Position Paper 1

Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant is one of the seminal works of Jewish fiction in the 20^th century. Morris Bober is the Jewish grocer who cannot break the cycle of perpetual poverty. He “never alter[s] his fortune, unless degrees of poverty [mean] alteration, for luck and he [are], if not natural enemies, not good friends” (16). Bober’s modest neighborhood grocery store has not grown much over the 20 some-odd years it has been open. He life he has made for his family and himself after World War II in Brooklyn is not much. The store is open for most Jewish holidays, so the family obviously does not particularly note or celebrate them (reference?) Being one of only a handful of Jewish merchants in the neighborhood makes Bober a target for harsh anti-Semitism: his store is robbed by two men who say bigoted phrases, like “You’re a Jew liar” (25) and “Your Jew ass is bad, you understand?” (26). This event leads to Bober losing the mere $10 he earns that day, in addition to suffering a crippling blow to the head.

Ida Bober, Morris’ wife, accurately depicts their misfortune when it comes to the business:

Everything we did too late. The store we didn’t sell in time. I said, ‘Morris, sell now the store.’ You said, ‘Wait.’ What for? The house we bought too late, so we have still a big mortgage that it’s hard to pay every month. ‘Don’t buy,’ I said, ‘times are bad.’ ‘Buy,’ you said, ‘will get better. We will save rent.’

It is a hardship even to sell the grocery store. Is the difficulty due to prejudice, the Brooklyn neighborhood, or general lack of wealth after World War II?

The Bobers’ daughter, Helen, is the symbol of changing America. Her father, Morris, laments at his inability to support her during her childhood years, saying, “for myself I don’t care, for you I want the best but what did I give you?” (21). Helen replies, “I’ll give myself… there’s hope” (21). Even though times are hard, Helen holds hope for the future, which assumedly requires even further limitation of Jewish practice to succeed economically.

Ida Bober calls a regular Polish customer “die antisemitke” (32), or the anti-Semite. Though Ida senses the anti-Semitic attitude, the customer’s daily payment for a roll and the occasional pickle is necessary to stay in business. In the same vein, the customer’s anti-Semitism must be put on hold for the novelty of a “Jewish roll” or “Jewish pickle” (32).

The ubiquity of hardship in this post-war era is present in the new character of Frank Alpine, also known as “the stranger” who visits this small Brooklyn town and eventually works for Morris. While Morris questions the stranger’s history and how he came to Brooklyn, the stranger simply says, “I had a rough life” (33).

Philip Roth is another renowned writer in the Jewish scholarly world. His novels explore the neuroses and internal conflicts of Jewish characters. American Pastoral is perhaps the last novel in which his memorable character, Nathan Zuckerman, appears. Zuckerman’s relationship with a not-so-Jewish-looking Jew is the focus and evolution of American Pastoral.

Physically, Seymour Irving “the Swede” Levov, of Zuckerman’s memory and present experiences, does not look like a Jew. While describing the Swede of the past, Zuckerman says, “Of the few fair-complexioned Jewish students in our preponderantly Jewish public high school, none possessed anything remotely like the steep-jawed, insentient Viking mask of this blue-eyed blond born into our tribe as Seymour Irving Levov” (3). Not only is the Swede an enigma in physical beauty, but in physical strength, too. The Swede’s abilities in basketball, football and baseball earn him legend status as a high school student in the neighborhood and beyond. Of Swede’s individuality and importance, Zuckerman says he is “a boy as close to a goy as we were going to get” (10). This attitude suggests that at the time of Zuckerman’s high school years, the late 1940s, it is seen as a disadvantage to success to be Jewish. The only way, apparently, for Jews to make a name for themselves within their community is to bolster the successes of a boy whose talents they think are so non-Jewish that they bring them to a higher level of value. But what provokes this attitude that beauty and natural talent for sports like Swede has is non-Jewish? HE cannot be the only Jew that has played on a high school football team. What exactly promotes his status as a legend, and how does it affect his neighbors’ attitudes towards their own Jewish identities as related to their abilities to succeed?

Part of the Swede’s mystique, according to our ever-observant Zuckerman, is his “talent for ‘being himself’” (19). This statement insinuates that Jews of that era ordinarily have to pretend to be something they are not. This is confusing, then, because Zuckerman may be suggesting that all Jews have those talents, but the Swede is the only one confident enough and self-assured enough to use them. Further along, Zuckerman says that the Swede has “the natural modesty of someone for whom there were no obstacles, who appeared never to have to struggle to clear a space for himself” (19). This skewed remark demonstrates the preeminent attitude that families with more money had fewer struggles. In reality, the Swede’s grandfather and father have struggled to pull together and maintain a successful glovemaking business to support the family. Of course, Zuckerman does not learn about this history until he meets Swede for dinner 50 years after high school.

This dinner is imperative to teach Zuckerman that the supposed glory of the Swede is not everything he thinks it is. The Swede does not escape prostate cancer, death in the family or divorce. Do these revelations make Swede less of a goy (non-Jew) than before? Should he now be considered “more Jewish” for having endured more public struggles?

It is interesting to try to break apart and evaluate Zuckerman’s childhood adoration for the Swede. Like others, he is enchanted by the Swede’s athletic skills that seem to lift the Jewish community of Newark out of its World War II stupor and depression. Zuckerman speaks eloquently about Swede’s celebrity and his relationship top Judaism:

The Jewishness that he wore so lightly as one of the tall, blond athletic winners must have spoken to us… in our idolizing the Swede and his unconscious oneness with America, I suppose there was a tinge of shame and self-rejection. Conflicting Jewish desires awakened by the sight of him were simultaneously becalmed by him; the contradiction in Jews who want to fit in and want to stand out, who insist they are different and insist they are no different, resolved itself in the triumphant spectacle of this Swede who was actually only another of our neighborhood Seymours whose forebears had been Solomons and Sauls and who would themselves beget Stephens who would in turn beget Shawns. Where was the Jew in him? You couldn’t find it and yet you knew it was there. Where was the irrationality in him? Where was the crybaby in him? Where were the wayward temptations? No guile. No artifice. No mischief. All that he had eliminated to achieve his perfection. No striving, no ambivalence, no doubleness – just the style, the natural physical refinement of a star. (20)

Zuckerman’s almost Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness-esque adoration for Swede shows several problems in his own self-identity and his relationship with Judaism. First, Zuckerman notes that the Swede, being just another Jew from the block, will inevitably bear children with names that are less and less Jewish over the generations. This demonstrates the waning importance of obvious Jewish identifiers like names in the community. At the same time, the Swede represents everything the Jews want to be and nothing that they are. They see in him something Jewish, but cannot place their finger on it. He has become so non-Jewish in nature and behavior that he the most noteworthy Jews of all. Zuckerman aptly states, “I don’t imagine I’m the only grown man who was a Jewish kid aspiring to be an all-American kid during the patriotic war years” (19-20). This demonstrates the desire to shed Jewish identity in order to become more American. In other words, one cannot be American unless he or she releases his or her Jewishness.