The Magic Barrel

As the long-suffering protagonist of “Angel Levine,” Manischevitz is a middle-aged tailor whose many misfortunes—the loss of a son in WWII, the loss of his shop in an accident, back pain, a dying wife—rival those of Job. He is a devout Jewish man who is driven to a crisis of faith by the absurdity of his calamitous life. Praying to God for succor, he is at first too narrow-minded to accept the miracle of Angel Levine, his guardian angel. Having dutifully followed the teachings of the synagogues since childhood, Manischevitz has certain rigid assumptions about God’s angels, none of which harmonize with this particular Black “angel” in his fraying, ill-fitting suit. Indignantly sending Levine away, Manischevitz has a slight change of heart when his health unaccountably improves. Eventually, after rejecting Levine a second time upon seeing him in a dive bar in Harlem, Manischevitz is forced by his desperate straits to seek out and rescue the almost-fallen angel from the seductions of lascivious living. Braving a Hell-like journey into a lurid underworld, where the rejected angel has been drowning his sorrows in wine, women, and song, Manischevitz demonstrates the evolution of his faith, empathy, and humanity by prostrating himself before the Black “probationary” angel, risking the hostility of the crowd of unfriendly faces that populate the bar. His climactic statement, “There are Jews everywhere” (56), crystalizes his revelation that everyone, whatever their race or situation, is worthy of faith and succor, and that salvation flows from empathy and reciprocity.

It is also important to note that “Manischevitz” is a brand-name that has long been associated with Jewish cuisine in the United States, especially the wine and matzo used in Passover. The B. Manischevitz Company was the first to mass-produce matzo with machinery, and this may be the provenance of the tailor Manischevitz’s name, since Malamud’s hero must overcome the robotic lockstep of his orthodox views concerning his faith. Moreover, in The Magic Barrel stories, bread appears frequently as a symbol of empathy and sharing.

Eva, the widow of the grocer Axel Kalish in “Take Pity,” is one of the few characters in Malamud’s collection not to achieve redemption for herself or another. Serving as a tragic foil to Rosen, the story’s soft-hearted protagonist, the fatalistic Eva has given up any hope of bettering her life, to the point that she has begun to fetishize her endless drudgery and suffering. Pigheaded in her refusal to accept any charity from Rosen for herself or her children, she appears at first to be too proud to accept pity. However, the story’s climax suggests that she has become destructively addicted to pity—and pity alone—to the point that she will selfishly allow her children to starve in order to maintain her supply of this particularly poisonous source of spiritual sustenance. Indeed, by story’s end, Eva and her children are implied to be dead, as is Rosen himself, for they both now inhabit a gray and hopeless version of the afterlife. Ultimately, whether Eva has killed herself and her children outright or has simply allowed them all to starve to death is left open to the reader’s imagination.

Her name also invokes the biblical Eve, who led Adam astray into a bleak, purgatorial existence, for this fate also awaits Rosen. Now marooned in a sunless limbo, he rants bitterly at Eva as his betrayer. Eva also recalls the anti-hero of Franz Kafka’s story “A Hunger Artist,” a carnival performer who starves himself for the entertainment of crowds. A professional masochist, Kafka’s character fasts not out of heroic discipline but because he does not like the taste of food. Making an endless spectacle of his physical suffering, he eventually starves himself to death. However, Eva shows herself to be even more destructive than Kafka’s hunger artist, for her insatiable and almost vampiric need for pity lures Rosen and her two small children to destruction.

Levin, the self-doubting protagonist of “The Lady of the Lake,” joins George Stoyonovich and Arthur Fidelman as one of Malamud’s impostor figures: insecure men who have crafted an outwardly prestigious persona in order to conceal an identity that makes them feel ashamed. Proud of his ability to “pass” as a gentile, Levin adopts the fake name of “Henry Freeman” while seeking romance in Italy, thereby striving to free himself from some of the baggage and perceived stigma of his Jewish heritage. The young, handsome Levin is so insecure about his ethnicity that upon falling for a beautiful Italian woman named Isabella, he repeatedly lies to her about his heritage and background even after she has confessed to him her own deception—that she is actually the daughter of a poor caretaker, not of del Dongo, the aristocrat whose idyllic island bears his name.

Levin’s fascination with the Italian gentry and its storied bloodline is what first attracts him to Isabella, and though he is open-minded enough to overlook her true and considerably impoverished circumstances and background, he is not mensch enough to apply this tolerance to his own Jewish heritage. Still hoping to marry Isabella under his false name, he envisions concealing his past for all time, even moving far away from everyone he knows in order to keep his secret from her forever. Levin’s hapless folly therefore marks him as an example of the iconic “shlemiel,” the archetypal fool from Yiddish folklore. Finally, his self-hating deceit, like Bessie Lieb’s selfishness in “The Loan,” conjures a climactic anti-miracle, for Isabella, who bears the literal stigma of a Buchenwald tattoo, melts away into the night, leaving Levin—a reverse Pygmalion—embracing nothing but a cold statue.

Fidelman, a Jewish American who, like Henry Levin, has come to Italy expressly to bask in its Christian splendors and history, also comes face-to-face with a sort of Jewish double (Susskind), whose dark, reverberative legacy propels him to an identity crisis. Fidelman, the hapless protagonist of “The Last Mohican” is like Levin in that he is also a schlemiel, for he cuts a scholarly yet vain and self-regarding figure. The young aesthete has a mental habit of envisioning his own face, particularly his sensitive, chiseled features, which are much like those of the Renaissance masterpieces he has come to study. Like Levin, he has aseptically suppressed his inner connection to his Jewish heritage. Consequently, the copiously Jewish figure of Susskind, who is described as “mirroring” Fidelman in his gaze, reflects not only Fidelman’s buried Jewish heritage and character, but also his blinkered conscience, which now boils over into his dreams with images of death and self-sacrifice.

In the Jewish ghetto and cemetery where Fidelman’s dreamlike search for his Jewish doppelganger leads him, he finds not Renaissance treasures but shocking poverty, as well as the forgotten tombs of murdered Jews who were betrayed by the Italian Fascists only years earlier. Eventually, at St. Peter’s Basilica, he finds his quarry scrounging for money and hawking rosaries to Christian pilgrims—an act of “selling out” that strikes a resonant chord in Fidelman. Finally, discovering that Susskind has burned his manuscript, Fidelman experiences a moment of rage that soon transforms itself into a “triumphant insight.” Vociferously accepting Susskind and all that he embodies, he begs the man to “come back” and take his extra suit. Seeing himself now in the truest sense, Fidelman embraces the ragged fugitive soul of his forbears, which, like Henry Levin, he has long sought to bury and deny. As with many of Malamud’s characters, suffering and loss have opened Fidelman’s eyes to a new commonality with others, especially the wretched and neglected of the earth.