The Magic Barrel

Short Stories for Students

COPYRIGHT 1997 Thomson Gale

The Magic Barrel

Bernard Malamud (/people/literature-and-arts/american-literature-

biographies/bernard-malamud) 1954

Author Biography

Plot Summary

Characters

Themes

Style

Historical Context

Critical Overview

Criticism

Sources

Further Reading
Bernard Malamud (/people/literature-and-arts/american-literature-
biographies/bernard-malamud)’s short story (/literature-and-arts/language-
linguistics-and-literary-terms/literature-general/short-story), “The Magic Barrel,”
was rst published in the Partisan Review in 1954, and reprinted in 1958 in
Malamud’s rst volume of short ction. This tale of a rabbinical student’s
misadventures with a marriage broker was quite well received in the 1950s, and
Malamud’s collection of short stories, The Magic Barrel, won the National Book
Award for ction in 1959.

As Malamud attained a reputation as a respected novelist in the 1960s and 1970s,

his short stories were widely anthologized and attracted considerable attention
from literary students and scholars. A writer in the Jewish-American tradition,
Malamud wrote stories that explore issues and themes central to the Jewish
community. A love story with a surprising outcome, “The Magic Barrel” traces a
young man’s struggle to come to terms with his identity and poses the religious
question of how people—Jews and others— may come to love God. Is human love,
the story asks, a necessary rst step to loving God? Malamud’s “The Magic Barrel” is
a story remarkable for its economy, using just a few strokes to create compelling and
complex characters.

Author Biography

Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn, New York (/places/united-states-and-

canada/us-political-geography/new-york), in 1914 to Russian Jewish immigrants
named Max and Bertha Malamud. He later described his parents as “gentle, honest,
kindly people.” Max, the manager of a small grocery store, was the model for Morris
Bober, the grocer protagonist of Malamud’s second novel, The Assistant (1957).
Malamud went to high school in Brooklyn and attended the City College of New
York (/places/united-states-and-canada/us-political-geography/new-york),
graduating in 1936. In 1942 he received a Master of Arts degree from Columbia
University (/social-sciences-and-law/education/colleges-us/columbia-university).

Malamud did not begin writing seriously until after World War II (/history/modern-
europe/wars-and-battles/world-war-ii), when the horrors of the Holocaust became
known to the international community. The revelation seems to have made Malamud
more actively aware of his own Jewish identity. “I was concerned with what Jews
stood for,” he recalled, “with their getting down to the bare bones of things. I was
concerned with . . . how Jews felt they had to live in order to go on living.”

In 1945 Malamud married Ann de Chiara. To the Malamud family, traditional Jews,
Bernard’s marriage to a gentile woman seemed an unforgivable act. After the
wedding Max Malamud went through the rituals of mourning for his son—an act
reminiscent of Salzman’s actions in “The Magic Barrel.” Ann and Bernard moved to
Oregon in 1949, after Bernard accepted a teaching position at Oregon State
University. There, Malamud recalled, “I was allowed to teach freshman composition
but not literature because I was nakedly without a Ph.D.” It was at Oregon State that
Malamud wrote “The Magic Barrel” in the basement of the university library.

In 1952 Malamud published his rst novel, The Natural, a poignant treatment of the
American hero as baseball player. His second novel, The Assistant (1957), is the
heartbreaking account of an impoverished grocer and the Catholic drifter who
comes to work for him. In 1961 Malamud and his family moved to Vermont, where
he took a job teaching creative writing at Bennington College—a position in which he
would continue for almost twenty ve years.

A highly respected teacher, Malamud was himself skeptical of creative writing

courses: “In essence, one doesn’t teach writing; he encourages talented people
whom he may be able to do something for. I feel that writing courses are of limited
value although they do induce some students to read ction with care.” Malamud
won the Pulitzer prize in ction for his 1966 novel, The Fixer, and the American
Library Association (/sports-and-everyday-life/social-organizations/private-
organizations/american-library-association)’s Notable Book citation for Dubin ‘s Lives
in 1979. Malamud continued actively to teach and write almost until his death in
1986.

Plot Summary

Part I

Leo Finkle has spent the last six years studying to become a rabbi at New York City’s
Yeshivah University. After hearing that he would have better job prospects if he
were to get married, Leo decides to consult a matchmaker. Matchmakers, also called
marriage brokers, were common in many European Jewish cultures, as well as in
some Jewish immigrant communities in the United States (/places/united-states-
and-canada/us-political-geography/united-states). Leo’s own parents were brought
together by a marriage broker, and Leo is determined to nd his bride through the
same tradition. He contacts Pinye Salzman, a marriage broker who has advertised in
The Jewish Daily Forward, New York’s leading Yiddish newspaper. (Written in Hebrew
characters and based on the vocabulary and syntax of medieval German, the Yiddish
language (/literature-and-arts/language-linguistics-and-literary-terms/language-
and-linguistics/yiddish) was spoken by many European Jews and their American
immigrant descendants.)

Salzman arrives at Finkle’s apartment one day late in February and the two set about
their task:
 Leo had led Salzman to the only clear place in the room, a table near a window that
overlooked the lamp-lit city. He seated himself at the matchmaker’s side but facing
him, attempting by an act of will to suppress the unpleasant tickle in his throat.
Salzman eagerly unstrapped his portfolio and removed a loose rubber band from a
thin packet of much-handled cards. As he ipped through them, a gesture and sound
that physically hurt Leo, the student pretended not to see and gazed steadfastly out
the window. Although it was still February, winter was on its last legs, signs of which
he had for the rst time in years begun to notice. He now observed the round white
moon, moving high in the sky through a cloud menagerie, and watched with half-open
mouth as it penetrated a huge den, and dropped out of her like an egg laying itself.
Salzman, though pretending through eyeglasses he had just slipped on, to be engaged
in scanning the writing on the cards, stole occasional glances at the young man’s
distinguished face, noting with pleasure the long, severe scholar’s nose, brown eyes
heavy with learning, sensitive yet ascetic lips, and a certain, almost hollow quality to
the dark cheeks. He gazed around at the shelves of books and let out a soft, contented
sigh.(Excerpt from “The Magic Barrel”)

Salzman boasts to Finkle that he has so many clients that he has to keep their cards
in a barrel at his of ce. He summarizes the attractions of three young women to
Finkle, listing their age, appearance,

Dowry, and the nancial assets of their respective fathers. Finkle becomes
embarrassed by the overtly commercial nature of the conversation and, wondering
what role love might play in an arranged marriage, asks Salzman to leave.

Leo spends the next day restless and unsettled, wondering if he should try another
matchmaker or if he should nd a wife on his own. That evening Salzman returns to
Leo’s apartment, asking if the student has reconsidered any of the three women he
described. Salzman particularly recommends one Lily Hirschorn, an unmarried
schoolteacher. Finkle pretends to be ambivalent about the idea, but is intrigued;
Salzman leaves the apartment con dent that Leo and Lily will meet.

Part II

The next Saturday Leo takes Lily for a walk. She turns out to be “not unpretty,” is au
courant (or up to date) on a variety of topics, and talks easily and intelligently. Leo has
the uneasy feeling that Salzman is hiding somewhere nearby, watching them. He
pictures the matchmaker as “cloven-hoofed Pan” (in Greco-Roman mythology Pan is
the god of nature, depicted as half man and half goat) sprinkling ower buds in their
path to celebrate their union. Lily presses Leo for details about his calling as a rabbi,
and Leo realizes that Salzman has represented him to Lily as a passionately religious
man. In a moment of unguarded honesty, Leo confesses to Lily: “I think . . . I came to
God not because I loved him, but because I did not.” Lily is disappointed in his answer
and the afternoon ends with the understanding that there will be no match.

Part III

Leo returns home in despair. The conversation with Lily has made him realize some
disturbing things about himself, in particular that he lacks the ability to love. Leo’s
religious vocation seems meaningless because he has lived an empty life. How can he
love God if he does not love man? He considers leaving the university, then decides
to continue his studies, but to nd a wife to love on his own terms. When Salzman
arrives the next day, Leo criticizes the matchmaker for having misrepresented the
situation to Lily, and tells him that he will no longer require his services. Salzman
departs, but leaves an envelope containing photographs of other women for Leo to
consider.
After a few weeks, Leo opens the envelope. Inside are six photographs of women
who are “past their prime.” Disappointed, he returns the photographs to the
envelope; at the last moment, a seventh photograph falls out. Leo looks at it a
moment, then lets out a cry of love. The face in the photograph is beautiful,
melancholy, and carries “an impression, somehow, of evil.” Leo falls desperately in
love with the image in the picture. He nds Salzman and presses him for the woman’s
name. Salzman hesitates, claiming that the picture was included in the envelope by
accident, then bursts out: “This is my baby, my Stella, she should burn in hell.”
Salzman’s daughter Stella, it is implied, has committed some terrible act of
disobedience against her father and Jewish tradition. As punishment, she has been
disowned.

