The Soothing Power Of Humanity: A Reflection Upon The Jewishness In Malamud's The Assistant

Bernard Malamud, as an iconic Jewish American writer, is considered one of the most representative writers in expressing Jewishness. For Malamud, Jewishness is a very special Jewish ethos that is comprehensively represented in literary works and different from any other cultural quality, which is brought about by the writers' unique employment of Jewish elements in their literary creation. Malamud's works are mainly concerned with the common Jews who suffer greatly and variously. With the desire to escape from their exilic history, they try to seek a new ideal life, however, they can not break away from their Jewish heritage they once deserted at the bottom of their heart, at last, they learn to live a life of imprisonment and adhere to an ethic of conscience, responsibility, love and mercy, and struggle for a moral perfection.This thesis is mainly to probe the Jewishness through analyzing Malamud's representative novel The Assistant. Previous reviews on The Assistant are mainly concerned with the author's writing style, biblical archetype, symbolism analysis, or the Jewishness in The Assistant from single Jewish element. However, for a Jewish writer who values the Jewish ethos a lot, abundant Jewish elements are actually employed to comprehensively express the Jewishness in The Assistant by Malamud. My study is to explore the Jewishness through contextualizing The Assistant in Jewish historical and cultural background. By means of examining Malamud's Jewish moral vision, Jewish humor, and the unique Jewish assimilation, a special Jewish quality is probed in The Assistant. The thesis consists of five major parts.Introduction offers a brief description of Malamud's life experience and The Assistant, besides, a survey of the criticism of the literary work at home and abroad are comprehensively described. In part two, based on the definition of Jewishness, three Jewish elements used in analyzing The Assistant are located as followings:Jewish moral vision, Jewish humor, and the unique Jewish assimilation. Part three gives a detailed analysis of Malamud's moral vision-moral growth under suffering. It demonstrates Malamud's deep concern for the moral ideology and existing state for all the American Jews, and for the whole human beings as well. Part four gives a discussion of the notion and features of Jewish humor and irony. With the Jewish schlemiels, the verbal irony and the situational irony, Malamud successfully presents a world that blends hope with despair, joyousness with pain, suffering with moral growth. Part five makes a detailed examination of the assimilation phenomenon in The Assistant. It is not one-sided but a process of interaction. Jews and Gentiles can affect each other. Jews can be assimilated in some degree, on the contrary, Jews can also assimilate Gentile. However, the most Jewish characters in Malamud's novel are impossibly fully assimilated, it mirrors the struggling history of Jews who try to keep their traditional heritage in the process of assimilation. The complicated Jewishness can also be shown from this point.The conclusion shows that Jewish moral faith is explored through analyzing the relationships among Morris, Frank, Helen, Ida and so on. It demonstrates that the Jewishness becomes an inner side of humanism and has a universal value.