"To Live Is To Suffer"-A Study Of The Jewish Theme In The Assistant By Bernard Malamud

As a Jewish American writer, Bernard Malamud (1914-1986) enjoys a reputation similar to Isaac Singer and Saul Bellow, especially for the Jewishness in his literary works. Malamud persists in depicting the struggling lives of Jewish immigrants, through which he hopes to unfold an important aspect of human experience—suffering. He believes that it is the common suffering experience one identifies with that can bond humanity. Through wringing out an essential tragic sense of life, one gets the rewards of life, which is the development of a spirituality that raises man to his highest being.Suffering is a common theme in Jewish literature and also the central theme in Malamud's novel The Assistant (1958). Combining Jewishness and humanity in The Assistant, Malamud creates vivid struggling Jewish characters and depicts their bitter immigrant experiences in the materialistic America. The novel also reveals the influences exerted by American materialism on the Jewishness of the Jewish immigrants. Some cling to their Jewishness in spite of the harsh life, others blindly pursue their"American Dream"at the cost of their senses of morality and responsibility, two essential elements of Malamud's Jewishness. Through the novel, the writer interpreted his special vision of Jewishness: the senses of morality and responsibility arising from the redemptive suffering.Combining textual study and social and historical analysis, the paper addresses the issue of Jewish suffering in The Assistant by asking three basic questions: what is Jewish suffering? Why do they suffer? How is it portrayed in the novel? Each of the questions corresponds to each of the chapters. Chapter One analyzes three types of suffering: physical, emotional and spiritual. The Jewish characters suffer physically from poverty and illness, emotionally from love frustration and family incompleteness, and spiritually from the struggle between one's good and evil inclinations and homelessness. It is revealed that America is never a dreamland for all the Jewish immigrants, but just another gathering place of Jews struggling for survival. In Chapter Two, the Jewish suffering is analyzed from the historical, religious and sociological perspectives. The analysis leads to the conclusion that Malamud's Jewish suffering not only represents a historical phenomenon and a religious legacy, but also embodies the sense of impermanence and insecurity resulting from the dangling identity and difficult assimilation of Jewish people on a foreign land. Chapter Three focuses on three major writing devices that contribute to the suffering theme. Irony serves as a key to the understanding of Malamud's attitude toward human survival and his sarcasm over American materialism and American Dream. Malamud uses symbols like negative images to create a tragic sense of suffering; furthermore, he makes Jew a symbol of mankind and Jewishness a symbol of senses of morality and responsibility forged out of the experiences of suffering. Through Malamud's application of archetypes from the Bible, the suffering characters become more recognizable and thus Jewish suffering becomes more significant for its redemptive values.Malamud in his novel regards the present Jewish life as a metaphor for the whole mankind's existence, universalizing Jewishness as senses of morality and responsibility, out of redemptive suffering. To be a Jew means to be moral and responsible, as a real human being should be. By exploring the Jewish suffering and Jewishness in Malamud's The Assistant, we understand the author's concerns for his fellow Jews and for the humankind.