Part IV

Leo cannot stop thinking of Stella. Finally, he resolves to nd her and to “convert her
to goodness, himself to God.” He encounters Salzman in a Broadway cafeteria and
insists that Salzman set up a meeting. Salzman agrees, and Leo suspects that Salzman
had planned for him to fall in love with Stella from the beginning.

Part V

Shortly after, Leo nally meets Stella on a spring night. She stands smoking beneath a
streetlight and he runs to her with a bouquet of owers. We are then told that:
“Around the corner Salzman, leaning against a wall, chanted prayers for the dead.” In
Jewish tradition, a parent will say the Kaddish, or the prayer for the dead, for a living
child only when that child has committed a sin of disobedience so grave as to cause a
nal separation from the parent.

Characters
Leo Finkle

Leo Finkle has spent the last six years studying to become a rabbi at New York’s
Yeshivah University. Because he believes that he will have a better chance of getting
employment with a congregation if he is married, Leo consults a professional
matchmaker. Leo is a cold person; he comes to realize that “he did not love God so
well as he might, because he had not loved man.” When Finkle falls in love with
Salzman’s daughter, Stella, the rabbinical student must confront his own emotional
failings.

Lily Hirschorn

Lily Hirschorn is introduced to Leo Finkle, the rabbinical student, by Pinye Salzman,
the matchmaker. She is a schoolteacher, comes from a good family, converses on
many topics, and Leo considers her “not unpretty.” It soon becomes clear, however,
that the match between them will not work.

Pinye Salzman

Leo consults Pinye Salzman, who is a professional matchmaker. Salzman is an elderly

man who lives in great poverty. He is unkempt in appearance and smells of sh. While
Salzman works to bring couples together, Leo has reason to believe that the
matchmaker, or “commercial cupid,” is occasionally dishonest about the age and
nancial status of his clients. Salzman seems greatly dismayed when Leo falls in love
with Stella. Yet Leo begins to suspect that Pinye, whom he thinks of as a “trickster,”
had “planned it all to happen this way.”

Stella Salzman
Stella Salzman is the daughter of Pinye Salzman, the matchmaker. Salzman has
disowned his daughter, evidently because she has committed some grave act of
disobedience. When Leo, who has fallen in love with Stella, asks her father where he
might nd her, the matchmaker replies: “She is a wild one—wild, without shame. This
is not a bride for a rabbi.” When he nally meets Stella she is smoking, leaning against
a lamp post in the classic stance of the prostitute, but Leo believes he sees in her
eyes “a desperate innocence.”

Leo consults Pinye Salzman, who is a professional matchmaker. Salzman is an elderly

man who lives in great poverty. He is unkempt in appearance and smells of sh. While
Salzman works to bring couples together, Leo has reason to believe that the
matchmaker, or “commercial cupid,” is occasionally dishonest about the age and
nancial status of his clients. Salzman seems greatly dismayed when Leo falls in love
with Stella. Yet Leo begins to suspect that Pinye, whom he thinks of as a “trickster,”
had “planned it all to happen this way.”

Themes

Identity

Malamud’s Leo Finkle is a character trying to gure out who he really is. Having
spent the last six years of his life deep in study for ordination as a rabbi, he is an
isolated and passionless man, disconnected from human emotion. When Lily
Hirschorn asks him how he came to discover his calling as a rabbi, Leo responds with
embarrassment: “I am not a talented religious person. . . . I think . . . that I came to
God, not because I loved him, but because I did not.” In other words, Leo hopes that
by becoming a rabbi he might learn to love himself and the people around him. Leo is
in despair after his conversation with Lily because “. . . he saw himself for the rst
time as he truly was—unloved and loveless.”
As he realizes the truth about himself, he becomes desperate to change. Leo
determines to reform himself and renew his life. Leo continues to search for a bride,
but without the matchmaker’s help: “. . . he regained his composure and some idea of
purpose in life: to go on as planned. Although he was imperfect, the ideal was not.”
The ideal, in this case, is love. Leo comes to believe that through love—the love he
feels when he rst sees the photograph of Stella Salzman—he may begin his life
anew, and forge an identity based on something more positive. When at last he
meets Stella he

Topics for Further Study

When did Jewish people settle in large numbers in New York City? Describe the Jewish communities in
New York City or in another large American city. In what way can “The Magic Barrel” be read as a story
about the descendants of immigrants?
In chapter twenty of the Book of Exodus in the Bible, Moses sets forth the Ten Commandments
(/philosophy-and-religion/bible/bible-general/ten-commandments) to the Israelites. Do the characters
in “The Magic Barrel” follow the Commandments? What does this say about them?
What does the story suggest about the relation between love and self-knowledge? What must Leo
Finkle learn about himself before he is truly able to love?

“Pictured, in her, his own redemption.” That redemption, the story’s ending leads us
to hope, will be Leo’s discovery through Stella of an identity based on love.

God and Religion

Central to Malamud’s “The Magic Barrel” is the idea that to love God, one must love
man rst. Finkle is uncomfortable with Lily’s questions because they make him
realize “the true nature of his relationship to God.” He comes to realize “that he did
not love God as well as he might, because he had not loved man.” In spite of the zeal
with which he has pursued his rabbinical studies, Leo’s approach to God, as the
narrative reveals, is one of cold, analytical formalism. Unable fully to love God’s
creatures, Leo Finkle cannot fully love God.
Once again, the agent of change in Leo’s life seems to be Stella Salzman. The text
strongly implies that by loving Stella, by believing in her, Leo will be able to come to
God. Just before his meeting with Stella, Leo “concluded to convert her to goodness,
him to God.” To love Stella, it seems, will be Leo’s true ordination, his true rite of
passage to the love of God.

Style

Point of View

Point of view is a term that describes who tells a story, or through whose eyes we see
the events of a narrative. The point of view in Malamud’s “The Magic Barrel” is third
person limited. In the third person limited point of view, the narrator is not a
character in the story, but someone outside of it who refers to the characters as “he,”
“she,” and “they.” This outside narrator, however, is not omniscient, but is limited to
the perceptions of one of the characters in the story. The narrator of the story views
the events of the story through the eyes of Leo Finkle even though it is not Leo
telling the story.

Symbolism

Symbolism is a literary device that uses an action, a person, a thing, or an image to

stand for something else. In Malamud’s “The Magic Barrel” the coming of spring
plays an important symbolic role. The story begins in February, “when winter was on
its last legs,” and ends “one spring night” as Leo approaches Stella Salzman under a
street lamp. The story’s progression from winter to spring is an effective symbol for
the emotional rebirth that Leo undergoes as he struggles to grow as a human being.

Idiom
Idiom may be de ned as a specialized vocabulary used by a particular group, or a
manner of expression peculiar to a given people. In other words, different groups of
people speak in different ways. While the narrator and most of the characters in
“The Magic Barrel” speak standard English, Pinye Salzman, the matchmaker, speaks
Yiddish. Written in Hebrew characters and based on the grammar of medieval
German, Yiddish was the common language of many European Jewish communities.
A Russian Jew at the turn of the century (Malamud’s father, for example) might read
the Torah in Hebrew, speak to his gentile neighbors in Russian, and conduct the
affairs of his business and household in Yiddish.

Since World War II (/history/modern-europe/wars-and-battles/world-war-ii),

Yiddish has become less prevalent in Europe and in the immigrant Jewish
communities of North America (/places/oceans-continents-and-polar-
regions/oceans-and-continents/north-america). In another generation, it may totally
die out. Many of Malamud’s characters, however, still use the idiom. When Salzman
asks Leo, “A glass tea you got, rabbi?”; when he exclaims, “what can I say to somebody
that he is not interested in school teachers?”; and when he laments, “This is my baby,
my Stella, she should burn in hell,” the reader hears an idiomatic version of English
seasoned with the cadences of Yiddish speech.

Historical Context

Malamud’s “The Magic Barrel” was rst published by the Partisan Review in 1954 and
reprinted as the title story in Malamud’s rst volume of short ction in 1958. The
period between those two dates was an eventful time in American history. In 1954
the United States (/places/united-states-and-canada/us-political-geography/united-
states) Supreme Court unanimously rejected the concept of segregation in the case
of Brown v. Board of Education, which found that the practice of maintaining separate
classrooms or separate schools for black and white students was unconstitutional.
In the same year Senator Joseph McCarthy was censured by the Senate for having
unjustly accused hundreds of Americans of being communists. In 1957 the Soviet
Union (/places/commonwealth-independent-states-and-baltic-nations/cis-and-
baltic-political-geography/soviet) launched Sputnik, the rst satellite to successfully
orbit the earth, sparking concern that the Soviets would take control of space.

