The Assistant, by Bernard Malamud, (1957)

The Assistant
Author: Bernard Malamud, (1957)

Malamud was a writer who always had one eye fixed on the eternal and one on the here and now. The eternal was the realm of moral quandaries. The here and now was usually a world of struggling 20th-century Jews. It was his genius to show the two constantly intersecting. In this book, his masterpiece, Morris Bober is a woebegone neighborhood grocer whose modest store is failing and whose luck actually takes a turn for the worse when he is held up by masked hoodlums. Or is it worse? When a stranger appears and offers to work without pay, "for the experience", it doesn't take long for the reader to realize that the stranger is one of the men who robbed Bober. But just what are his motives in returning? He seems to be seeking to atone, but he soon begins quietly robbing the till, while also falling in love with Bober's daughter, theft of a different kind. From this intricate material Malamud builds a devastating meditation upon suffering, penance and forgiveness, and the ways in which the weight of the world can be lifted, just a little, by determined acts of grace.— R.L.

From the TIME Archive:
"Though Malamud's people have a bad time of it, they are never just helpless victims of life"

The Good Grocer

Monday, Apr. 29, 1957

THE ASSISTANT (246 pp.) — Bernard Malamud— Farrar, Straus & Cudahy

In his first novel, The Natural, Bernard Malamud brought a southpaw wackiness, plus a few touches of cloudy symbolism, to the subject of baseball (TIME. Sept. 8, 1952). In his second book he goes deeper into human nature, and the result is an even more impressive novel to delight admirers in the growing Malamud salon.

Again he takes a familiar, almost mythical theme, turns it upside down and irradiates it with originality. His hero is Morris Bober, an aging Brooklyn grocer who is clinging to solvency by his fingertips. But Morris is also that legendary Jewish figure of misfortune, the schlemiel, whose fate has been told and retold from the Old Testament to Sholom Aleichem. Bobers good intentions gain him nothing but hard knocks. The only dangers he escapes are imaginary ones. Yet, through all his woes, there shines unblinkingly the steady light of a good heart.

Toward Expiation. Morris Bober's world is bounded by his seedy store, his endlessly nagging wife Ida, his difficult daughter Helen—a girl who wants "to be a virgin again and at the same time a mother"—and his wealthy neighbor Karp, whose "every good fortune spattered others with misfortune, as if there were just so much luck in the world and what Karp left over wasn't fit to eat." Morris Bober's troubles never come singly. Not only has a brand-new grocery opened around the corner, halving his already pitiful income, but a pair of inept hoodlums, passing up Karp's well-heeled liquor store, rob Morris instead and pistol-whip him when they find only $10 in his cash register.

When shabby Frank Alpine shows up, eager to work without pay ("I need the experience"), Morris suspects there must be a catch somewhere. Why should anyone want to work for nothing, Ida asks, and a gentile at that. "Give him better a dollar he should go someplace else," she urges. But Frank stays and, miraculously, business improves. Frank Alpine is slowly revealed as a man whose aspirations are several light-years ahead of his performance. He works hard, but cannot resist stealing from the till. Then Morris discovers that Frank is one of the two robbers who held him up. Worst of all, his daughter Helen has fallen in love with the new clerk. Morris fires him, but Frank comes back, dogged, penitent. In the end, by way of ultimate expiation, Frank gradually changes, and step by step becomes more and more like the grocer, assuming his burdens and his fate.

Against Windmills. Though Malamud's people have a bad time of it, they are never just helpless victims of life. Out of each debacle they draw surprising strength; always ready to charge the next windmill. Helen is convinced she will eventually get the college education that will change her life. Frank Alpine knows that some day he will find the self-discipline to keep him from always turning good into bad. Morris manages to get through each day without dishonesty or cheating. He dies of a heart bursting with regret that "I gave away my life for nothing." But Morris was wrong, and Novelist Malamud proves him so in a tenderly moving funeral sermon by a rabbi who never knew him.

Brooklyn-born Bernard Malamud, 43, assistant professor of English at Oregon State College, is now in Rome on a fellowship working on his third novel. He writes out of his own experience (his father was a New York grocer). In The Assistant, Malamud brings to his story of the poor not only pity without sentimentality and realism without bad taste; he gives their humblest acts a kind of foreboding excitement that can only spring from a conviction that they—the poor and the meek—will inherit the earth.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,821143-2,00.html