The Magic Barrel

“Max’s Adam’s apple went up once he saw them, and his eyes had little lights in them.”

Miriam derides her young suitor Max as a “materialist” who cares only about “things,” and his rapture over his newly repaired shoes seems to confirm this, for he shows much less excitement over the prospect of dating Miriam. His prominent “Adam’s apple,” besides emphasizing his gaunt meagerness, strikes an amusing contrast with the biblical Adam, for whom the woman offered to him (Eve) was the apple of his eye.

“When after a while, he gazed around the room, it was clean, drenched in daylight and fragrance. Gruber then suffered unbearable remorse for the way he had treated the old man.”

The highly impressionable Gruber is by nature a pessimist who has recurrent visions of death and desolation (his building falling down, himself falling down the stairs), and his tendency toward self-pity has made him callous toward his tenants. The squalor of Kessler’s room and person repels him with its intimations of mortality—which, he suddenly realizes, is rooted in fears of his own death. This revelation of his shared humanity with Kessler (another mourner of a meager, misspent life) conjures another vision: a beatific one of sympathy and love.

“So he lay on the bed and whether awake or asleep dreamed the recurrent dream of the burning barrel (in it their books commingled), suffering her agony as well as his own.”

The frustrated writer Mitka longs not for money or fame but for human connection, desperately needing someone to understand his heartfelt words—preferably an attractive young woman. Whether he realizes it or not, this longing is largely a sexual one, as his recurring dream of their two books hotly “commingl[ing]” suggests. His meeting with Olga, who offers not sexuality but intense empathy, allows him to eventually transcend the superficiality of his desire for physical intimacy.

“They would jounce together up the stairs, then (strictly a one-marriage man) he would swing her across the threshold, holding her where the fat overflowed her corset as they waltzed around his writing chamber.”

After his encounter with Olga, Mitka’s artistic “impotence” comes to an end, as he learns to accept love and empathy as sustenance for his life and his art, rather than sex. No longer repulsed by Mrs. Lutz’s maternal solicitousness, he envisions a mock-marriage with her as his muse.

“What sort of mockery was it—provided Levine was an angel—of a faithful servant who had from childhood lived in the synagogues, always concerned with the word of God?”

Manischevitz, who has prayed to God to relieve his Job-like woes, has a crisis of faith when a shabbily-dressed Black man appears at his table, claiming to be his guardian angel. To his misfortunes, which are already absurd in their severity and sheer preponderance, God has seemingly added another insult. The tailor, who has long honored the form but not the spirit of his religion, must learn to look beyond the surface of his fellow man, whether human or angel.

“‘A wonderful thing, Fanny,’ Manischevitz said. ‘Believe me, there are Jews everywhere.’”

After his show of faith and the miracles that follow, Manischevitz has a revelation about the commonality of man—and of angels, realizing that all members of humankind are all Jews, whatever their race, for they all suffer and are in need of help. Even God’s angels, to some degree, are lost and uncertain, and may look to humans for salvation from the abyss of a common plight.

“Rome, a city of perpetual surprises, had surprised unhappily. He felt unpleasantly lonely for the first time since he had been married, and found himself desiring the lovely Italian women he passed in the street, especially the few who looked as if they had money.”

Carl Schneider, an American student of history who has dragged his family to Italy, registers surprise that the long-suffering Italians are “indifferent” to his search for a comfortable, cheap apartment. Underscoring the hypocrisy of his later treatment of De Vecchis, the Contessa’s abandoned “kept man,” Carl longs for a rich Italian woman off of whose wealth he himself might comfortably live.

“De Vecchis flung the key at them and ran. Bevilacqua, the light of hatred in his eyes, ducked, and the key hit Carl on the forehead, leaving a mark he could not rub out.”

The former kept man, stung by Carl’s treatment of him, hurls the key of the apartment that he has destroyed, leaving a mark on Carl’s forehead like that of Cain. De Vecchis’s words (“Ecco la chiave”: “Behold the key”) recall the biblical phrase “Ecce homo” (“Behold the man”): Pontius Pilate’s contemptuous surrender of the scourged Christ to the Jews. This biblical parody underscores how Carl has ruthlessly sought salvation in a cheap apartment (a false savior) rather than in brotherhood with the Italians; like Cain, and unlike Christ, he is not his “brother’s keeper.”