While the text of “The Magic Barrel” is almost entirely free of topical or historical
references that might allow readers to place the events of the story at a particular
date, one detail establishes Leo’s encounter with Salzman as taking place roughly at
the time of the story’s publication in the mid- fties. Finkle is about to complete his
six-year course of study to become a rabbi at New York City’s Yeshivah University.
Yeshivah, in Hebrew, means a place of study. Yeshivah University is the oldest and
most distinguished Jewish institution of higher learning in the United States. While
its history goes back to 1886, the school was not named Yeshivah until 1945, when
its charter was revised. At the end of the traditional six years of study to become a
rabbi, then, Leo would probably be considering marriage sometime early in the
1950s.

By consulting a professional matchmaker to nd a bride, Leo is acting more like his

immigrant grandparents than an American Jew of the 1950s. In Yiddish, the secular
language of many European and American Jewish communities, the word for
“matchmaker” is shadchen (pronounced shod-hun). Before the seventeenth century,
the shadchen was a highly respected person, responsible for the perpetuation of the
Jewish people through arranged marriages. As European Jewish communities grew
larger and as modern secular notions of romantic love became pervasive,
professional matchmakers became less scrupulous in their dealings and were
frequently the objects of satire and derision. Indeed a wealth of humor at the
expense of the shadchen developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries;
representative is the remark of the Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem
(/people/literature-and-arts/hebrew-literature-biographies/sholom-aleichem)
(1859-1916), who quipped that the shadchen was best de ned as “a dealer in
livestock.”

Regardless, the shadchen tradition survived Jewish immigration to the United States.
In his history of Jewish immigrant life on New York City’s lower east side, World of
our Fathers, Irving Howe describes the typical shadchen as similar to Malamud’s Pinye
Salzman: “Affecting an ecclesiastic bearing, the matchmaker wore a somber black
suit with a half-frock effect, a silk yarmulke (skullcap), a full beard.” The matchmaker,
according to Howe, “customarily received 5 percent of the dowry in addition to a at
fee, neither one nor both enough to make him rich.” Pinye Salzman is in many ways,
then, a stereotypical gure who has stepped from the world of Jewish oral humor
into the pages of Malamud’s story. Leo, in seeking the shadchen’s help in the 1950s,
reveals himself not only as a formal, but as a very old fashioned young man.

Critical Overview

When Malamud’s “The Magic Barrel” rst appeared in Partisan Review in 1954, it
provided a colorful glimpse into the world of American Jews. Fours years later, after
his second novel, The Assistant, had been enthusiastically received, Malamud
reprinted “The Magic Barrel” as the title story in a collection of his short ction. The
collection sold well, and was praised by reviewers for its honesty, irony, and acute
perception of the moral dilemmas of American Jews. It won the National Book
Award for ction in 1959.

Between the publication of the collection in 1958 and his death in 1986, Bernard
Malamud became one of America’s most respected writers of ction, publishing six
more novels and numerous collections of short ction. Malamud’s writing has been
the subject of critical debate for three decades. Writing in 1966, Sidney Richman
examines the
Compare & Contrast
1950s: Decades of immigration from Eastern and Western Europe (/history/modern-europe/ancient-
history-middle-ages-and-feudalism/western-europe) have led to a considerable Jewish population in
the United States. Strong and vibrant Jewish communities thrive in many American cities. Yet
discrimination against the Jewish people exists.

1990s: Through intermarriage and assimilation, many people in the Jewish

community believe that Jewish culture is endangered. Unfortunately,
discrimination still exists in the United States, but many groups ght
misinformation and discrimination against Jews.

1950s: The Jewish matchmaker, also known as the “shadchen,” performs a vital function within the
community. Arranged marriage, although losing popularity among Jewish families, is still a viable option
for young Jewish men and women of age.

1990s: Matchmaking is considered an antiquated tradition. It is mainly used in

orthodox Jewish communities, as other networking opportunities allow Jewish
men and women to meet and nd possible marriage partners.

Emotional sterility of the protagonist Leo Finkle. According to Richman, “. . . Finkle

knows the word but not the spirit; and he makes it clear that in a secret part of his
heart he knows it.”

Theodore C. Miller, in 1972, compares “The Magic Barrel” to Hawthorne’s The

Scarlet Letter, pointing out that both stories explore “the love of the minister and the
whore.” Unlike Hawthorne’s minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, however, Malamud’s
rabbinical student, Finkle, “comes to accept Stella for the reason that he accepts
universal guilt.” Miller also contends that Salzman has arranged the love affair
between Leo and Stella because he wishes “to initiate Leo Finkle into the existential
nature of love.” When at the end of the story Salzman says Kaddish, the traditional
Jewish prayer for the dead, he is “commemorating the death of the old Leo who was
incapable of love. But he is also celebrating Leo’s birth into a new life.”
Both Richard Reynolds and Bates Hoffer offer interpretations of “The Magic Barrel”
based on speci c Jewish religious traditions. Reynolds’s focus is on the role of
Kaddish, maintaining that Salzman hopes that Leo will bring Stella, “the prodigal
daughter,” back to a moral life. In that case, reciting the Kaddish is particularly
appropriate given the ancient prayer’s emphasis on resurrection. Hoffer compares
the ve-part structure of the story to the Torah (the rst ve books of the Old
Testament (/philosophy-and-religion/bible/old-testament/old-testament), the sacred
text of Judaism) and claims that Leo has broken a majority of the ten
commandments.

Finally Carmen Cramer maintains that Leo’s story is a journey of emotional maturity.
Rather, “The Magic Barrel” chronicles the rabbinical student’s “Americanization,” his
gradual assimilation into American culture. Cramer asserts that Finkle “possesses
few of the typical American traits—decisiveness, emotionality, action-orientation—
but he melts into the American pot by the end of Bernard Malamud’s polished piece
of writing. . . .”

Criticism

Benjamin Goluboff

Goluboff has taught English at Lake Forest (/places/united-states-and-canada/us-political-

geography/lake-forest) College in Lake Forest (/places/united-states-and-canada/us-
political-geography/lake-forest), Illinois. In the following essay, he places the story within
the context of Jewish ction of the 1950s and focuses on the theme of intergenerational
relations.

Publishing “The Magic Barrel” in 1954, Bernard Malamud was at the beginning of his
career, and near the beginning of a brief and remarkable period in the history of
Jewish-American writing. For
What Do I Read Next?
The Jews in America, a work by Arthur Hertzberg, is an accessible and entertaining history of Jewish
people in the United States from colonial times to the civil rights (/social-sciences-and-law/sociology-
and-social-reform/social-reform/civil-rights) movement of the 1960s.
Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers is a powerful novel about a family of Russian immigrant Jews on New
York’s Lower East Side.
The Assistant is Bernard Malamud’s second novel. Frank Alpine, a drifter and dreamer, works in the
corner grocery of Morris Bober, an impoverished and hard working Jew. Through his friendship with
Morris and his daughter Helen, Frank learns about Jewish culture and religion.
The Stories of Bernard Malamud, published in 1983 several years before the author’s death, contains
stories of great wit and frightening insight.

Perhaps a decade, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, the American literary
imagination seemed to have been captured by a series of books by and about Jews.
In 1953 Saul Bellow (/people/literature-and-arts/american-literature-
biographies/saul-bellow) published The Adventures of Augie March, a story of
tragicomic misadventures set in Chicago’s Jewish immigrant milieu. In 1957
Malamud brought out his second novel, The Assistant, the tale of an impoverished
Brooklyn grocer who becomes a kind of Jewish everyman. 1959 saw the literary
debut of Philip Roth (/people/literature-and-arts/american-literature-
biographies/philip-roth), whose Goodbye, Columbus was the account of a doomed
love affair between two Jewish young people divided by social class.

Goodbye Columbus won the prestigious National Book Award for ction in 1960, as
Bellow’s Augie March had done in 1954, and as Malamud’s collection of short stories,
The Magic Barrel, had in 1959. Equally distinguished Jewish-American writers—such
as Norman Mailer (/people/literature-and-arts/american-literature-
biographies/norman-mailer), Joseph Heller (/people/literature-and-arts/american-
literature-biographies/joseph-heller), and Chaim Potok—attracted attention on the
literary scene during these years as well.
The novelists who made their reputations during this time didn’t always have Jewish
concerns as the focus of their ction. Still, for a decade or so, Malamud’s ction
seemed to be part of a movement of the American novel toward the lives and
problems of Jews. Of course, Jewish-American ction was not invented in the
1950s; novels by and about American Jews comprised a tradition of some
signi cance and depth by the time Malamud began his career. In one important
respect—in its theme of change and con ict between generations— Malamud’s “The
Magic Barrel” is solidly embedded in the tradition of Jewish-American ction.

The rst important Jewish-American novel was Mary Antin’s The Promised Land of
1912. Born in Russian Poland, Antin immigrated to Boston as a child in 1894 and
became a social worker in the immigrant neighborhoods of that city. The Promised
Land is based on Antin’s own immigrant experience, contrasting the poverty and
persecution of Jewish life in Eastern Europe (/history/historians-and-
chronicles/historians-european/eastern-europe) with the freedom and economic
opportunity available to immigrants in the United States.

