The Magic Barrel

The darkest of The Magic Barrel’s stories begins, appropriately, in a lightless, morguelike room, and Malamud gradually drops clues that the setting is a limbo or afterworld in which the dead are questioned by bureaucratic drones who are even more depressed than the wingless angel of “Angel Levine.” Like Levine, the “census taker” Davidov drops a “feather” (a shaving from his pencil), a wan hint of his celestial employ, and he writes in an “old-fashioned language” that is no longer in use. Davidov has come to question Rosen, a dead salesman, about the fatal dynamic between him and Eva, who is probably also dead. Left with two small children and a failing grocery, Eva absolutely refuses to avail herself of Rosen’s advice and charity. Her stubbornness seems not so much pride as a fatalistic compulsion to embrace suffering, for she says, “I always suffered. […] This is my life” (89). Married to her misery, she refuses to wed anyone else, notably Rosen, even for the sake of her hungry children. Rosen’s reaction is a classic example of offended masculinity, for when Eva rebuffs his expert advice, he tries at once to take matters into his own hands, even resorting to the use of trickery to force her to accept his money; this trend reaches unrealistic and darkly comical lengths when finally, in a stubborn rage, he tries to force his money on her by arranging his own death. Thus, although Rosen’s actions ostensibly stem from a self-destructive tendency toward altruism, the reality is darker still, for the dynamic between him and Eva evolves into a grim battle of wills between two bottomless wells of need; Eva’s is to be pitied, and Rosen’s is to paradoxically exert control by way of sacrifice. At the story’s conclusion, when Davidov raises the shade, Eva can be seen haunting Rosen’s window like a vampire, her eyes haggard with an eternal hunger. Though in life she refused his proposal of marriage, they are now locked in a hellish union in death, imprisoned in a version of limbo. The only difference is that death has reversed their dynamic, and now it is Rosen who violently resists Eva’s parasitic advances.

This fable of a folie à deux (commonly defined as a delusion or mental illness that is shared by two people in close association) resembles Yiddish folktales in its ripples of dark magic and demonic imagery, and pity is once again the core theme. In this case, however, the wrong kind of pity is at work, for it is not a healer of rifts but a destructive force that wrecks love, lives, and innocent children. In this light, the title itself is darkly ambiguous, for the phrase “Take Pity” could be asking readers either to pity these characters or merely to consider the phenomenon of pity itself as a blade that can cut both ways. It may even refer to Eva, who literally takes or seizes the pity of others as a vampire takes blood. Notably, “Take Pity” is one of the few Magic Barrel stories that directly references the Holocaust; Eva’s relatives, she says, were taken from her by Hitler. Like Bessie Lieb in “The Loan,” whose closed-off heart is injured by many losses and therefore causes her to repeat the darkest of histories by incinerating her husband’s loaves of bread, Eva may also have constructed a joyless prison around herself to replicate the one in which her loved ones perished. If so, a twisted gesture of love has spawned a demonic act of pity, dooming four more souls.