“In my whole life I never had anything. In my whole life I always suffered. I don’t expect better. This is my life.”

The widow Eva sees herself as being married to suffering and will do nothing to help herself, even though it means that her small children must suffer as well. Eva says these words to Rosen, the man whom she knows pities her, and from whom she will accept nothing except pity—not money, food, or love. She cannot see herself as anything but a victim and an object of pity, and this mindset binds her to the soft-hearted Rosen in a parody of a mutually destructive marriage.

“It was Eva, staring at him with haunted, beseeching eyes. She raised her arms to him. […] Infuriated, the ex-salesman shook his fist.”

Rosen, who has gassed himself in a misguided attempt to help Eva, discovers too late what she really wants. Ironically, his ultimate act of pity has only increased her hunger, for instead of caring for her children, she now haunts the window of his dark chamber like a vampire.

“He found himself thinking about the way his life had turned out, and then about this girl, moved that she was so young and a thief.”

Tommy Castelli, whose youthful act of thievery has trapped him in the joyless, loveless prison that is his life, finds himself “moved” by a little girl who steals candy from his store. His despondency and self-hatred lead him to an act of forgiveness and love: a familiar trajectory for Malamud’s heroes, who often seek to derive some ultimate good from their suffering.

“At the same time he recalled a sad memory of unlived life, his own, of all that had slipped through his fingers.”

Like many Malamud characters, Henry Levin feels cheated by life, which has failed to meet his expectations. By taking a false (non-Jewish) name, he hopes to multiply his possibilities. This passage ironically foreshadows the story’s final scene, when, due to his deceit, Isabella slips forever out of his grasp.

“The large brown eyes, under straight slender brows, were filled with sweet light; her lips were purely cut as if from red flowers; her nose was perhaps the one touch of imperfection that perfected the rest—a trifle long and thin.”

The insecure Henry, beguiled by his romantic dreams of the Italian gentry, sees Isabella’s stereotypically semitic nose as her only “imperfection”—unaware that she is also of Jewish heritage, just like himself. Isabella’s flower-like lips, so like the “exotic” plants of the lush del Dongo gardens, recall the macabre Hawthorne story “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” which details the experiences of a student in Italy. This student falls in love with a flower-like girl who, as it turns out, is as deadly to his touch as the poisonous flowers she tends. When he learns her secret, he spurns her, though he has by then also become poisonous. Finally, attempting to cure them both of their fatal touch so they can marry, he accidentally kills her. When Henry’s deceit about his own background leaves him without Isabella’s love or even her presence, he finds himself similarly “poisoned” and bereft.

“Though drunk, he looked the same as always, except for his tight walk, the quietness, and that his eyes were wet. […] Mr. Cattanzara was a different type than those in the neighborhood.”

Mr. Cattanzara is one of Malamud’s lonely souls; he feels trapped by past mistakes and seeks to use his bitter experience to help another to avoid the pitfalls of life. Cattanzara, who weeps when he is drunk, seems “different” because he has a superior mind and wishes that had made much more of his life.

“Unable to reply, he shut his eyes, but when—years later—he opened them, he saw that Mr. Cattanzara had, out of pity, gone away, but in his ears he still heard the words he had said when he left: ‘George, don’t do what I did.’”

Cattanzara sees that George is wasting his youth, seeking to get by on lies and boasts rather than on ambition and hard work; he also recognizes his younger self in the teen’s fecklessness. However, instead of reacting with anger at being lied to, he continues to be kind and solicitous, which has the effect of inspiring George to attempt to turn his lie into a reality.

“He said that everything was run on credit, business and everything else, because after all what was credit but the fact that people were human beings, and if you were really a human being you gave credit to somebody else and he gave credit to you.”

