Synopsis
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 vital for several generations of writers.
"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
Recommendations
Generating recommendations…
Our AI is preparing recommendations for The Assistant A Novel. This usually takes under a minute.
About Bernard Malamud
B
Bernard Malamud
1914–1986
Bernard Malamud (April 26, 1914 – March 18, 1986) was an American novelist and short story writer. Along with Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, he was one of the best known American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel *The Natural* was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford. His 1966 novel *The Fixer* (also filmed), about antisemitism in the Russian Empire, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
View author page