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American Jewish Fiction no surprise that Remember Me to God spent more than 30 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list; what is shocking, and unfortunate, is that so few people know of it today. Further reading: Kaufmann’s second novel, Thy Daughter’s Nakedness, appeared in 1968 and his third, The Love of Elspeth Baker, not until 1982; all three books take place in Boston and deal intensely and at length with Jewish issues. Though Remember Me to God is occasionally mentioned in bibliographies and was praised in Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself (1959), nothing significant has been written on Kaufmann aside from newspaper reviews of his novels. As of 2008, Kaufmann, who is well into his 80s, is still serving as a gabbai for daily services at an Orthodox synagogue in Sharon, Massachusetts. The protagonists of Jack Ludwig’s Confusions (1963) and James Atlas’s The Great Pretender (1986) pass through Harvard a decade or two after Richard Amsterdam. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48pThe Assistant By Bernard Malamud FARRAR, STRAUS AND CUDAHY, 1957. 246 PAGES. Though it isn’t much to see—there’s no headstone, just a nondescript grassy stretch—Bernard Malamud’s grave, in Mount Auburn Cemetery, explains quite a bit about his writing and particularly his most famous novel, The Assistant. The cemetery, a few miles up the road from Harvard University in Watertown, Massachusetts, serves as the final home of several prominent 19th-century American poets and artists, including Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, and Winslow Homer as well as the Christian Science pioneer Mary Baker Eddy. What on earth is a master of Yinglish syntax, and a patron of struggling immigrant Jews, doing in this grim bastion of Christian high culture? One answer is that for Malamud, being Jewish was a way of being connected to everybody else, and especially to Christians—“I try to see the Jew as universal man,” he said—so why not get buried alongside Christians? Moreover, in Malamud’s view, Jews are Jews because they suffer. Helen, for example, the female lead of The Assistant, “felt loyal to the Jews, more for what they had gone through than what she knew of their history of theology.” Her father, a shopkeeper named Morris Bober, puts the point even more clearly, having been asked by his Italian assistant, Frank Alpine, why Jews seem to suffer so much: “They suffer because they are Jews. . . . I think if a Jew don’t suffer for the Law, he will suffer for nothing.” As many critics have pointed out about Malamud’s work, this isn’t a vision of Judaism—in which asceticism and self-abnegation have rarely been privileged as values—but of Christianity, which makes a primary virtue of Christ’s martyrdom and of “turning the other cheek.” The novel’s plot concerns Frank’s slow and tumultuous integration into the Bober home: he robs the store; feeling guilty, he signs on as Morris’s assistant; he falls in love with 72 Helen; he’s kicked out for borrowing from the till; and, eventually, hoping to win Helen over, he converts. But again, as Ruth Wisse has noted, “The Judaism to which Alpine converts is really a purer ethical form of his own Catholicism.” Many Jews may bristle at the idea of Jewishness as a universal human religion, open to all those who suffer or need, but some—the Kabbalah Center, for example—have shown that this view continues to be marketable today, and others have found good reason to agree with the notion, expressed by Malamud in a rabbi’s eulogy for Morris, that “there are many ways to be a Jew.” A meticulous work of fiction, The Assistant isn’t just a conversion tract. Malamud writes beautifully, painstakingly, of his characters’ struggles with their desires and unfulfilled dreams. Frank shimmies up an airshaft to watch Helen undressing in the bathroom, and watching her, he feels “a throb of pain at her nakedness, an overwhelming desire to love her, at the same time an awareness of loss, of never having had what he had wanted most.” Such precise observations recur throughout the novel. No wonder it won the National Jewish Book Award and earned Malamud an enduring place alongside Roth and Bellow in the pantheon of the great American Jewish writers. Further reading: A favorite text of literary critics all over the world, The Assistant has been the subject of dozens of interpretations and scholarly articles. It is worthwhile to think about...

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