Mr. Panessa, a former factory worker who has just bought a deli, applies his humane beliefs about reciprocity and faith in others to his business transactions, with disastrous results. As with the candy store owner in “The Prison,” his attempts at compassion and forgiveness breed mostly resentment from the flawed human beings he trusts.

“He felt for Panessa and his wife a grating hatred and vowed never to pay them back because he hated them so much, especially the humpback behind the counter.”

The janitor Willy Schlegel blames the trusting Panessas for his own weakness and guilt for having run up a massive debt, and he therefore dehumanizes Mr. Panessa as a “hunchback” in order to rationalize his unreasoning hatred. His unreflective rage illustrates Tacitus’s axiom that “It is human nature to hate him whom you have injured.” By the time Willy takes responsibility for his conduct and seeks to make amends, it is too late.

“Behind him, a short distance to the right, he had noticed a stranger—give a skeleton a couple of pounds—loitering near a bronze statue on a stone pedestal of the heavy-dugged Etruscan wolf suckling the infant Romulus and Remus […] so as to suggest to the traveler that he had been mirrored (lock, stock, barrel) in the other’s gaze for some time.”

A Jewish American abroad in Italy, Fidelman finds himself haunted by a ghost-like reminder (Susskind) of an ethnic history and responsibility to others that he has tried to repress. Throughout the story, the skeletal Susskind is associated with images of death and grieving, as well as of charity, and his “mirror[ing]” of Fidelman in his gaze hints that Susskind is a doppelganger: a ragged embodiment of Fidelman’s guilty conscience.

“He had read that here, under his feet, were the ruins of Ancient Rome. […] History was mysterious, the remembrance of things unknown, in a way burdensome, in a way a sensuous experience.”

The city of Rome both excites and disturbs Fidelman, who is trying to write a book about the early Renaissance artist, Giotto. Eventually, his dreamlike quest to find Susskind, which takes him to the Jewish ghetto and cemetery, suggests that he has been studying the wrong “history.” His doppelganger leads him not to subterranean Roman ruins but to a more recent buried history: the graves of Jewish people who were murdered by the Fascists and Nazis.

“One day, out of misery, he wept into the dough. Thereafter his bread was such it brought customers from everywhere.”

The baker Lieb (which is German for “love”) discovers after years of poverty and drudgery that his tears have the miraculous effect of sweetening his bread. This touch of magical realism serves an overarching theme of the story collection: that of unhappy people learning to create something good and nurturing out of their suffering.

“A cloud of smoke billowed out at her. The loaves in the trays were blackened bricks—charred corpses.”

Lieb’s miracle of sublimating personal suffering and pain into nourishment for others is a private revelation that his wife does not share. Her litany of woes, which she wields as an excuse not to lend money to Kobotsky, distracts her from the bread in the oven, and the loaves’ “charred corpses” grimly evoke the relatives that she lost to the Holocaust. Her anti-miracle, the opposite of her husband’s, suggests that suffering can lead to a loss of humanity and thence to more cruelty and suffering.

“Finkle, after six years of study, was to be ordained in June and had been advised by an acquaintance that he might find it easier to win himself a congregation if he were married.”

Finkle decides to marry because an “acquaintance” (not a friend) has suggested it as a career move. Like Manischevitz and Fidelman, Finkle has honored the words but not the spirit of his calling and therefore lacks the affinity for his fellow humans that a rabbi should have in abundance. The number six appears frequently in the story—six years of study, six marriage prospects, six photographs of girls—with Stella revealed as the seventh of the latter. These numerical references thus connect her with the sabbath, God’s day of rest after the creation of the universe. This suggests that Finkle’s search is at an end, and that he has perhaps created himself anew through his intense sympathy for the world-weary Stella.

“His head ached and eyes narrowed with the intensity of his gazing, then as if an obscure fog had blown up in the mind, he experienced fear and was aware that he had received an impression, somehow, of evil.”

The vague impression of evil and danger that radiates from Stella’s photograph is what makes her irresistible to Finkle. Unlike the other six women, all of whom life has “passed by,” she bristles with the sharp edges of life and experience that Finkle has long avoided—but that he knows he must minister to, to redeem others and himself.