The vision of America is not so happy, however, in The Rise of David Levinsky by
Abraham Cahan (/people/literature-and-arts/hebrew-literature-
biographies/abraham-cahan) (1917). Cahan was a Russian immigrant who found
success in America as an editor and journalist. (He edited the The Jewish Daily
Forward, the Yiddish newspaper in which Leo Finkle reads Pinye Salzman’s ad.) Like
his creator, David Levinsky encounters an America where opportunity is purchased
at great sacri ce. As David rises in New York’s garment industry, his success costs
him love and personal integrity. Most of all, David’s success results in his betrayal of
those Jewish spiritual traditions that had sustained his ancestors in Russia. David
ends the novel as a representative of an immigrant generation that has lost the
integrity of its ancestors.
“Consequently, Finkle’s transformed character would suggest that, unlike their
ancestors, the younger generation is open to passion, to change, and to new
beginnings exempt from the in uence of tradition.”

The theme of change and con ict among generations appears powerfully in Anzia
Yezierska’s 1925 novel Bread Givers. Yezierska’s novel dramatizes the con ict
between Sara Smolinsky, a lively young Jewish woman, and her dictatorial father, a
Russian immigrant Rabbi. Rabbi Smolinsky has devoted his life to study of the Torah,
and insists that his daughters work to support him as he continues his studies in
America. Sara dreams of receiving a secular American education and becoming a
teacher, but to do so she must defy the will of her father: “More and more I began to
see that father, in his innocent craziness to hold up the Light of the Law to his
children, was a tyrant more terrible than the Tsar from Russia.” Sara eventually
realizes her dream, becoming a teacher in the New York Public Schools, but only at
the price of breaking off her relationship with her father. When the two reconcile at
the end of the novel, it is because Sara has come to recognize that the drive and will
that allowed her to nish her education came from her father.

As Leo Finkle and Pinye Salzman pursue each other through the pages of Malamud’s
“The Magic Barrel,” the theme of generational con ict presents itself with rich
ambivalence. It’s as clear from his profession—an arranger of marriages in the way
traditional to nineteenth-century European Jewish communities—as it is from his
Yiddish-in ected speech that Pinye Salzman is the story’s representative of an older
generation of immigrant Jews. Leo Finkle, born in Cleveland and bearing a gentile
given name, as clearly embodies a younger population—perhaps those second- or
third-generation American Jews who came to maturity in the 1950s. What’s less
clear, however, is with which of the two generations the story encourages us to
empathize. Who has moral authority in the story, old Salzman or young Finkle?
It is tempting to read the story as favoring youth, especially in light of the emotional
transformation that Leo Finkle undergoes. Leo enters the story as a cold and
passionless young man. He requires a bride not because he is in love, but because he
is about to be ordained as a rabbi and believes that he will nd a congregation more
readily if he is married. Leo praises Salzman’s profession with chilly formalism; the
matchmaker, he says, makes “practical the necessary without hindering joy.” After his
date with Lily Hirschorn, Leo comes to recognize and deplore his own
passionlessness. Prompted by the matchmaker, Lily had expected Finkle to be a man
of great human and spiritual fervor. Leo disappoints her, of course, and sees “himself
for the rst time as he truly was— unloved and loveless.”

In the aftermath of this revelation, Leo appears to change. He tells the matchmaker,
“I now admit the necessity of premarital love. That is, I want to be in love with the
one I marry.” Salzman’s reply to this declaration seems to identify the matchmaker
with the older generation: “‘Love?’ said Salzman, astounded. After a moment he
remarked, ‘For us, our love is our life, not for the ladies. In the ghetto they—.’” (Finkle
interrupts here with more about his new resolve to nd love on his own.) In his
fragmentary response Salzman seems to say that for the older generation—those
who had lived in the Jewish ghettoes of Europe—romantic love was a frivolous
luxury. Survival was what mattered (“our life”), not “the ladies.” With that remark,
Salzman appears to inhabit a past whose dangers are no longer real to any but
himself.

Finkle’s transformation is complete when he falls in love with the photograph of

Salzman’s daughter, Stella, left accidentally among pictures of the matchmaker’s
other clients. Loving this fallen woman, and loving her only on the basis of her
photograph, is just the passionate leap of faith of which Leo has been previously
incapable. His eyes now “weighted with wisdom,” Leo has learned at last the
redemptive nature of passion.
Old Salzman, however, is more in exibly than ever rooted in tradition. He considers
his daughter dead because of her mysterious sin, and even Finkle’s newfound
passion for her can’t restore Stella to the living in her father’s eyes. In the story’s
mysterious nal section, Finkle rushes to Stella with a bouquet of owers while:
“Around the comer, Salzman, leaning against a wall, chanted prayers for the dead.”

If we interpret Salzman’s Kaddish—the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead—as

being for his daughter, then as representative of the older generation Salzman is so
committed to tradition that he sees only death where life had just begun.
Consequently, Finkle’s transformed character would suggest that, unlike their
ancestors, the younger generation is open to passion, to change, and to new
beginnings exempt from the in uence of tradition.

One problem with this interpretation is that the story more than once suggests that
Finkle’s sudden passion for Stella might not have been an accident, that it might have
been planned by the wily Salzman. Finkle suspects that the old man is capable of
intrigue. As he walks with Lily Hirschorn, Finkle senses Salzman “to be somewhere
around, hiding perhaps high in a tree along the street, ashing the lady signals with a
pocket mirror. . . .” Just before the story’s conclusion, when Salzman has nally
agreed to let Finkle meet Stella, Leo is suddenly “af icted by a tormenting suspicion
that Salzman had planned it all to happen this way.” If Leo’s meeting with Stella is part
of the matchmaker’s plan, then we would have to attribute to him, and to the older
generation he represents, a knowledge of human frailty and passion superior to that
of the formalistic rabbinical student.

What, then, do we make of the Salzman’s saying Kaddish at the story’s conclusion? If
his plan has been all along to educate Leo in the necessity of passion, then it would
be inconsistent with that plan for Salzman to mourn just when he has succeeded in
bringing the lovers together. Critic Theodore C. Miller has suggested a persuasive
way out of this dilemma: “. . . if Salzman has planned the whole episode, then the
matchmaker through his Kaddish is commemorating the death of the old Leo who
was incapable of love. But he is also celebrating Leo’s birth into a new life.” Viewed in
this way, the matchmaker’s prayer of mourning celebrates the success of his plan for
Leo and Stella, the “Yiddishe kinder” (Jewish children).

Because Malamud’s “The Magic Barrel” is a work of art and not a sociological study
of inter-generational relations, it must remain a matter of interpretation whether the
story privileges the older or younger generation. Because its central interpretive
question involves this judgment between two generations, however, “The Magic
Barrel” is a story solidly grounded in the tradition of Jewish-American ction.

Source: Benjamin Goluboff, “Overview of ‘The Magic Barrel,”’ for Short Stories for
Students, The Gale Group, 2000.

Sidney Richman

In the following excerpt, Richman provides a plot synopsis and an examination of the major
themes of “The Magic Barrel.”

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

Source: Sidney Richman, “The Stories,” in Bernard Malamud and the Critics, edited by
Leslie A. Field and Joyce W. Field, New York University Press, 1979, pp. 305-31.

Bates Hoffer
In the following excerpt, Hoffer identi es parallels between the rst ve books of the Old
Testament (/philosophy-and-religion/bible/old-testament/old-testament) and the structure
of the story, arguing that Finkle is a “sinner” rather than a hero.

No synopsis is a substitute for [“The Magic Barrel”]. One is given here in case you
have not read the story for some time.

Leo Finkle, a rabbinical student, hears that he may have a chance at a better position
if he is married. He approaches Salzman, a poverty-ridden matchmaker who smells of
sh, who wears old clothes, and whose suggested brides are not shall we say big
winners. After rejecting the few suggested by Salzman, Leo nds a picture in the le
of a different girl and immediately falls in “love.” The picture is of Salzman’s daughter
and the story does not make clear whether the picture is there by mistake (as
Salzman says) or by design (as Leo suspects). It is clear that Salzman has indeed
disowned his daughter who has gone completely bad. Leo demands to meet her, no
matter what her background and condition. As the story closes, Leo is rushing
toward her with a bouquet while she is standing under a streetlight dressed in red
and white. The last paragraph then reads:

Around the corner, Salzman, leaning against a wall, chanted prayers for the dead.

As common in Malamud’s stories, the closing picture is ambiguous upon a super cial
reading. Salzman is chanting for whom? His daughter? Leo? The current state of
Judaism? Someone even suggested to me that Salzman is singing in happiness
because he is a Jew who is about to get his daughter married!

