The Assistant Study Guide & Notes

The Assistant Plot Summary

Preview of The Assistant Summary:

This is a typical Malamud novel containing Jewish themes such as sin and redemption, as well as societal and familial conflicts. It is about an old man who owns a grocery store. He is helped by his wife and by his daughter, who works fulltime to help out her parents, but who deeply desires to go to school and somehow improve her lot. The story takes place in New York, in a neighborhood where Jews hardly live anymore. The old man's grocery store is an anachronism; and he barely makes expenses from day to day. It is impossible for him to give up the store, though he has generous offers to buy it. Illness and old age are weighing him down, along with his old-fashioned methods and poor ways of doing business. A young man comes into the story, once as a criminal and then in a lengthier way as...
(read more)