The Assistant [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION BY JONATHAN ROSEN We are told in the first sentence of The Assistant that the street "was dark though night had ended." This description in many ways captures the larger condition of Bernard Malamud's fiction. Writing after the grimmest struggles of immigrant hfe, after the Holocaust, after Saul Bellow had, with The Adventures of Augie March, made Jewish writing synonymous with American exuberance, Malamud conjured a world in which the long shadow of suffering still blotted out the sun. Though he dabbled in magical realism, spread his wings in novels like A New Life, and occasionally sent a character to Italy following his own Fulbright there, Malamud's most memorable fictions are set in an outer borough of Stygian darkness where the inner light of the soul is in constant danger of winking out. When the psalmist cries, "O Lord, do not let me go down into the pit," he may have in mind something like Morris Bober's grocery store. Morris groans as he drags in the heavy milk bottles from the freezing sidewalk. He seems, as well, to have a kind of spiritual hernia simply from bearing the injustice of the world. He is poor and his family is poor through his bad luck, uncompromising honesty, and trusting nature. There