One example of a previous interpretation of the story is given by Rovit [in Bernard
Malamud and the Critics, 1970]:
 The aesthetic form of the story—the precise evaluation of forces—is left to the reader. .
..

In the best of his stories in The Magic Barrel, the same pattern of ultimate poetic
resolution by metaphor is evident.

I assume that you will agree, after re-reading the quote, that Rovit does not provide
an interpretation at all. In fact, he nds purposeful ambiguity, as evidenced by:

The dramatic action of the story attempts to lead the characters into a situation of
con ict which is “resolved” by being xed poetically in the nal ambiguity of
con icting forces frozen and united in their very opposition. (Italics added)

In other words, the answer to the question “Who is he chanting for?” is “Who
knows?” That answer is only suf cient if there is no evidence at all for an answer.
That there is abundant evidence is made clear below.

Another example is from Rahv’s Introduction to A Malamud Reader:

 Of all Malamud’s stories, surely the most masterful is “The Magic Barrel,” perhaps the
best story produced by an American writer in recent decades. . . .

. . . Salzman contrives to leave one picture in Finkle’s room by which his imagination is
caught as in a trap. When tracked down, he swears that he had inadvertently left the
fatal picture in Finkle’s room. “She’s not for you. She is a wild one, wild, without shame
Like an animal, like a dog. For her to be poor was a sin. This is why to me she is dead
now . . . This is my baby, my Stella, she should burn in hell.” (Rahv then quotes the last
two paragraphs of the story.)

Thus the rabbinical student who, as he confesses, had come to God not because he
loved Him but precisely because he did not, attempts to nd in the girl from whose
picture “he had received, somehow, an impression of evil” the redemption his
ambiguous nature demands. (Italics added)

Rahv, then, sees the basic ambiguity in Finkle and does not worry about Salzman.

But worry we must. Where Rahv assumes Salzman “contrives” to leave Stella’s
picture, others feel that Salzman tells the truth when he swears it was an accident.
Assumptions and feelings will convince no one who does not agree with us.
Therefore we must look for evidence in the story for support of one view or another.
Let us, then, turn to independent but mutually supporting arguments, based on the
story itself, for a non-ambiguous interpretation. We should only accept ambiguity
after exhausting all procedures and even then realize that someone else may nd the
key to clear up the ambiguity. . . .

We start by noting that Leo is a nal year rabbinical student about to obtain a
doctoral degree from Yeshiva, a highly prestigious university. As rabbi, as scholar
deeply knowledgeable of the Pentateuch, the Law, he will be “master” and “teacher”
of the Law to generations of Jewish children. We therefore begin our analysis of Leo
by judging his thoughts, words and deeds in light of his vocation. Although we might
go deeply into the Law—and the reader is encouraged to do so—in order to judge,
here we will mainly use the “basic” part of the Law which most of us know, the Ten
Commandments (/philosophy-and-religion/bible/bible-general/ten-commandments)
from Deuteronomy 5:6-21. (I use Monsignor Knox’s translation for a variety of
reasons. It is important to note that Catholics, Protestants and Jews often number
the verses, and consequently the commandments, differently.) Surely we can expect
a rabbi to support at least the fundamental parts of the law.

Deuteronomy 5

6 And thus he spoke: I am the Lord thy God, it was I who rescued thee from the land
of Egypt, where thou

7 didst dwell in slavery. Thou shalt not defy me by

8 making other gods thy own. Thou shalt not carve thyself images, or fashion the
likeness of anything in heaven above, or on earth, to bow down and

9 worship it. I, thy God, the Lord Almighty, am jealous in my love; be my enemy, and
thy children, to the third and fourth generation, shall make amends;

10 love me, keep my commandments, and mercy shall be thine a thousand-fold.

(Commandment 1)

11 Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God lightly on thy lips; if a man uses
that name lightly, he will not go unpunished. (2)

12 Observe the Sabbath day and keep it holy, as

13 the Lord thy God has bidden thee. Six days for drudgery, for doing all the work
thou hast to do;
14 when the seventh day come, it is a sabbath, a day of rest, consecrated to the Lord
thy God. That day, all work shall be at an end, for thee and for every son and
daughter of thine, thy servants and serving-women, thy ass, too, and thy ox, and all
thy beasts, and the aliens that live within thy city walls. It must bring rest to thy men-
servants and thy maid-servants,

15 as to thyself. Remember that thou too wast a slave in Egypt; what constraining
force the Lord used, what a display he made of his power, to rescue thee; and now he
will have thee keep this day of rest. (3)

16 Honour thy father and thy mother, as the Lord thy God has bidden thee; so shalt
thou live long to enjoy the land which the Lord thy God means to give thee. (4)

17 Thou shalt do no murder. (5)

18 Thou shalt not commit adultery. (6)

19 Thou shalt not steal. (7)

20 Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. (8)

21 Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. (9)

Thou shalt not set thy heart upon thy neighbour’s house or lands, his servants or
handmaids, an ox or ass or anything that is his. (10)

The rst three commandments pertain to God and the next seven to man. As we go
through the story and compare Leo’s behavior against the standards of the law,
recall that the rst three were summarized by Christ with the phrase from
Deuteronomy 6:5, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with the love of thy whole
heart, and thy whole soul, and thy whole strength,” and the last seven from Leviticus
19:18, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thy self; thy Lord is his.” Note, then, that love
of God is the focus of all.

“I am convinced that they believe that breaking God’s law, dropping religious beliefs,
and doing anything your little ole heart desires are the marks of maturation.”

So now we look to Leo. Instead of observing the Sabbath, he goes out on a date with
Lily. On the date he mentions the name of God in ordinary conversation. . . . And on
the date he says he “came to God not because I loved Him, but because I did not.”
Poof! The rst three commandments disappear, not broken but evaporated! We
begin to suspect we are not here reading of a dedicated religious leader.

Before turning to the other commandments, let us pause and look closely at the
de nition of love in the Law and compare it with Leo’s version. In commandment
number one we nd that love of God includes keeping the commandments: “If you
love Me, keep My commandments.” “Love,” then, is a commitment of the will to
behave in a certain manner. It might be helpful to use an example here. In the
commandment against adultery, the word “adultery” itself refers to an “adulteration”
of the love of God by an illicit love of someone or something. Thus fornication or sex
outside marriage, and sex when married, are both adulterations of the Divine love.
Human love is a re ection of Divine love and, therefore, true love is always within
the limits of the Divine will expressed in the commandments and elsewhere. Yet
when we turn to Leo’s version of love, we nd that he has decided to throw away the
divine de nition:

Love, I have said to myself, should be a by-product of living and worship rather than its
own end. Yet for myself I nd it necessary to establish the level of my need and ful ll it.
He changes “love” to “need” and seeks not God’s will but his own: “my” need, he says.
Recall here that Leo’s great “love” for Stella all comes from a cheap picture. He has
not yet met her or seen her in the story. “Who can love from a picture?” Salzman
asks. “If you can love her, then you can love anybody.” Then Leo con rms what we
have suspected, that he has thoroughly confused “love” with sex, desires, needs and
etc. “Just her I want,” he murmurs. This bastion of Judaism has spent almost seven
years in rabbinical preparation and still has the understanding of “love” of a sex
starved sophomore. There is no evidence in the story of any commitment to his
religion or his vocation, no evidence of any real practice of his faith or any real
knowledge of it. We nd that his study has not been rewarding. You can nd, if you
look, the several other places which indicate that Leo is not what you would call your
model rabbi.

Let us go on to the other commandments. Numbers 6 and 9 deal with sex. There is
evidence that Leo does not understand the morality of sex at all. When he goes out
with Lily, he thinks he sees Salzman as a “cloven-hoofed Pan, piping nuptial ditties”
throwing owers in their way. Note the pagan image for marriage. When he rst
thinks of using a matchmaker, he looks out the window and

Observed the round white moon, moving high in the sky through a cloud menagerie,
and watched with half-open mouth as it penetrated a huge hen, and dropped out of
her like an egg laying itself.

My judgement is that Leo is thinking primarily of the physical part of the marriage, to
put it diplomatically. The last example here occurs when he discovers Stella’s picture.
You should re-read the whole paragraph, but in case you do not have a copy handy,
here are some critical lines:
 It was not, he af rmed, that she had an extraordinary beauty—no, though her face
was attractive enough; it was that something about her moved him. Feature for
feature, even some of the ladies of the photographs could do better; but she leaped
forth to his heart—had lived, or wanted to—more than just wanted, perhaps regretted
how she had lived—had somehow deeply suffered: it could be seen in the depths of
those reluctant eyes, and from the way the light enclosed and shone from her, and
within her, opening realms of possibility: this was her own. Her he desired. His head
ached and eyes narrowed with the intensity of his gazing, then as if an obscure fog had
blown up in the mind, he experienced fear of her and was aware that he had received
an impression, somehow, of evil. He shuddered, saying softly, it is thus with us all.

