Though it’s not much to see—there’s no headstone, just a nondescript grassy stretch—Bernard Malamud’s grave, in Mount Auburn Cemetery, explains quite a bit about his writing, and particularly his most famous novel, The Assistant. The cemetery, a few miles up the road from Harvard University in Watertown, Massachusetts, serves as the final home of several prominent 19th century American poets and artists, including Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and Winslow Homer, as well as the Christian Science pioneer Mary Baker Eddy. What on earth is a master of Yinglish syntax, and a patron of struggling immigrant Jews, doing in this grim bastion of Christian high culture?
One answer is that for Malamud, being Jewish was a way of being connected to everybody else, and especially to Christians—”I try to see the Jew as universal man,” he said—so why not get buried alongside Christians? Moreover, in Malamud’s view, Jews are Jews because they suffer. Helen, for example, the female lead of The Assistant, “felt loyal to the Jews, more for what they had gone through than what she knew of their history of theology.” Her father, a shopkeeper named Morris Bober, puts the point even more clearly, having been asked by his Italian assistant, Frank Alpine, why Jews seem to suffer so much: “They suffer because they are Jews. … I think if a Jew don’t suffer for the Law, he will suffer for nothing.” As many critics have pointed out about Malamud’s work, this isn’t a vision of Judaism—in which asceticism and self-abnegation have rarely been privileged as values above all others—but of Christianity, which makes a primary virtue of Christ’s martyrdom and of “turning the other cheek.” The novel’s plot concerns Frank’s slow and tumultuous integration into the Bober home: he robs the store; feeling guilty, he signs on as Morris’s assistant; he falls in love with Helen; he’s kicked out for borrowing from the till; and, eventually, hoping to win Helen over, he converts. But again, as Ruth Wisse has noted, “the Judaism to which Alpine converts is really a purer ethical form of his own Catholicism.” Many Jews may bristle at the idea of Jewishness as a universal human religion, open to all those who suffer or need, but some—the Kabbalah Center, for example—have shown that this view continues to be marketable today, and others have found good reason to agree with the notion, expressed by Malamud in a rabbi’s eulogy for Morris, that “there are many ways to be a Jew.”
A meticulously crafted work of fiction, The Assistant isn’t just a conversion tract. Malamud writes beautifully, painstakingly, of his characters’ struggle with their desires and unfulfilled dreams. Frank shimmies up an airshaft to watch Helen undressing in the bathroom, and seeing her, he feels “a throb of pain at her nakedness, an overwhelming desire to love her, at the same time an awareness of loss, of never having had what he had wanted most.” Such precisely observed moments resonate throughout the novel. No wonder it won the National Jewish Book Award, and earned Malamud an enduring place alongside Roth and Bellow in the pantheon of the great American Jewish writers.