Where It All Goes Down
A mid 20th Century Neighborhood in Brooklyn
The events of The Assistant are set in and around a small, family-owned grocery store located in Brooklyn. The place is owned and run by Morris and Ida Bober. We also get familiar with some other sites in Brooklyn: a liquor store, a candy store, a barbershop, a public library, and the Coney Island Boardwalk.
Morris is a Jewish immigrant. He fled persecution in Russia like many Jewish immigrants at the time. From the late 1800s to 1914, Brooklyn witnessed a rise in the Jewish population from tens of thousands to well over a million, many of them coming from Eastern Europe. A few years later, it would have the largest Jewish population of any borough in New York City. Sounds like a party.
The Bobers, however, live and work in a neighborhood away from the denser Jewish populations in Brooklyn. There are only a few fellow Jews in their local area. This has consequences. Morris knows and chats with the working-class Jewish customers who come into his store, but he doesn't have the communal support others do. Animus toward Jews negatively affects his customer base and also makes him an easy target for crimes motivated by anti-Semitism, because it's not like he had it hard enough already.
New York was famously a home for many other immigrants, too, and the Bobers' neighborhood is no exception. An old Polish woman buys rolls from them every morning. The other grocery store in the neighborhood is run by a German and later by Norwegian partners. The assistant who comes to work for them is Italian. This was a time when people knew and called one another by their nationalities. It was also a time of lingering hostilities. With the Second World War having ended only recently, it's not surprising, for example, that Morris is suspicious of Germans.
It was also a time when big supermarkets had yet to make their arrival everywhere, but flashier and more modernized stores were starting to make business difficult for shopkeepers like the near-destitute Morris and Ida. When you run a simple generic store, how do you compete with one-stop shops and new markets with better selection? Sometimes, you can't, and simply find your business diminishing. This has been business life for the Bobers.
In summary, The Assistant is set in a time and place of great social change. Morris feels imprisoned in his store, watching with regret as sales get worse and worse, unable to see his place or future in such turbulent times.