“Her he desired.” He senses she is “evil” and shudders with excitement. Here at the
3/4 point of the story, the climax, he makes his decision to possess the evil. His desire
must be attained. That she is evil is clari ed by Salzman as he and Leo talk:

“She is not for you. She is a wild one—wild, without shame. This is not a bride for a
rabbi.”

“What do you mean wild?”

“Like an animal. Like a dog. For her to be poor was a sin. This is why to me she is dead
now.”

“In God’s name, what do you mean?”

“Her I can’t introduce to you,” Salzman cried.

“Why are you so excited?”

“Why, he asks,” Salzman said, bursting into tears. “This is my baby, my Stella, she
should burn in hell.”
Ultimately, Leo chooses the wild animal, the dog, the disinherited Stella “dead” in sin.
We can only conclude, following this line of reasoning, that eventually Leo
consciously chooses evil and turns his back on God Whom he said he did not love
anyhow. Leo is not, to put it mildly, thoroughly dedicated to the Law.

The other commandments are broken or ignored in less powerful ways. For example,
Leo breaks the one against stealing when he refuses to give Salzman’s picture of
Stella back. The commandment against greed, avarice and envy of other’s goods may
be involved in the reason why Leo approached the matchmaker in the rst place.
Quite simply he wanted to “win” a better congregation. By which might be meant a
bigger or more af uent one. The commandment against lying is broken when Leo
turns down the lame girl; he tells Salzman, “because I hate stomach specialists,” the
profession of her father. The one against honoring mother and father is ignored
when he decides to avoid the matchmaking institution. [At one point] he couples that
institution with the honoring of his father and his mother. Indeed the only
Commandment he does not overtly break is the one against murder—and my
judgment is that he does indeed “murder” his own soul by choosing evil.

With all this evidence that Leo is precisely the worst possible rabbi—we have not
time to note the other rules and laws he breaks—we must conclude that Leo is not a
positive picture of a modern rabbi. He may be a picture of some modern rabbi, but
Malamud does not give us a positive picture. Leo may even be a picture of one type of
rabbi graduating today, one pursuing a “thrust for life” (to use Rahv’s phrase) which is
actually a grasp of spiritual death. At the story’s close, Salzman is around the corner
chanting prayers for the dead, which refers to Leo and Stella and their offspring to
the third and fourth generation and to that part of Judaism which has a Leo, a great
“lion” of God, as its master and teacher. . . .
There is a richer and deeper analysis of “The Magic Barrel” which carries us across
the sweep of Jewish history and takes us into the heart of the Pentateuch itself. For a
few moments forget all you have read above and read this subsection independently.

In much great literature there is an underlying structure which borrows from

religious and/or literary structure. James Joyce (/people/literature-and-arts/english-
literature-20th-cent-present-biographies/james-joyce) builds his Portrait on Dante’s
Inferno, Greene builds End of the Affair on John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul,
Faulkner builds The Sound and the Fury on the New Testament (/philosophy-and-
religion/bible/new-testament/new-testament) through Revelations. Examples
abound in any good survey of Western literature. To posit such a structure for “The
Magic Barrel” is to suggest that some of the story’s power derives from its allegorical
structure.

The underlying structure begins to take shape when you see that the story is in ve
parts and that Leo has been studying the Pentateuch, the ve parts of the Torah.
Here is a brief version of each book. . .:
 GENESIS: “In the beginning” the focal point is the fall of Adam which begins the
redemption story.

EXODUS: “The going out” has Moses as the central gure. The deliverance by means
of crossing the Red Sea (/places/oceans-continents-and-polar-regions/oceans-and-
continents/red-sea) is referred to throughout the Bible. The wandering in the desert
and the manna from heaven are major points.

LEVITICUS: “The Levites” or Israelite priesthood discusses the ministry of the Levitical
priesthood. This highly legalistic book demands perfect obedience and sets up the
rites of the Day of Atonement (/philosophy-and-religion/judaism/judaism/day-
atonement) in precise detail. Obedience will bring redemption.

NUMBERS: “In the wilderness” the Israelites are given nal preparation for their
entrance into the Promised Land. Numbers stresses that disobedience receives its due
reward, but repentance results in pardon and restoration.

DEUTERONOMY: The “second law” describes the Israelites as they are about to enter
the Promised Land. Moses will not be allowed to enter because of a sin. Moses exhorts
the people to follow the law and describes the results of a lack of obedience. The
concluding part is an added section on the death of Moses.

Before starting the broad outlines of the parallels between the Pentateuch and “The
Magic Barrel,” recall the simple point that allegories as de ned in Linguistics in
Literature are parallel structures. The story is divided into ve sections overtly, that is,
by spaces on the page.

“In the beginning” of the story Leo has his sexual image fantasy about the moon while
Salzman is there talking about women.
In part two, parallel to Exodus or “the going out”, he literally “goes out” with Lily. We
notice the mention of his walking cane even as Moses carried a staff. This section
contains an image that is extremely hard to explain except by reference to Exodus.
The winged loaves of bread that Leo sees at the end of the story make perfect sense
if we accept a parallel to the “bread from heaven” or manna which occurs in Exodus.
The manna came down from heaven as if frost or snow in Exodus and of course just
after the loaves of bread y high overhead it snows in part two. Note also that part
two ends with Leo still “out.”

In part three Leo spends much time thinking of the priest hood (Leviticus), his
reasons for his decisions, and so on. Leo seeks redemption for self in the sense of
establishing the level of his need. The redemptive picture given by Salzman is the
choice of good or evil, that is, he tells Leo that Leo should not choose Stella, “she
should burn in hell.”

In part four, parallel to Numbers in which the methods and choices in the redemption
story become clear, Salzman offers Leo yet one more chance to avoid evil. “Who can
love from a picture? . . . if you can love her, then you can love anybody.”

Finally, again only in the broadest terms, in part ve Leo rushes towards his serf-
de ned “promised land,” Stella. Parallel to the funeral prayer for Moses, who could
not enter the Promised Land, the section which concludes Deuteronomy, we nd the
prayers for the dead concluding this part.

Now let us pause for a while and re ect. The analysis above accounts for a whole
potful of seeming aberrations in the story, for several occurrences which cannot be
explained in an internally consistent way by any other analysis: loaves of bread ying
overhead; a matchmaker who “appears” out of thin air, who is “transparent,” almost
“vanishing”; the prayers for the dead when no one is dead and so on. If, however, we
had only the above parallels few would bother searching for the more particular
parts of the parallel structure. Here I will give one extended parallel and drop a few
hints for parallels you can have fun nding for yourself.

Let’s look for a moment at the choice which Leo faces, Lily or Stella, coupled with a
central choice which the priest has in Leviticus. In making an offering to God, the
priest must choose only a clean animal, never an unclean. He must be able to
distinguish them. We note here that the girl proposed by Salzman is named “Lily,”
surely a symbolic name for purity. The priest must also do something to the clean
animal or the offering is not valid. That something is that it must be salted. Here we
notice that Salzman (which means “saltman”) has disinherited his impure daughter.
She is not only “unclean” but unsalted. Thus we nd that the names of Lily and
Salzman are perfectly suited to the parallel structure.

Let’s go a little more deeply into Leviticus. Aaron’s two sons mentioned in chapter 10
decide to honor the Lord more than their orders require by moving closer to the
holiest place. They decided to do more; that is, they think they are choosing good
when they decide to do it their own way. They are then consumed by re from the
Lord. Leo, too, wants to decide for himself and he decides Salzman’s daughter is
“good” despite all evidence to the contrary (100% of it). Now if I had written “The
Magic Barrel” and had set up the parallel to this point, I would look for a girl’s name
which suggests purity or whiteness but which also suggests the re which consumes
her (“she should burn in hell”) and will, by extension, consume Leo. In fact, “Stella”
does the job to perfection since it means “star.”. . .

There are several other parallels you could track down. Part two ought to have a
body of water (i.e. “Red Sea (/places/oceans-continents-and-polar-regions/oceans-
and-continents/red-sea)”). It does. Leo ought to have other parallels to Moses. He
does. There ought to be more examples of law and tradition breaking, since Leo is the
great Law-Breaker rather than a Moses or Law-Giver. There are. Since Salzman
appears and disappears on “wings of the wind” and has a relative who has fallen and
burns in hell, it shouldn’t be too dif cult to relate them to the redemption story. (If
you will permit me—if she indeed is burning, it is interesting to note that when Leo
rst sees her she is standing “by the lamp post, smoking.”). . .

One last line of analysis must be given here to show clearly that what Leo thinks is a
“redemption” process is precisely the opposite. We look at Leo at the end of each
section and nd how he had “entangled himself” to such an extent that he became
suspicious of “Salzman’s machinations.” He acted “frenziedly” in his craving for Stella,
was “af icted” with a “tormenting suspicion” and nally had “prayers for the dead”
prayed for him. Leo looked upon evil, decided it was good, and ran to greet it with
owers outthrust.

