The Magic Barrel

Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), a master of the short story whose tragicomic works blend modernism with fable, realism with fantasy, and American English with Yiddish idiom, is often bookended with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth as one of the “three horsemen” of the so-called American Jewish Renaissance of the later 20th century. Like the works of Bellow and Roth, Malamud’s stories and novels introduced a range of Jewish characters, concerns, humor, and vernacular into the forefront of modern American literature, most notably when his short story collection The Magic Barrel won the National Book Award in 1959. However, unlike Bellow and Roth, Malamud infuses his terse, fable-like accounts of the sufferings of ordinary people with ripples of fantasy and mysticism that evoke the shtetls of Europe and the “folk terrain” of Isaac Bashevis Singer, I. L. Peretz, and other authors steeped in the Yiddish tradition.

Although Malamud was born in the United States, he spoke Yiddish before learning English, for he was the son of immigrants from Ukraine. Consequently, the characters and authorial voice of many of his stories are shaded with “Yinglish,” a hybrid of English and Yiddish words and speech patterns. Most of the stories in The Magic Barrel are also set in an abstract time and place, evoking settings that seem both familiar and universal; they are essentially a blend of Depression-era New York and the timeless poverty of Eastern European villages of centuries past. Malamud’s first literary successes came relatively late in his writing life, when he was in his mid-thirties, and according to his wife, his breakthrough arrived when he began to “cull” from the lives, voices, and stories of the Jewish relatives and neighbors he remembered from his childhood (Solotaroff, Bernard Malamud: A Study of the Short Fiction, p. 11).

The classic Malamud hero, which is often exemplified by the wan shopkeepers, grieving widows, lonely wanderers, and wingless angels of The Magic Barrel, knows acutely that he or she is a prisoner—not just of the brick walls of failing stores and dead-end neighborhoods, but of youthful mistakes and the vagaries of fate and history. For most of Malamud’s protagonists, their only release is derived from the triumphant self-knowledge and human connection that comes from intense suffering. Malamud once said that he wrote about misery because that was what he knew; and most of his stories, even the most fantastical ones, contain a cold sliver of autobiography. His parents, who fled Czarist Russia for America in their teens, lived and worked in their own version of prison: a tiny Brooklyn grocery much like the ones featured in “The Bill” and “Take Pity,” where they labored 18 hours a day, seven days a week. Malamud, too, worked there as a child and a teen, and these early experiences provided him with the raw material for his second novel, The Assistant, which tells the story of a failing Jewish-owned grocery store in Brooklyn.

Despite the narrow, beleaguered lives of his characters and the ever-present specters of poverty and the Holocaust, Malamud’s stories echo the narrative style of the Yiddish folk stories they resemble and are riven with flashes of humor and magical events, from angels and prophetic dreams to miracle workers and comical doppelgangers. His short stories invoke aspects of magic and the uncanny, for they often feature moral transformations that can redeem the most arid of lives, often in the form of epiphanies that show Malamud’s debt to modernists like James Joyce. As his characters stumble their way toward some form of transcendence, the implicit irony of this dynamic evokes the comic halo of the schlemiel, which is the Yiddish archetype of the holy fool. As Malamud himself observed, “A Malamud character is someone who fears his fate, is caught up in it, yet manages to outrun it. He’s the subject and object of laughter and pity” (Mambrol, Nasrullah. “Analysis of Bernard Malamud’s Stories.” Literary Theory and Criticism, 11 June 2020).