Word: grocer
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...propriety of outright refusal, a Montana practitioner took one extreme position: "A doctor's justified in refusing at any time he doesn't want to serve the patient. We're no more obligated to give service than is the grocer." A Michigan M.D. replied: "Nothing about medicine is as impressive to the layman as our willingness to get up and go out at midnight. Doctors must maintain their reputation on this score...
...ASSISTANT, by Bernard Malamud. An aging Jewish Brooklyn grocer, a holdup and a thief's remorse seem hardly the substance of a good novel. This book becomes one through its tender, realistic grasp of the meanings, small defeats and even smaller victories in the lives of seemingly hopeless people...
Again he takes a familiar, almost mythical theme, turns it upside down and irradiates it with originality. His hero is Morris Bober, an aging Brooklyn grocer who is clinging to solvency by his fingertips. But Morris is also that legendary Jewish figure of misfortune, the schlemiel, whose fate has been told and retold from the Old Testament to Sholom Aleichem. Bobers good intentions gain him nothing but hard knocks. The only dangers he escapes are imaginary ones. Yet, through all his woes, there shines unblinkingly the steady light of a good heart...
...robbers who held him up. Worst of all, his daughter Helen has fallen in love with the new clerk. Morris fires him, but Frank comes back, dogged, penitent. In the end, by way of ultimate expiation, Frank gradually changes, and step by step becomes more and more like the grocer, assuming his burdens and his fate...
Brooklyn-born Bernard Malamud, 43, assistant professor of English at Oregon State College, is now in Rome on a fellowship working on his third novel. He writes out of his own experience (his father was a New York grocer). In The Assistant, Malamud brings to his story of the poor not only pity without sentimentality and realism without bad taste; he gives their humblest acts a kind of foreboding excitement that can only spring from a conviction that they-the poor and the meek-will inherit the earth...