52
MORRIS DICKSTEIN
Malamud's work that is more Christian than Jewish, an emphasis
on bearing the cross, on suffering-for-others, on salvation through
suffering. When Frank Alpine, the Italian assistant, asks the old
storekeeper, "Why do you suffer, Morris?" he calmly answers, "I
suffer for you." At the heart of Malamud's work is a quasi- .
religious theme of salvation, as when Alpine finally becomes a Jew
and takes on his back the same wretched store, the same wretched
life, that had crushed his dead employer.
What do these timeless patterns of suffering and redemption
have to do with the 1950s when they were conceived? There is
little sense of specific historical time in
The Assistant.
Though
nominally set in the 1930s its historical matrix is as shadowy as its
New York milieu is claustral and specterlike. Yet I believe this tells
us a great deal about the period when it was written. As Ruth
Wisse shows in her fine study
The Schlemiel as Modern Hero,
the
schlemiel character became dear to Jewish folklore as a vehicle of
spiritual transcendence amid constrained and sometimes desperate
social circumstances. As in farce, where the most extreme violence
is rendered harmless and absurd, the schlemiel, usually a comic
figure, provides a catharsis of catastrophe and pain, a way of
coping. Sholom Aleichem, in adapting this folk motif, Wisse says,
"conceived of his writing as a solace for people whose situation
was so ineluctably unpleasant that they might as well laugh. The
Jews of his works are a kind of schlemiel people, powerless and
unlucky, but psychologically, or, as one used to say, spiritually,
the victors in defeat." Maurice Samuel makes a similar point about
Sholom Aleichem's "application of a fantastic technique that the
Jews had developed over the agGs.... a technique of avoidance
and sublimation.... They had found the trick of converting
disaster into a verbal triumph, applying a sort of Talmudic in–
genuity of interpretation to events they could not handle in their
reality." The schlemiel (or the schlemiel people) achieves a victory
of mind or heart, even in the shadow of the iron fist.
Yet such a strategy can be deeply quietistic and evasive -–
quite literally -"fantastic," as Samuel says - - especially in cir–
cumstances less constricting than the Russian Pale or the Polish
ghetto. Even there, as currents of socialism, Zionism, and the
Hebrew Enlightenment spread among the people, some of Sholom
Aleichem's contemporaries were scornful of these folk attitudes
