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    A Study Guide for Bernard Malamud's "The Assistant"
    A Study Guide for Bernard Malamud's "The Assistant"
    A Study Guide for Bernard Malamud's "The Assistant"
    Ebook49 pages30 minutes

    A Study Guide for Bernard Malamud's "The Assistant"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Bernard Malamud's "The Assistant," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 15, 2016
    ISBN9781535835114
    A Study Guide for Bernard Malamud's "The Assistant"

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      A Study Guide for Bernard Malamud's "The Assistant" - Gale

      08

      The Assistant

      Bernard Malamud

      1958

      Introduction

      The Assistant (1958) is American writer Bernard Malamud's second novel and is generally regarded as one of his best. It tells the story of Morris Bober, a poor immigrant Jew who owns a small grocery store in New York in the middle of the twentieth century. Business is bad and he struggles to make ends meet. The core of the novel is the relationship between Bober, an honest man who shows compassion to others, and Frank Alpine, an Italian American drifter who arrives in the neighborhood and ends up working in Morris's store. The Assistant paints a detailed and accurate portrait of an impoverished neighborhood in which three very different Jewish immigrant families try to make their living. It touches on issues such as the American dream and what people will or will not do to achieve it. It shows how ethical values, whether conceived in a religious framework or not, potentially offer a person freedom from the oppressive nature of human life. The spiritual journey undergone by Frank Alpine is a moving story of how a man can find hope and renewal in an apparently hopeless situation.

      Author Biography

      Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn, New York, on April 26, 1914, the son of Bertha and Max Malamud, who were Russian Jewish immigrants. Malamud's mother died when Bernard was fourteen, and after that he was raised by his father who, like the fictional character Morris Bober in The Assistant, owned a small grocery store and worked long hours to keep it solvent. Malamud attended Erasmus Hall High School, and during the Great Depression of the 1930s, he worked in a census office and a factory in order to provide additional income for his impoverished family. He also attended City College of New York, which at the time was a school for poor students. He received a bachelor's degree from that institution in 1936.

      In 1942, Malamud received a master's degree in English from Columbia University. He had already begun writing short stories, and some of these were published in magazines during the years of World War II. During this period Malamud supported himself by working odd jobs (rather like Frank Alpine in The Assistant), and he also taught evening classes at Erasmus High School and then Harlem High School. In 1949, he joined the English Department of Oregon State College, where he stayed for twelve years, rising to the rank of associate professor. He married Ann de Chiara in 1945, and they had a son, Paul (born 1947) and a daughter, Janna (born 1952).

      In 1952, Malamud published his first novel, The Natural, a fable about a baseball player cast in the form of the legend of the Holy Grail. Four years later, in 1956, Malamud received a fellowship in fiction from Partisan Review, and he lived in Rome and traveled in Europe. The next year saw the publication of his second novel, The Assistant, which in 1958 received the Rosenthal Foundation Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the Daroff Memorial Fiction Award of the Jewish Council of America.

      In 1959, Malamud published a collection of short stories, The Magic Barrel, which won the National Book Award in 1959. The stories have a mystical flavor and

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