The Magic Barrel

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1958

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Themes

Biblical Subtext and Transcendence

The Magic Barrel, whose stories hew closer to fable than to realistic fiction, makes frequent use of biblical analogues, both Jewish and Christian, in order to amplify its themes and resonance. As if to stress this allusivity, the title of the first story, “The First Seven Years,” refers explicitly to the Book of Genesis and the Jewish patriarch Jacob’s seven-year courtship of his future wife, Rachel. Like Jacob, the shoemaker Sobel must complete seven years of labor before asking for the hand of his taskmaster’s daughter, Miriam. Also like Jacob, who was forced into the wilderness by his brother Esau’s murderous will, Sobel is a refugee who narrowly escaped Hitler’s death camps.

The next story, “The Mourners,” continues the Jacob subtext with the epiphany of a harried landlord named Gruber, who must repeatedly climb a tall staircase to evict a troublesome tenant. Like “Jacob’s ladder” (Genesis 28), the stairs trigger, in the story’s final scene, a vision of exaltation that leads to Gruber’s spiritual transcendence. The fourth story, “Angel Levine,” likewise recasts Jacob’s act of wrestling with the angel in Genesis 32 as a long struggle by a Job-like tailor to accept the divinity of a Black angel who has come to test his faith. As in Genesis, the struggle ends in revelation and rebirth. Throughout the stories of The Magic Barrel, salvation often comes only after wrestling with a darkness that usually takes the form of the specific protagonist’s own weakness or narrowness of spirit.

The fifth story, “Behold the Key,” ventures into Christian allegory by putting a dark twist on the Gospel of John. In the climactic scene, the Roman lothario, De Vecchis, echoes the bitter words of an earlier Roman, Portius Pilate (“Ecce homo”: “Behold the man”), while hurling at the protagonist the coveted key of an apartment he has destroyed. In this story, however, the Christ analogy ironically brings no salvation—least of all for the protagonist, who has failed his responsibilities of generosity and pity and ends up with a comical version of the mark of Cain on his forehead. “The Loan,” which also uses Christ-like imagery to foreground a spiritual failure, alludes to both the miracle of the loaves and fishes and to the rite of transubstantiation, which holds that the bread of the Eucharist transmutes into the crucified body of Christ. In the story, the bitter tears of Lieb’s sorrow make his bread miraculously sweet and profitable. However, his wife will not allow him to pass this bounty on in the form of charity; her covetousness and self-pity thus make “charred corpses” of the magical loaves. In these two stories, the transcendence of suffering, a cornerstone of both the Bible and The Magic Barrel, has been defeated by human pettiness and has turned to ashes in the mouth.

Empathy and Human Solidarity

In “Angel Levine,” after the eponymous Black angel has restored the tailor Manischevitz’s wife to health, the protagonist remarks with dawning wonder, “[T]here are Jews everywhere” (56). Earlier, the “probationary” angel’s frayed clothing and hangdog air, not to mention his race, gave the prejudiced tailor serious doubts about his legitimacy and divine status. Powerless to complete his task without the faith of his suppliant, Levine began to sink into dissolution; hence, Manischevitz must ultimately save the angel before the angel can save him. This revelation of the moral interconnectedness of all people—however different they might seem to be—is central to almost every story in The Magic Barrel. Malamud once asserted that “all men are Jews,” by which he meant that all people lead thwarted lives and suffer in one way or another, requiring kindness from others, and bearing responsibility for fellow humans (Featherstone, Joseph. “Bernard Malamud.” The Atlantic, Mar. 1967). Malamud therefore implies that like Levine, everyone holds a “probationary” status and must be willing to trust, to give, and to make sacrifices for others.

The spirit of empathy takes on many different guises as the stories of The Magic Barrel unfold one by one. In “The Mourners,” for example, Gruber the landlord has a profound insight on his way to evict Kessler and suddenly realizes how much he holds in common with the sickly tenant, for both men are equally subject to mortality. His sudden empathy takes the form of a leap of faith like Manischevitz’s: the belief that he and Kessler are, in a sense, one in their commonality and in their pity for each other. In “The Prison,” the bitter shopkeeper Tommy Castelli likewise sees his own life-ruining delinquency in a 10-year-old shoplifter and tries repeatedly to save her. Similarly, the middle-aged cashier of “A Summer’s Reading,” Cattanzara, takes pity on a teenager whom he realizes is repeating his own mistakes and wasting his youth; and in this instance, the older man’s empathy and kindness lead to the other’s moral transformation as the boy redeems his lie about reading books by making it true. In “The Loan,” Mrs. Lieb’s narrowness of spirit and one-upmanship about her own suffering incinerates her husband’s magical, tear-sweetened loaves of bread. (In this particular tale, Mr. Lieb’s transubstantiation of his own sufferings into nourishment for others starkly foregrounds his wife’s lack of empathy and generosity.) Of all these stories, however, Malamud’s belief in reciprocity and in the moral obligation of human beings to help each other finds its most unequivocable expression in Mr. Panessa, the doomed grocer in “The Bill,” who states, “If you were really a human being you gave credit to somebody else and he gave credit to you” (146-47). Though Panessa’s faith in mankind goes unappreciated in the desolate crucible where he struggles to keep his shop afloat, it remains The Magic Barrel’s quintessential vision of humanity’s spiritual triumph.

Alienation and Diaspora

This theme is most eloquently expressed when Leo Finkle, the aspiring rabbi of “The Magic Barrel,” the collection’s title story, feels calamitously estranged from his community, his fellow men, and from God. Alone and friendless in a big city, he turns to a questionable matchmaker in order to find a suitable wife. Like many of the characters in The Magic Barrel, Leo has a complicated relationship with cultural and familial ties that seem, in his uprooted life, to become more and more tenuous. Deracination, including the loss of family and homeland, is historically a Jewish problem in many ways, and the specter of the Holocaust in The Magic Barrel serves as a harsh reminder of this dynamic. Despite Malamud’s assertion that “all men are Jews” (Featherstone), the Jewish people have had a uniquely fragmented continuity due to the millennia-long dispersion known as the “Jewish diaspora.” In 135 CE, the destruction of Judea by the Roman Empire scattered the Jewish people widely throughout Europe and Asia, and in the Middle Ages, they were expelled en masse from several countries, including England in 1290 and Spain in 1492. The Holocaust, which represents the most recent and catastrophic of these persecutions, casts a heavy shadow over the events of The Magic Barrel, many of whose characters are refugees, immigrants, and travelers.

Malamud’s characters, most of which are of Jewish heritage, all have a fractured sense of community. In “The First Seven Years,” the Polish refugee Sobel has “by the skin of his teeth escaped Hitler’s incinerators” (15), and his trauma and introversion estrange him from others, even fellow Jewish Polish immigrants such as Feld, who finds his aspirations “strange and sad” (15). In “The Loan,” Bessie Lieb’s loss of family and friends in the Holocaust has hardened her heart to others, even her husband’s old friends. Shimon Susskind of “The Last Mohican,” who says he is “always running,” has fled Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Israel and seems to be almost a living avatar of the “Wandering Jew,” the nationless figure of legend who has become a widely-used metaphor for Jewish diaspora. Susskind argues his kinship to Arthur Fidelman, a prim Jewish American who denies any responsibility for him. And in “The Lady of the Lake,” Henry Levin, another American who tries to disown his Jewish roots, falls in love with a Buchenwald survivor, with tragic results. In these stories and others, Malamud uses Jewish estrangement and deracination as metaphor for the attempts (and, often, the failures) of human beings to relate to one another and relieve each other’s loneliness and suffering.