"Exile And Return"—The Correspondences And Reversions Of The Spiritual Passage Of Frank Alpine In The Assistant To The History Of Jew

Bernard Malamud, a prestigious American Jewish writer in the20th century, contributes greatly to the widespread of Jewishness through the portraits of a series of ordinary Jews. In The Assistant, Malamud vividly depicts the assistant Frank Alpine’s spiritual sublimation with the help from the grocer Morris Bober, a typical Jew. This paper, instead of shedding too much light on the connotation of Jewishness, focuses on The Assistant’s correspondences and reversions to the Jewish history. Based on biblical source and the works of Abba Eban as well as Xu Xin, who are authoritative historians on Jewish history, this paper analyzes the novel’s plot and identifies the to and fro pattern of Frank’s spiritual journey, which is quite similar with the Jewish history’s paradigm "exile and return" put up by Jacob Neusner. In Jewish history, the construction and destruction of the First and Second Temple in Jerusalem served as the symbol of Jewish people’s return and exile. Adopting such kind of historical terms, Frank Alpine’s spiritual passage is divided into four stages chronologically: Frank’s passage into and out of the Promised Land, Frank’s first spiritual exile and return, Frank’s second spiritual exile and return, the Assistant’s conversion towards Judaism and The Assistant’s mirror reflection of Jewish history. Since mirror frequently appears in the novel when Frank Alpine undergoes psychic changes, Jacque Lacan’s idea of mirror stage is adopted in this paper to analyze Frank Alpine’s psychological changes in different phases of his self-identification.