BERNARD MALAMUD’S ‘THE ASSISTANT’:

THE AMERICAN AGONISTES

DR. A. V. KRISHNA RAO, M. A., Ph. D.

Indian Institute of Technology, Madras

On the occasion of receiving the National Book Award for The Magic Barrel, Bernard Malamud is reported to have said: “I am quite tired of the colossally deceitful devaluation of Man in this day...Whatever the reason, his fall from grace in his eyes is betrayed by the words he has invented to describe himself as he is now: fragmented, abbreviated, other-directed, organizational...The devaluation exists because he accepts it without protest.”¹

Malamud’s fictional experience seems to be, in this context, a significant affirmation of the ethical sensibility of man as it evolves into moral awareness, the locus being the peculiar Jewish sub-cultural situation in the contemporary American society. The Jewish-American novelist, unlike the Negro novelist, is not so much concerned with racial segregation as with cross-cultural patterns of experience, especially when the minority culture happens to be rooted in thousands of years of historical consciousness. Having won the struggle for a place in society, the American Jew, while not being unduly worried about his social and legal status, still remains wistfully committed to his traditional notions of individual behaviour or personal conduct and relations. At any rate, this appears to be the central thematic concern in Malamud’s The Assistant. More importantly, Malamud in this novel projects the image of Jew that of Everyman; and through the subtle process of his art, achieves a perfectly satisfying and integrated vision of human destiny in terms of redemptive suffering and moral regeneration.

In The Assistant, Malamud dramatizes chiefly the psychological tension operating in the moral consciousness of a gentle hoodlum in New York. Morris Bober, the Jewish grocer and Frank Alpine, the ‘joy’ drifter ironically act out the roles of victim and victimizer, culminating in the latter’s literal and symbolic conversion to the way of life of his victim which is suffering. Morris Bober’s tragic role, however, is also part of his Jewish heritage.

The novel opens with a crisp description of a typical Bober day:

“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 curb. Morris Bober dragged the heavy boxes to the door, panting. A large brown bag of hard rolls stood in the door-way along with the sour-faced, gray-haired Poilisheh huddled there, who wanted one.²(7)

Morris Bober’s grocery store, looking like “a long dark tunnel” has changed little in twenty-one years. Instead of development, there seems to be a steady decline of business despite Morris Bober’s utter dedication, honesty and goodness. The tragedy of Morris is that he can neither get rid of the “blood-sucking” store, nor get out of it, for, he feels almost “entombed” in it.

“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.”(9)

For all this, he has just been able to eke out a living. Even that is decidedly threatened now by the sophisticated competitiveness of a German named H. Schmitz. His usual customers, always countable on fingers, seem to desert him for no apparent reason. The cause of his undoubted misfortune cannot be racial boycotting because his Jewish neighbour Karp, the liquor dealer, flourishes well. “The Karps, Pearls and Bobers, representing attached houses and stores, but otherwise detachment, made up the small Jewish segment of this Gentile community.”(17) The grocer’s fortune, in contrast to that of Karp, had never altered “unless degrees of poverty meant alteration.” As Helen ironically reflects, “luck and he were, if not natural enemies, not good friends”:

“He laboured long hours, was the soul of honesty–he could not escape honesty, it was bedrock; to cheat would cause an explosion in him, yet he trusted cheaters–coveted no- body’s nothing and always got poorer...He was Morris Bober...With that name you had no sure sense of property, as if it were in your blood and history not to possess...At the end you were sixty and had less than at thirty....”(17)

When he is not either engaged by his nagging wife, Ida, or waiting on some customer, Morris Bober sits all alone in the back and reads yesterday’s paper Forward and broods over “the tragic quality of life.” After a brief, futile, and bitter conversation with Karp in the evening regarding the sale of his store, Bober notices a suspicious-looking car in the street but hardly expects any trouble. The ‘holdupniks’, however, rob him of what little cash he has in the cash-box and beat him up. And the end fits the day; his luck merely means “soured expectations and endless frustration” in America.

