The Magic Barrel

Malamud’s richly ambiguous title story, like several others in the collection (“The Girl of My Dreams,” “Behold the Key,” “The Lady of the Lake,” “A Summer’s Reading,” and “The Last Mohican”), chronicles the dawning of conscience and humanity in a young person, by way of an elder who serves as a guide but is also something of a trickster—a common figure in Yiddish folklore. The matchmaker Salzman, who is as slippery a salesman as Bevilacqua in “Behold the Key”, also echoes the uncanny attributes and scrounging, knife’s-edge existence of Susskind. In the soon-to-be rabbi Finkle’s waking dreams, Salzman becomes a “pagan” god of fertility (Pan), an image that inspires no more trust than Susskind’s nightmarish incarnation in “The Last Mohican.” Throughout the story, Malamud remains resolutely ambiguous about Salzman’s true nature, refusing to confirm whether he is an honest, earthly marriage-broker, a schemer looking to unload his daughter on a naive rabbi, or a supernatural being who twitches Finkle along, puppet-like, toward redemption or disaster.

Friendless and isolated from the very community he hopes to serve as a rabbi, Finkle only decides to marry as a means of helping his career. Despite Finkle’s cold reception of the man on their second meeting, in which he refuses to provide the matchmaker with a morsel of food, Salzman examines Finkle’s “ascetic” features and likes what he sees, and this judgment is also deliberately ambiguous. Salzman may regard Finkle as a naïve fool to be swindled, a lost soul to be redeemed, or a promising match for his own daughter or another girl—or perhaps all of these things at once. It is also significant that his somewhat deceitful method of arranging a meeting between Finkle and the teacher named Lily ultimately leads to an awkward discussion about God, and thence to Finkle’s first, shocking stab of self-knowledge: that he loves neither God nor man. This narrative twist emphasizes a trend that recurs in other Malamud stories such as “A Summer’s Reading,” for Salzman’s lies ironically lead circuitously to life-shaking truths for the characters involved. Deeply troubled by this unexpected epiphany, Finkle declares his desire to marry for love rather than convenience, and through his subsequent dealings with the mysterious—and possibly angelic—matchmaker, he begins to view matrimony as something much more than just a career move. Just like several of Malamud’s other misanthropic characters who undergo a positive transformation, he begins to turn away from books and toward actual people as a more viable path to learning how to love.

As the melancholy Salzman steadily infects the student’s imagination, Finkle begins to resemble him in speech and appearance, losing weight, growing a ragged beard, and absorbing the older man’s Yinglish phrasing, uttering statements like “Just her I want” (213). (The uncanny nature of this transformation mirrors Fidelman’s own transformation in “The Last Mohican,” in which the Giotto scholar, searching endlessly for Susskind, takes on his quarry’s wardrobe of beret and pointed shoes as well as his vocal rhythms.) Finally, Finkle finds a dime-store photo that was dropped into Salzman’s folder of unmarried women, although whether its presence is accidental or intentional is also ambiguous. Standing in sharp contrast to the wan, hopeless women in the first six photographs, the seventh photo seems almost magical to Finkle in its galvanic intensity. Her eyes—reminiscent, haunting, and “absolutely strange”—obsess him, not least for their faint impression of “evil,” and the fact that her gaze is “reluctant” implies that she does not want to be desired, which ironically makes Finkle desire her all the more. Most attractively, like Kobotsky in “The Loan,” she glitters with the primal allure of someone who has “lived” and “deeply suffered,” which Finkle himself has not. She therefore takes on a talismanic significance, for Finkle feels instinctively that she might represent his sacred path to life, love, and redemption. Rushing to find Salzman just as Fidelman rushes after Susskind, Finkle looks forward to a symbiotic double-redemption, not unlike the one between the tailor and the lost angel in “Angel Levine.”

The fact that the troubled girl in the photo turns out to be Salzman’s own daughter is portrayed as being something of a magical coincidence, but perhaps it is Salzman’s haunted eyes, gazing from Stella’s comely face, that have beguiled Finkle with their desperate glitter of life and their “used to the bone” (208) authenticity. This emotional vibe resonates deeply for an alienated, sheltered man whose own parents and ancestors owed much to the local matchmaker’s miracles of coupling. True to Salzman’s trickster tendencies, Salzman’s apparent resistance to the match is implied to be a further example of his cunning, for Finkle begins to wonder if the entire progression of events was meticulously planned. Accordingly, as Finkle rushes to meet Salzman’s daughter, Stella’s status is still far from clear, for as she waits under a streetlight on the corner, smoking a cigarette, her enigmatic figure might be that of a sex worker, an angry rebel, or just an average American girl who has run afoul of her father’s Old-World strictures on modesty and religious observance. Salzman, meanwhile, leans against a nearby wall—his personal Wailing Wall— and chants “prayers for the dead” (214). Again, it is unclear if these prayers are for his lost daughter, the soon-to-be-lost Finkle, or for himself, due to his own devious machinations. In whimsical contrast to his laments, the heavens pinwheel with a rapturous magic that reflects Finkle’s romantic dreams, which seem unabashedly (and perhaps naively) Old World themselves. Finkle, ardent to redeem this wounded woman and himself, has dared a Malamudian leap of faith, rushing headlong into the stream of life. As with Mitka, Sobel, and other characters, his breakthrough could just as easily lead to misery as to happiness, but with this conclusion Malamud implies that these risks are always inherent in the acts of faith, love, and living. As Finkle reflects, sensing the danger in Stella’s eyes: “It is thus with us all” (209).