The Magic Barrel

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1958

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“The Loan”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“The Loan” Summary

Lieb, a baker whose delicious bread attracts customers in droves, has a visitor: Kobotsky, a “frail, gnarled” man who seems marked by a deep misery. Bessie, Lieb’s second wife, makes short work of the customers with her “annihilating service” and nervously approaches the stranger, who says he is an old friend of her husband’s. Lieb almost cries when he sees Kobotsky, who came from Poland many years ago on the same ship that he did. They learned English together in night school and were dear friends, though they have not seen each other in 15 years. He tells Kobotsky that he had little success as a baker until one day, overcome with sadness, he wept into the bread dough. Since then, his bread has been wildly popular, and he has trouble keeping up with demand. Kobotsky hesitantly tells Lieb that he needs 200 dollars. Saddened but unsurprised, Lieb remembers the terrible argument that destroyed their friendship 15 years ago: Kobotsky borrowed a hundred dollars from Lieb and later insisted that he had repaid it.

Now, Lieb waits for Kobotsky to apologize for this past transgression, but the latter just stares at his hands. Lieb decides to forgive Kobotsky and tells him that he will ask Bessie for the loan. Kobotsky starts to say that the money is for his wife, but Lieb interrupts him. Lieb nervously tells Bessie about Kobotsky’s mother, how kind she was to him, and what a fine woman his wife is. Bessie, who has never met Kobotsky or his wife, is immediately suspicious. Lieb tells her that Kobotsky’s wife needs 200 dollars for an operation, and Bessie screams and claims that they do not have the money. Lieb pleads with her, but she coldly turns her back to him.

Kobotsky asks them not to fight and moves to leave. He says the money was for his wife, but not for an operation; she died five years ago, and every year, he has promised her spirit that he will buy a headstone for her grave. Lieb, tearing up, sees that his wife is also moved, and hopes that she will now agree to the loan. However, Bessie shakes her head and recounts her own sufferings: the murder of her father by the Bolsheviks, the death of her first husband of typhus, and the loss of her beloved brother and his family, who were incinerated in Hitler’s ovens. Finally, she came to America and married Lieb, a poor baker in poor health. She demands to know who will take care of her when he dies. Suddenly, the kitchen is full of the smell of burning bread. Distracted by her memories, Bessie has forgotten about the loaves in the oven, which are now “charred corpses.” Kobotsky and the baker, sighing over their “lost youth,” kiss and part forever.

“The Loan” Analysis

The story of the baker Lieb and his tear-salted bread is a throwback to the European setting of the shtetls, or Jewish towns, and their fables of magical and moral comeuppance. Upon seeing his immigrant dreams evaporate, Lieb’s tears of suffering flavor his bread, which becomes a bestseller. Thus, Lieb achieves the apparent miracle that eludes Manischevitz in the beginning of “Angel Levine”: the act of turning suffering into sustenance. Lieb’s sorrows have also made him more sensitive to others’ pain, and consequently, he is deeply moved by his estranged friend Kobotsky’s losses, even though Kobotsky has previously borrowed money without repaying it or apologizing. Seeing his old friend’s hands and gnarled frame and thinking of his own cataracts and failing health, he sees himself in the other, and true to his name, which is German for “love,” Lieb’s heart goes out. In this latest example of Empathy and Human Solidarity, pity thus leads to identification and the effort to help, which in Malamud’s stories is always a sacrament.

However, in a sharp contrast to Lieb’s generosity, his wife Bessie reveals herself to be far more stinting in her tears, which are all for herself and her husband. It is also significant that she does not even know about Kobotsky’s previous loan, yet she still bridles at the idea of trusting him. Her first sight of the visitor, with his arthritis-maimed hands and “glitter” of unconcealed misery, threatens her, for she knows the magical force of unhappiness on others’ hearts. Therefore, after Kobotsky recites his woes, she counters them resoundingly with her own, but rather than allowing her to remain a two-dimensional antagonist, Malamud imbues her lack of charity with striking emotion and nuance, for it is soon clear that the horrors of pogroms and the Holocaust have exhausted her generosity and made her fearful of future disasters. Additionally, the fact that the loan is for a dead wife rather than a live one suggests that there may even be a tough wisdom in her refusal, for in the realities of immigrant life, hard-earned money might better be spent on the living. From this exchange, it is clear that Bessie’s miseries have hardened her into a survivor who perhaps knows better than her warm-hearted husband, who somewhat cagily withholds the facts of Kobotsky’s previous unpaid loan. The “glittering” ostentatiousness of Kobotsky’s sadness also bears a manipulative taint. Thus, as in “The First Seven Years,” Malamud crafts a delicate sense of ambiguity surrounding the love and generosity that flows from sorrow. In that earlier story, Sobel, who is a Holocaust survivor, cares nothing for money, a purity that may augur a precarious life for Miriam. However, in this fable-like story, the destruction of Lieb’s magical loaves tips the scales of divine judgment in favor of the compassionate Lieb, for the loaves burn due to Bessie’s self-justifying flood of grievances, which stand in contrast to the humble, bread-sweetening tears that usually flavor them. Her lack of charity has therefore harmed herself and her husband in immediate, material terms—the ones she most values—turning their precious loaves into “charred corpses” like Hitler’s victims. Instead of enjoying a meeting of hearts around the table, Lieb must therefore comfort his friend with a tender kiss of love and sorrow before parting “forever.”