbors and meager poverty and infuriating morality—the ultimate insider. He makes him Jesus Christ. “I suffer for you.”

  And when Frank, the suffering servant who works for slave wages in a grave of a grocery store, submits to circumcision, and drags himself around “inspired” by the pain between his legs, he is only adding a new stigma to more familiar wounds. Jews in Malamud’s world are the true Christians.

  But the question haunting the novel is whether Malamud is restoring to Judaism something appropriated by Christian culture—a theology of suffering—and showing up anti-Semitism as a form of blasphemy and self-hatred, or giving to Christian culture a victory denied it by persistent Jewish otherness, since it makes that very otherness a secret sameness. Is Frank leaving behind a false “new” dispensation for the enduring truths of the old, or is he carrying Judaism off into an assimilationist ether where no law but love need prevail, and where it is indistinguishable from Christianity? This novel of stubborn surfaces, indelible accents, and tenacious ethnicity turns out,
as much as any Jewish American novel, to be all about embracing—indeed becoming—the “other.”

  Perhaps The Assistant, first published in 1957, is merely a theological formulation of a question that hovers over many novels by immigrants and the children of immigrants. Am I assimilating into mainstream society or assimilating mainstream society into myself? This may, ultimately, be an unanswerable question, unless the answer is both. Assimilation, after all, works both ways.

  The Assistant deserves to be read for many reasons: the stark portrait of working people on the brink of going under; the bleak humor; the tender evocation of Helen longing for a better life, an education, a way out; the wry critique of the “good life” as mere material comfort instead of a life of goodness; the sheer pleasure of the prose. But it should also be read as a provocative part of the literature exploring, and refashioning, America as a place where the true self is both lost and found.

  The early November street was dark though night had ended, but the wind, to the grocer’s surprise, already clawed. It flung his apron into his face as he bent for the two milk cases at the curb. Morris Bober dragged the heavy boxes to the door, panting. A large brown bag of hard rolls stood in the doorway along with the sour-faced, gray-haired Poilisheh huddled there, who wanted one.

  “What’s the matter so late?”

  “Ten after six,” said the grocer.

  “Is cold,” she complained.

  Turning the key in the lock he let her in. Usually he lugged in the milk and lit the gas radiators, but the Polish woman was impatient. Morris poured the bag of rolls into a wire basket on the counter and found an unseeded one for her. Slicing it in halves, he wrapped it in white store paper. She tucked the roll into her cord market bag and left three pennies on the counter. He rang up the sale on an old noisy cash register, smoothed and put away the bag the rolls had come in, finished pulling in the milk, and stored the bottles at the bottom of the refrigerator. He lit the gas radiator at the front of the store and went into the back to light the one there.

  He boiled up coffee in a blackened enamel pot and sipped it, chewing on a roll, not tasting what he was eating. After he had cleaned up he waited; he waited for Nick Fuso, the upstairs tenant, a young mechanic who worked in a garage in the neighborhood. Nick came in every morning around seven for twenty cents’ worth of ham and a loaf of bread.

  But the front door opened and a girl of ten entered, her face pinched and eyes excited. His heart held no welcome for her.

  “My mother says,” she said quickly, “can you trust her till tomorrow for a pound of butter, loaf of rye bread and a small bottle of cider vinegar?”

  He knew the mother. “No more trust.”

  The girl burst into tears.

  Morris gave her a quarter-pound of butter, the bread and vinegar. He found a penciled spot on the worn counter, near the cash register, and wrote a sum under “Drunk Woman.” The total now came to $2.03, which he never hoped to see. But Ida would nag if she noticed a new figure, so he reduced the amount to $1.61. His peace—the little he lived with—was worth forty-two cents.

  He sat in a chair at the round wooden table in the rear of the store and scanned, with raised brows, yesterday’s Jewish paper that he had already thoroughly read. From time to time he looked absently through the square windowless window cut through the wall, to see if anybody had by chance come into the store. Sometimes when he looked up from his newspaper, he was startled to see a customer standing silently at the counter.

  Now the store looked like a long dark tunnel.

  The grocer sighed and waited. Waiting he thought he did poorly. When times were bad time was bad. It died as he waited, stinking in his nose.

  A workman came in for a fifteen-cent can of King Oscar Norwegian sardines.

  Morris went back to waiting. In twenty-one years the store had changed little. Twice he had painted all over, once added new shelving. The old-fashioned double windows at the front a carpenter had made into a large single one. Ten years ago the sign hanging outside fell to the ground but he had never replaced it. Once, when business hit a long good spell, he had had the wooden icebox ripped out and a new white refrigerated showcase put in. The showcase stood at the front in line with the old counter and he often leaned against it as he stared out of the window. Otherwise the store was the same. Years ago it was more a delicatessen; now, though he still sold a little delicatessen, it was more a poor grocery.