I do not see how anyone could nd the story “ambiguous” with respect to Leo’s
decision.

The analysis presented above uses a great deal of direct textual evidence (such as
breaking of various rules) to show that Leo is the opposite of a high-level rabbi and it
uses direct textual evidence for parallels between the story and the Pentateuch, that
which Leo studied for years and that which he would be expected to teach as a rabbi.
In the latter interpretation, Leo becomes the great Law-Breaker as contrasted to the
author and “hero” of the Pentateuch, the Law-Giver, Moses. Leo seeks not the
Promised Land offered by God, but the promised land of his own desires, union with
a prostitute whom he does not even know, save from a cheap picture. Leo breaks
God’s laws, the Mosaic law, the natural law (/philosophy-and-
religion/philosophy/philosophy-terms-and-concepts/natural-law), the standards
appropriate to a rabbinical student and to a Jew in general; he breaks the traditions
of his religion, his race, his ancestors, his parents; he breaks the rules of common
courtesy and kindness. He seeks that which makes him shudder, a picture of evil
which he decides will become his good. From direct textual evidence, Leo is perhaps
the greatest loser in the history of literature since Lucifer’s Fall. . ..

You may disagree with the last sentence, but the point there was exaggerated for a
particular reason. Over and over again the commentators on this story project Leo
as a winner, as someone who has “matured” and seeks his redemption. Pinye Salzman
is even seen as a “criminal.” How can anyone hold the idea that Leo is somehow
“maturing” by choosing a hooker? Here I would like to attempt an answer, not by
quoting endlessly, but by commenting on the type of criticism involved. Let us
therefore begin by presenting a case for Leo as the good guy.

As we read “The Magic Barrel” we note that Leo is suspicious that Pinye arranged for
him to nd Stella’s picture and that the whole story was staged. Leo is presented
pictures of older or crippled girls so that Stella will seem better. Stella is condemned
so as to make her more attractive to Leo. Pinye is a poor, undigni ed representative
of the old, repressive system that must be broken through for true maturation to
take place. (Maturation, in this interpretation, consists of doing exactly what one
wants to do.) Leo runs toward his redemption to the tune of violins.

What precisely is it that is the key to the two polar opposite—and hence ambiguous?
—interpretations? Clearly it is the interpretation of the role of the matchmaker. Is
Leo right in his suspicion that the whole affair was staged or is Pinye right in denying
any duplicity? If you side with Leo, then everything Pinye says is suspect because
after all lying is breaking a commandment. If you side with the matchmaker, then you
see Leo as having a guilty conscience, one that turns Pinye into a Pan or a liar or a
fraud. How do we resolve the issue? We look closely at the story for evidence that
one is presented as a positive character and the other as negative. Only if the
evidence is mixed can we accurately say the story is “ambiguous.” A close analysis
shows Leo to be the consummate loser. The only evidence for Pinye as wrong comes
from Leo’s thoughts. No, Leo as hero simply will not hold up if you use the evidence
of the story itself.

OK, you ask, but aren’t we back where we started? How can someone cling to the
view that Leo is the good guy? The answer is rather harsh, but I think the harshness
is fully justi ed. My judgment, after some years of studying the issue, is that those
critics actually believe that breaking all the rules and sleeping with a prostitute is a
maturational experience. . . . Those critics must actually believe that “adult” movies
are indeed adult, rather than mere adolescent sex fantasies. I am convinced that they
believe that breaking God’s law, dropping religious beliefs, and doing anything your
little ole heart desires are the marks of maturation. They aren’t, in the abstract, but
the issue raised by their misunderstanding is a serious one. Let us spend a few lines
on it. Leo may represent the “mature” modern rabbi who abandons his entire
background and perhaps he may in a more general sense represent the Jew who has
nothing of Jewishness left except his race. Certainly that interpretation ts with
other Malamud Jews, especially Henry Levin (of “The Lady of the Lake (/literature-
and-arts/literature-english/english-literature-1499/lady-lake)”) who changes his
name to Henry R. Freeman and heads for Europe to escape and denies his
Jewishness to one and all. But there is more to it than that, simply because Leo’s
story is more than abandoning his past values. Leo actually decides to treat what is
shudderingly evil as a positive good through which to achieve redemption. The critics
and commentators who nd Leo a “model” for our youth must have absorbed the
same reversal of values, which reversal after all so pervades American society. Leo,
then, may also represent all of us who are faced with the profoundly spiritual
question: which value system do I choose? We know Leo’s choice and have clear and
direct textual evidence that he chose wrong. The evidence from the story is clear, but
we have come to the point in literary criticism where we may ignore the text, ignore
the structure of the story, ignore anything that clashes with the interpretation we
want to make. We have come to the point where the choosing of evil is considered a
positive good—just as Leo considered it.

“The Magic Barrel” is a great short story (/literature-and-arts/language-linguistics-

and-literary-terms/literature-general/short-story). Its power is evident whether you
seek a deeper level of meaning or not. It is anthologized widely and discussed by
thousands of people every year. Analyses of it are still appearing. The point of this
article is that Malamud has constructed his story of the student of the Pentateuch
on the structural framework of the Pentateuch and that any interpretation which
fails to take into account this integration of content and form is de cient. The
conclusion of this analysis is that Malamud as master craftsman and Malamud as
artist of vision has created for us a powerful short story which will stand the test of
time as a classic of our century.

Source: Bates Hoffer, “The Magic in Malamud’s Barrel,” in Linguistics in Literature, Vol.
2, 1977, pp. 1-26.

Richard Reynolds

In the following excerpt, Reynolds investigates the meaning of the prayers for the dead that
Salzman chants at the conclusion of “The Magic Barrel.”

Published analyses of Bernard Malamud’s “The Magic Barrel” praise the “richly
ambiguous” conclusion. The consensus is that to reduce the story to speci c
meaning is to do the author an injustice. Perhaps, however, an interpretation may be
sustained that points to a consistent moral thread.

Pinye Salzman is, as Professor Bellman suggests [in “Women, Children and Idiots
First: The Transformation Psychology of Bernard Malamud,” Critique (1965)], “almost
supernatural.” The title of the story supports that. What exactly is a magic barrel?
Apparently Malamud did not have a speci c analogue in mind, but the concept is
quite clear; it is a barrel which produces surprises, usually inexhaustible quantities or
unique qualities, or both. Plainly Salzman’s briefcase is the magic barrel, providing
rst an endless number of possible brides for Leo Finkle, and then yielding, as if from
a mysterious compartment, the special girl, Stella. There is thus an irreducible
element of magic in the story; the narrative combines sheer fantasy with the idea
that love and marriage are divinely supervised.

But Salzman also operates in the earthy sphere of ge lte sh, dingy tenements, and
Broadway cafeterias. At this level, and at least in this one instance of Leo and Stella,
Salzman is a superb manager, whose art is based on his understanding of Leo’s
character and situation. He gives Leo the

“But Salzman also operates in the earthy sphere of ge lte sh, dingy tenements, and
Broadway cafeterias. At this level, and at least in this one instance of Leo and Stella,
Salzman is a superb manager, whose art is “based on his understanding of Leo’s
character and situation.”

Chance to learn about himself by associating with people. The meeting with Lily
Hirschorn brings Leo to the realization that “he had never loved anyone. . . . he did
not love God so well as he might, because he had not loved man.” The supposedly
accidental appearance of Stella’s picture from the magic briefcase leads to Leo’s
eager pursuit of her and to Salzman’s evasions and assertions of his daughter’s wild
life. “If you can love her, then you can love anybody,” Salzman tells Leo, apparently
with scorn, but knowing this is exactly the challenge Leo wants. The image Salzman
has presented of Stella contrasts sharply with Leo’s own life. She has dared, sinned,
suffered. She is the prodigal daughter. Leo has gone from a sheltered home in
Cleveland to six years of intensive study in a small room. “Put me in touch with her . . .
Perhaps I can be of service,” Leo says to Salzman. He has learned that he will not
reach God through books, that he needs to involve himself with mankind, and that he
and Stella can assist each other.

Whether Stella is the fallen woman Salzman has suggested and Leo has visualized, is
uncertain. She plays the part, standing by the lamp post smoking. But she waits for
Leo “uneasily and shyly . . . her eyes . . . lled with desperate innocence.” She is
probably much less experienced than her father has indicated. That is of less
importance than the revolution that Salzman has achieved in Leo’s heart.