Malamud’s first chapter in the novel is a severely synoptic review of Morris Bober’s cosmic identity in the entire novel. The opening paragraph, already mentioned, indicates the Jew’s naturally determined confinement in his store, referred to in various places in the novel, as a “prison” and “open tomb.” Comedy results whenever Morris Bober seeks to change his chosen position, viz., that of suffering in the store. He is both Malamud’s conception of Job who affirms life through pain, failure and suffering; and also of shlemihl or ‘holy’ innocent, transforming alienation and aloneness into saint-hood. As Richman remarks:

“Half ironic, half absurd, Morris is patently one of those absurd emblems of Jewish luck who finds that the clock stops when he winds it or the chicken walks when he slays it.” ³

The Karp-Morris relationship, Morris Bober’s nostalgic reminiscence of his childhood, and his virtues of honesty and goodness exemplify the mythical Jewish joke inasmuch as they only contribute to the intenser and greater suffering of Morris Bober, the moral masochist. He explains to Frank that the Jewish Law means “to do what is right, to be honest, to be good,” and in living up to this moral code he willingly subjects himself to suffering. Asked why “the Jews suffer so damn much,” Morris replies quietly:

“They suffer because they are Jews...If you live, you suffer. Some people suffer more, but not because they want. But I think if a Jew don’t suffer for the Law, he will suffer for nothing.”(99)

Morris Bober confidently tells Frank, his assistant not only in running the store but in suffering it for others as well, he suffers for him. To Frank’s question: “What do you mean?”, “I mean you suffer for me” is the Jew’s cryptic reply. He himself courts death in spring for the sake of his non-descript, if not almost non-existent, Customers by shovelling the snow against Ida’s advice. Morris, a proto-typical Jew, tempts fate–he asks, “What kind of winter can be in April?” (175) and dies of pneumonia.

Frank Alpine, an Italian-American isolato and a boy bum, is the central character in the novel, in fact, it may even be said that the drama in the novel centres on his relationship with Morris Bober on the one hand, and Helen, the 24-year old daughter of the Jew, on the other. He is an accomplice of Ward Minoque in the violent “holdup” in Bober’s grocery store, which itself is presented throughout the novel as an image of living death. Frank, in the early part of the novel, takes “much easy pleasure in guilt,” mainly owing to his continuing sense of self-isolation, reminding the reader of Dostoevsky’s hero Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment; Malamud’s description of Frank’s megalomaniac decision illustrates the point:

“But one day while he lay in some hole he had crawled into, he had this terrific idea that he was really an important guy, and was torn out of his reverie with the thought that he was living this kind of life only because he hadn’t known he was meant for something a whole lot better–to do something big...In the past he had usually thought of himself as an average guy, but there in this cellar it came to him that he was wrong...Then when he had asked himself, what should he be doing, he had another powerful idea, that he was meant for crime...At crime he would change his luck, make adventure, live like a prince.’

That is how he makes his appearance at the end of the first chapter. The ultimate burden of this criminal is suggested by Frankie’s return to the grocery store the next day. There he confesses to Sam Pearl, the candy-store owner, his sense of admiration for St. Francis “who was born good, which is a talent if you have it”. Frankie, who could admire both Napoleon and St. Francis, stands in a morally ambivalent position. Just as Ward Minoque is his criminal alter ego, Morris Bober appears to be his ethical ‘double’. The psychological tension in the novel arises out of this constant conflict of values and unresolved pulls of Frankie’s mind. “Perhaps the grimmest humour in the novel,” says Richman, “springs from the assistant’s and the proprietor’s efforts to deny a relationship that is apparent in every gesture; both retreat into a complex prejudice that perpetually screens their merging humanity...In an ambiguous drama of cross purposes that do not really cross, Malamud indicates the un-acknowledged relationship that unites the pair.”⁴ While Ward’s death symbolically releases Frank from his criminal past, the death of Morris nominates him as his successor. After the funeral of Morris, Ida and Helen identify Frank as “the grocer who had danced on the grocer’s coffin” earlier in the cemetery.

The Helen-Frankie relationship could be understood only when we concede that “Helen is not simply an idealized slum jewel. She is a modern girl of character and mind.” When her willing and unwilling sexual experience does not get her love, she goes back to “emotional virginity.” It is through her that Frank finally understands the term self-discipline, and that one can achieve a renewed inner feeling of decency or growth of conscience even after violent violation. Ward Minoque recognizes this initial change in Frank when he calls him a “stinking kike” and says:

“Your Jew girl must be some inspiration.”

As Jonathan Baumbach has noted, Helen unites all the “sons” of the novel–Louis Karp; Nat Pearl; Ward Minoque and Frankie “into a single contrasting unit.” But, like them, her personality also is starved of fulfilment because she dogmatically declares: “I won’t compromise with my ideals”; and that “Life has to have some meaning”; and that she wants to wait “for the return of possibilities” in self-fulfilment. Nevertheless she longs for the termination of the winter of her emotional discontent.

