The Meaning of 'The Assistant': Social Impacts and Father-Son Relationships in Pursuit of the American Dream Kagoni Meja College

The Assistant is the second novel written by Bernard Malamud in 1957. The riveting story resonated with a wide audience and it garnered positive reviews subsequently winning the National Jewish Book award for fiction, which saw to it being listed in All-Time 100 novels of Time. The story is about a Russian immigrant in New York and a grocery owner, Morris Bober, arguably inspired by Malamud's immigrant parents, who also owned a grocery store. A father-son relationship is central to this narrative, and provides the reader a point from which to view Malamud's approach to the connected issues of hard work and the pursuit of the American Dream.

The setting of Morris's grocery is in an immigrant area, where the characters we are introduced to in the story are all referred to their ethnicities. There is the Polish woman who always buys three-cent bread roll from Morris at six am, Schmitz, the German grocer who just opened up the other grocery store, Nick Fuso, the Italian mechanic and Carl, the Swedish painter. In the same location, we have three Jewish families, the Bobers, Karps, and Pearls. All of these people live in different levels of poverty, with the exception of Julius Karp, who runs a successful liquor business. The Jews...