6/20/2023 0 Comments The assistant by bernard malamudMorris’s masochism and ineffectuality slowly doom his business, even as his daughter dithers over her romantic and educational possibilities more seriously, Frank Alpine’s drive to behave well and improve himself is constantly detoured by his capacity for dishonesty, theft, and even rape. The Italian-American orphan and drifter Alpine slowly intricates himself into the ways and values of the Jewish Bober family he comes to admire the old man’s goodness and persistence and to fall in love with Helen, the Bobers’ smart, ambitious daughter.īoth bad luck and moral weakness afflict this ensemble, however. Frank Alpine, its eponymous anti-hero, becomes a clerk in the failing Brooklyn grocery store of Morris Bober after Bober is robbed and assaulted. The Assistant (1957) is Bernard Malamud’s second novel.
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