On Cultural Integration In Bernard Malamud's Assistant

Bernard Malamud (1914-1986) is an outstanding Jewish American novelist and short-story writer, a part of a triumvirate of American Jewish writers dominating the American literature in the 1950s and 1960s. He published seven novels and five collections of short stories and has once won O. Henry Awards, the Pulitzer Prize for literature,and twice National Book Awards.The Assistant is generally considered as Malamud's masterpiece. It won him the Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and secured his position as a major writer. It is on Time's list of the 100 best English language books published between 1923 and 2000. It attracts worldwide readers and critics for its realistic description of the Jewish life, its poetic, well-crafted style, its humanistic motifs and its distinctive rendering of Yiddish idioms into American English. Some critics studies its themes of humanism or moral regeneration, some work on its tendencies of realism, symbolism, romanticism, naturalism, existentialism, while some others on its unique writing style. Here this thesis explores its cultural integration of the Jewish and American cultures by analyzing the relationships between different characters or the changes in their lives. This thesis consists of three parts.Part I is a brief introduction to Bernard Malamud's literary position in American literature, his writing career, a brief literary review of his Assistant and the targets of this thesis.Part II is the body of the thesis which includes four chapters.Chapter I explores the cultural integration through studying the relationships between husband and wife and between parents and children in a Jewish American family– the Bobers. Influenced by its American culture which advocates freedom, equality and independence, the Jewish male dominant, hierarchical family tends to be Americanized. Therefore, husband has lost his authority over his wife and parents have lost their absolute authority and complete control over their children though husband is still in dominant position and children still show due obedience and awesome to their parents.Chapter II explores the cultural integration through analyzing the first- and second-generation Jews'different responses to Helen's perspective intermarriage. The American advocate free marriage on the basis of mutual love and respect, put sexual attraction and pleasure into first consideration, and share relatively liberal sexual morality. Thus, intermarriage is widely accepted among the Americans. However, the Jews usually practice arranged marriage within their race, hold conservative sexual morality, and intermarriage is unacceptable for them. Both cultures have differently influenced the attitudes of the two-generation Jewish Americans to marriage and sex.Chapter III explores the cultural integration by examining the changes in the American Jews'neighboring relationships. In America, some Jews begin to worship money and become morally corrupt,which reflects in the tense relationship with their neighbors on the basis of American individualism and egoism. At the same time, some Jews stick to their Jewish morality"love your neighbor as yourself."and establish a harmonious relationship with their neighbors on the basis of collectivism and altruism.Chapter IV explores the cultural integration by examining the changes in the Jews'religious life in the America and the significance in Frank's conversion to Judaism.Part III comes to the conclusion that ancient Jewish culture and American culture start integrating into each other gradually with the entry of the Jews into America. Malamud, in the Assistant, expresses his hope that people from different countries and ethnics should eliminate their prejudice and hostility to each other and assist each other in this tough world to live a better life.