  A half-hour passed. When Nick Fuso failed to appear, Morris got up and stationed himself at the front window, behind a large cardboard display sign the beer people had rigged up in an otherwise empty window. After a while the hall door opened, and Nick came out in a thick, hand-knitted green sweater. He trotted around the corner and soon returned carrying a bag of groceries. Morris was now visible at the window. Nick saw the look on his face but didn’t look long. He ran into the house, trying to make it seem it was the wind that was chasing him. The door slammed behind him, a loud door.

  The grocer gazed into the street. He wished fleetingly that he could once more be out in the open, as when he was a boy —never in the house, but the sound of the blustery wind frightened him. He thought again of selling the store but who would buy? Ida still hoped to sell. Every day she hoped. The thought caused him grimly to smile, although he did not feel like smiling. It was an impossible idea so he tried to put it out of his mind. Still, there were times when he went into the back, poured himself a spout of coffee and pleasantly thought of selling. Yet if he miraculously did, where would he go, where? He had a moment of uneasiness as he pictured himself without a roof over his head. There he stood in all kinds of weather, drenched in rain, and the snow froze on his head. No, not for an age had he lived a whole day in the open. As a boy, always running in the muddy, rutted streets of the village, or across the fields, or bathing with the other boys in the river; but as a man, in America, he rarely saw the sky. In the early days when he drove a horse and wagon, yes, but not since his first store. In a store you were entombed.

  The milkman drove up to the door in his truck and hurried in, a bull, for his empties. He lugged out a caseful and returned with two half-pints of light cream. Then Otto Vogel, the meat provisions man, entered, a bushy-mustached German carrying a smoked liverwurst and string of wieners in his oily meat basket. Morris paid cash for the liverwurst; from a German he wanted no favors. Otto left with the wieners. The bread driver, new on the route, exchanged three fresh loaves for three stale and walked out without a word. Leo, the cake man, glanced hastily at the package cake on top of the refrigerator and called, “See you Monday, Morris.”

  Morris didn’t answer.

  Leo hesitated. “Bad all over, Morris.”

  “Here is the worst.”

  “See you Monday.”

  A young housewife from close by bought sixty-three cents’ worth; another came in for forty-one cents’. He had earned his first cash dollar for the day.

  Breitbart, the bulb peddler, laid down his two enormous cartons of light bulbs and diffidently entered the back.

  “Go in,” Morris urged. He boiled up some tea and served it in a thick glass, with a slice of lemon. The peddler eased himself into a chair, derby hat and coat on, and gulped the hot tea, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

  “So how goes now?” asked the grocer.

  “Slow,” shrugged Breitbart.

  Morris sighed. “How is your boy?”

  Breitbart nodded absently, then picked up the Jewish paper and read. After ten minutes he got up, scratched all over, lifted across his thin shoulders the two large cartons tied together with clothesline and left.

  Morris watched him go.

  The world suffers. He felt every schmerz.

  At lunchtime Ida came down. She had cleaned the whole house.

  Morris was standing before the faded couch, looking out of the rear window at the back yards. He had been thinking of Ephraim.

  His wife saw his wet eyes.

  “So stop sometime, please.” Her own g
rew wet.

  He went to the sink, caught cold water in his cupped palms and dipped his face into it.

  “The Italyener,” he said, drying himself, “bought this morning across the street.”

  She was irritated. “Give him for twenty-nine dollars five rooms so he should spit in your face.”

  “A cold water flat,” he reminded her.

  “You put in gas radiators.”

  “Who says he spits? This I didn’t say.”

  “You said something to him not nice?”

  “Me?”

  “Then why he went across the street?”

  “Why? Go ask him,” he said angrily.

  “How much you took in till now?”

  “Dirt.”

  She turned away.

  He absent-mindedly scratched a match and lit a cigarette.

  “Stop with the smoking,” she nagged.

  He took a quick drag, clipped the butt with his thumb nail and quickly thrust it under his apron into his pants pocket. The smoke made him cough. He coughed harshly, his face lit like a tomato. Ida held her hands over her ears. Finally he brought up a gob of phlegm and wiped his mouth with his handkerchief, then his eyes.

  “Cigarettes,” she said bitterly. “Why don’t you listen what the doctor tells you?”

  “Doctors,” he remarked.

  Afterward he noticed the dress she was wearing. “What is the picnic?”

  Ida said, embarrassed, “I thought to myself maybe will come today the buyer.”

  She was fifty-one, nine years younger than he, her thick hair still almost all black. But her face was lined, and her legs hurt when she stood too long on them, although she now wore shoes with arch supports. She had waked that morning resenting the grocer for having dragged her, so many years ago, out of a Jewish neighborhood into this. She missed to this day their old friends and landsleit—lost for parnusseh unrealized. That was bad enough, but on top of their isolation, the endless worry about money embittered her. She shared unwillingly the grocer’s fate though she did not show it and her dissatisfaction went no farther than nagging—her guilt that she had talked him into a grocery store when he was in the first year of evening high school, preparing, he had said, for pharmacy. He was, through the years, a hard man to move. In the past she could sometimes resist him, but the weight of his endurance was too much for her now.