Malamud dextrously manages the Helen-Frankie relations, characterized by the ebb and flow of passion. The dual-levelled and double-working meaning in the novel is to be obtained in relation to Helen’s individual consciousness, that is, her alternate attraction and repulsion toward Frank; similarly Frank’s own conduct toward Helen seems to peculiarly undulating. For example, he nearly rapes her in the park where, minutes before, he himself rescues her from Ward Minoque; this fact also confirms the mutual criminal identity of Frank Alpine and Ward Minoque. The irony in this most interesting scene in the novel is that Frank has been invited by Helen herself to meet:

“And since she had told him she had something important to say, nothing less than that she now knew she loved him, surely he would want to hear what.” (131) A similar pattern of relations is perceptible between Frankie and Morris; and Frankie and Ida. In the first half of the novel, Morris virtually adopts Frankie as his protege disregarding more than Curtain lectures of his wife, Ida. This period is marked by Frankie’s occasional and conscious pilfering in the store and sub-conscious urges to confess his guilt to Morris. In the second part of the novel, following the illness of Morris and the consequent mishaps of the Bober family, Frank’s reinstatement as the Assistant in the grocery store is opposed by Morris but strongly supported by Ida. It is curious that Morris forgives him and takes him in whenever he has committed a crime or guilt; while Ida is irate. But there is a reversal of attitude whenever Frankie helps the Jew out of a crisis–be it a business, sickness or accident. Thus, for example,

when Morris makes the unusual decision to burn down the store with a view to claiming the insurance money, he also catches fire. Frankie saves him but is promptly turned out by the Jew in spite of his importunities.

A network of such paradoxical relationships is Malamud’s technical strategy in this novel, Frankie, in fact symbolizes the union of criminal and saint, clerk and robber; “matched by the role of lover as luster, and lover as provider and by lover as romantic and as sensualist.”⁵ The reticulated pattern of human relationships is paralleled by the pattern of crime, punishment, exile and return in regard to the dynamics of character. For example, the last chapter of the novel completes the fulfilment of Frankie’s personality. Helen’s recognition thus:

“Now that she had seen him there, groggy from overwork, thin, unhappy, a burden lay on her, because it was no mystery who he was working for. He had kept them alive...It came to hear that he had changed. It’s true he’s not the same man...She had despised him for the evil, without understanding the why or aftermath, or admitting there could be an end to the bad and a beginning of good.”(190)

Frank even pleasantly thinks that St. Francis comes “dancing out of the woods in his brown rags, a couple of scrawny birds flying around over his head.” His chief concern now is to give Helen the college education although it is “a rocky load on his head.”

He even confesses to Helen that he owes to her dead father a moral obligation. Frank, whom Helen once called bitterly, an “uncircumcised dog”, has had himself circumcised now and becomes a Jew after passover.

Frank Alpine’s rebirth as a Jew is not merely ritualistic but symbolically significant. The “moral ambience”, as Ihab Hassan puts it, rounds off the enactment of Jewish experience and raises it to a frontier where the tale of the assistant becomes a fable, almost a parable. As Granville Hicks says in The Creative Present:

“Frank Alpine, when he becomes a Jew is not only accepting suffering but also finding hope. Suffering, Malamud is saying, is the human lot but we need not surrender to despair. To escape suffering is impossible; to live a good life in spite of it is not.”

Thus, although the Jewish community is “the constant condition of his sensibility” Malamud seems to have achieved in The Assistant a human comedy of endurance and a modern fictional parable to illustrate the necessity in this world of ethical liability of accepting moral obligation.

The Rabbi refers to Morris as a true Jew who lived in the Jewish experience and with the Jewish heart, and says:

“He suffered, he endured, but with hope.” (p. 180)

Frank Alpine, representing every man symbolically, takes the place of Morris Bober, thereby accepting the human lot of suffering. The physical pain he suffers may enrage but, more significantly, inspires him.

Moral victory in physical defeat is Malamud’s thematic concern. His artistic translation of Jewish experience and character in relation to and in interaction with contemporary reality in America will place him, as Leavis might have said, “in the realm of significant creative achievement” in American literature. In that, Malamud in this novel arrives at and affirms not just a surfacial Jewish American social adjustment but the realizable possibility of moral regeneration of every man. If his Jew suffers and endures with hope because he is chosen for that, man everywhere suffers and certainly endures to become good and honest but not necessarily fortunate.

¹ Sidney Richman, Bernard Malamud. Popular Prakashan, Bombay. (1966) p. 23

² All the textual quotations in this paper are from the Signet Paper-Back edition of The Assistant. Page numbers are given in brackets following quotations.

³ Richman op. cit. p. 67

⁴ Richman, op. cit. p. 57

⁵ Op. cit. p. 60

“...but he had to do it, it was his only hope; he could think of no other. All he asked for himself was the privilege of giving her something she couldn’t give back.” (186)

Back