The Assistant

Name: The Assistant
ISBN: 9780374504847

A Novel

Bernard Malamud

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION

A Brooklyn grocer's life is turned upside down by an enigmatic assistant in this celebrated novel by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Fixer.

The Assistant, Bernard Malamud's second novel, originally published in 1957, 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 take a turn for the better when 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 stories, this novel unerringly evokes an immigrant world of cramped circumstances and great expectations. Malamud defined the immigrant experience in a way that has proven to be timelessly vital.

"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

“The clarity and concreteness of [Malamud's] style, the warm humanity over his people, the tender wit that keeps them first and compassionable, will delight many.... Mr. Malamud's people are memorable and real as rock.” —William Goyen, The New York Times

"Perfect ... A lyric marvel." —The Nation

"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 (1914–1986) was an American novelist and short story writer celebrated for his richly moral fiction and his exploration of Jewish American life. Born in Brooklyn to Russian immigrant parents who ran a small grocery store, Malamud drew on that working-class, immigrant milieu throughout his career, even when his stories ventured into other settings and subjects.

He first gained wide acclaim with The Natural (1952), a mythic baseball novel later adapted into the popular 1984 film starring Robert Redford. His reputation was cemented with The Assistant (1957) and the story collection The Magic Barrel (1958), which won the National Book Award. In 1967, his novel The Fixer, based on the real-life case of a Jewish man falsely accused of ritual murder in czarist Russia, won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a second National Book Award.

Alongside Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, Malamud is often regarded as one of the great voices of 20th-century Jewish American literature, known for blending realism with fable-like, allegorical touches and a deep concern with suffering, guilt, and redemption. He taught for many years at Bennington College in Vermont and continued writing until his death in 1986.