But what about the prayers for the dead, which Salzman is chanting at the end of the
story? Does he do so because the meeting of Leo and Stella is a “disaster?” That
hardly agrees with Leo’s own notion that Salzman has been managing Leo’s
prospective marriage for some time. Is it [as Earl Rovit asks in his “Bernard Malamud
and the Jewish Literary Tradition,” Critique 6, No. 2] simply the matchmaker’s “ nal
digni ed behavior,” his part in the concluding tableau? Is it [as Sidney Richman asks in
his 1966 Bernard Malamud] “impossible to tell for whom Pinye chants?” To decide, we
must consider the nature of the Kadish, the prayers for the dead. [According to
Meyer Waxman in A Hand book of Judaism, 1947:]

[The Kadish] is not primarily a prayer for the dead. . . . It is not known de nitely when
the Kadish became the special prayers for mourners, and various reasons are
advanced for this appropriation. The real reason seems to be that the Kingdom of God
is so closely associated in the entire Talmudic and Rabbinic literature with the
Messianic times when resurrection will take place, that a plea for its realization was
considered indirectly a plea for the resurrection of the departed.
No one would appreciate this better than Leo Finkle, after six years’ study about to
be ordained. If, as one may well suppose from the story, Leo knows where Salzman is
and what he is doing— reciting the Kadish—then the matchmaker is playing his part
to the end: he has speci cally told Leo that he considers Stella dead; Leo and love are
to effect her resurrection. The understanding and art of Salzman have brought about
a prospect of happiness.

Source: Richard Reynolds, “‘The Magic Barrel’: Pinye Salzman’s Kadish,” in Studies in
Short Fiction, Vol. 10, No. 1, Winter, 1973, pp. 100-02.

Theodore C. Miller

In the following excerpt, Miller discusses the role of love in “The Magic Barrel.”

Although Bernard Malamud has colored his short story “The Magic Barrel” with the
language and the manners of the Jewish ghetto, he also makes use of a cultural past
that has a closer relationship to Nathaniel Hawthorne (/people/literature-and-
arts/american-literature-biographies/nathaniel-hawthorne) and Blaise Pascal
(/people/science-and-technology/mathematics-biographies/blaise-pascal) than to
Sholem Aleichem (/people/literature-and-arts/hebrew-literature-
biographies/sholem-aleichem).

Malamud, of course, is using the same motif that Hawthorne mined in The Scarlet
Letter—the love of the minister and the whore. Hawthorne’s Dimmesdale, the man of
God, was destroyed because he could not accept Hester and her emblem of sexual
transgression. In Malamud’s story too, Leo Finkle, the young rabbinical student, is at
rst repelled when he senses the sexual history of Stella, the matchmaker’s daughter.
Although he does not yet know speci cally that she is a whore when he rst sees her
picture, his attraction is sti ed, for “then as if an obscure fog had blown up in the
mind he experienced fear of her and was aware that he had received an impression,
somehow, of evil.” But Finkle, unlike Dimmesdale, comes to accept Stella for the
reason that he accepts universal guilt. When Malamud adds that “[Finkle]
shuddered, saying softly, it is thus with us all,” Finkle is well on his way to becoming a
Dimmesdale redeemed.

But Malamud’s minister is ultimately quite different from Hawthorne’s. For Leo
Finkle does not fall in love primarily for a reason—but rather he loves for no reason
at all. Malamud—who echoes Pascal in several other stories too—is suggesting that
“Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connait point”—one must love even if all the
evidence denies the emotion. Like Pascal, Malamud proposes that love is existential.

And if Salzman is Malamud’s spokesman in the story, then he only appears to be the
comic stereotype of the Jewish marriage broker. Although he has decided that his
own daughter should be the bride of the young rabbinical student, he does not really
believe in the matchmaker’s ethic that love is the product of reason. Salzman is the
sage who would initiate Leo Finkle into the existential nature of love--but that is a
peculiarly dif cult task since Finkle is the eminently rational young man committed
to the life of reason. The student wants to marry for the solid cause that it will prove
bene cial to his professional status. He has even turned to the rabbinate, not for love
of God, but because he is interested in the Talmudic law—rules of reason. Therefore,
in order to work his ends, Salzman must engage in a ruse—he initially enters into
Finkle’s system of thought, offering him several young women who should prove
highly attractive according to all the rules of logic. One has a father, a physician,
ready to give a handsome dowry; another has a regular teaching license—the
reasons derive from the middle-class Jewish ethic.

But Finkle’s rational world fails him, for despite all the logical good inherent in these
young ladies, he cannot fall in love with them. Instead, he becomes lled only with
existential despair as he realizes the emptiness of his life—and of his religious calling.
Only after he has exploded Finkle’s system can Salzman make sure that Finkle sees
Stella’s picture. But he must present her in a context so that it is absurd to marry her.
And precisely because it is absurd, Finkle falls in love.

“Salzman is the sage who would initiate Leo Finkle into the existential nature of love
—but that is a peculiarly dif cult task since Finkie is the eminently rational young
man committed to the life of reason.”

Several critics have accepted literally the description of Stella as a “carnal young
lady” and a “girl of the streets.” And indeed within the text, she evokes “a sense of
having been used to the bone, wasted”; Finkle has that “impression of evil”; and
Salzman, himself, describes his daughter as “a wild one—wild, without shame.” But
the accuracy of these characterizations is most ambiguous since they are all subject
to double meanings. That Stella has been “used to the bone” may mean only that she
has suffered. That she evokes “an impression . . . of evil” may be interpreted not in a
sexual sense, but in Hawthorne’s sense that all men bear human guilt. And Salzman’s
own statement may be part of his ruse to complete Finkle’s initiation—and bring him
to the marriage altar with his daughter. Just as Salzman only pretends to be a comic
marriage broker who offers young women for rational cause, he must also pretend
that his daughter is a whore, a girl whom there is no reason to marry. Near the end of
the story Finkle himself recognizes that Salzman has perhaps planned this outcome
from their rst encounter.

When Finkle nally encounters Stella, her purity is suggested by the whiteness of
her dress and furthermore by the explicit statement that Finkle sees a look of
“desperate innocence” in her eyes.

But more important, her innocence clari es the puzzling ending when the reader is
told that Salzman is chanting a prayer for the dead. In the orthodox Jewish ritual, a
parent may in extreme cases enact the ritual of mourning for a child who has broken
a primary taboo. If Stella is really a trollop, her father, considering her and the
rabbinical student to be a most un t couple, is rejecting them both through his
prayer. But if Salzman has planned the whole episode, then the matchmaker through
his kaddish is commemorating the death of the old Leo who was incapable of love.
But he is also celebrating Leo’s birth into a new life. Salzman’s remark to Leo about
Stella “if you can love her then .you can love anybody” is ironically not a statement
disparaging his daughter as a social outcast. Rather Salzman is suggesting that if Leo
can love Stella, he has unlocked his heart to mankind and God. He will have learned
that the barrel in which Salzman keeps his pictures is then indeed a magic barrel, for
love is a magic that cannot be explained by the normal laws of logic.

Source: Theodore C. Miller, “The Minister and the Whore: An Examination of

Bernard Malamud’s ‘The Magic Barrel,’” in Studies in the Humanities, Vol. 3, 1972, pp.
43-4.

Sources

Antin, Mary. The Promised Land, rst published 1912, reprinted, New York: Penguin,
1997.

Cahan, Abraham. The Rise of David Levinsky, rst published 1917, reprinted, New
York: Harper’s, 1960.

Cramer, Carmen. “The Americanization of Leo Finkle,” in Cyahoga Review, Vol. 1, No.
2, Fall, 1983, pp. 143-147.

Hoffer, Bates. “The Magic in Malamud’s Barrel,” in Linguistics in Literature, Vol. 2, No.
3, 1977, pp. 1-26.

Miller, Theodore C. “The Minister and the Whore: An Examination of Bernard

Malamud’s ‘The Magic Barrel,’” in Studies in the Humanities, Vol. 3, 1972, pp. 43-4.
Reynolds, Richard. “‘The Magic Barrel’: Pinye Salzman’s Kadish,” in Studies in Short
Fiction, Vol. 10, c. 1973, pp. 100-102.

Richman, Sidney. Bernard Malamud, Twayne, 1966.

Yezierska, Anzia. Bread Givers, rst published 1925, reprinted, New York: Persea
Books, 1975.

Further Reading

Astro, Richard and Jackson Benson, eds. The Fiction of Bernard Malamud, Oregon
State University Press, 1977.

Gives a comprehensive study of Malamud’s short and long ction.

Field, Leslie A. and Joyce W. Field, eds. Bernard Malamud: A Collection of Critical
Essays, Prentice- Hall, 1974.

Explores various aspects of Malamud’s work.

Meeter, Glenn. Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth (/people/literature-and-arts/american-

literature-biographies/philip-roth): A Critical Essay, Eerdmans, 1968.

Examines the two writers in the context of Jewish ction.

Pinsker, Sanford. “The Achievement of Bernard Malamud,” in Midwest Quarterly, Vol.

10, July, 1969, pp. 379-89.

Provides an assessment of Malamud’s career.

Richman, Sidney. Bernard Malamud, Twayne, 1966.

 Gives a detailed survey of Malamud’s life and works.

Learn more about citation styles 

© 2016 Encyclopedia.com | All rights reserved.