The Magic Barrel (1954). Content and Description

Marriage, in its accomplished state or in prospect, is important subject matter in “The Jewbird,” “The First Seven Years,” and “Black Is My Favorite Color.” It is also at the heart of Malamud’s best-known short story, “The Magic Barrel,” which, though not as fantastic as “The Jewbird,” also touches on the supernatural.

Leo Finkle, a rabbinical student, resolves to take a wife—not because he needs love or feels passion, but because he believes it will help him with his future congregation. Knowing no women, he employs a marriage broker, the plausible, slightly fishy Salzman, but Salzman’s efforts, despite his powerful salesmanship, do not bear fruit. Of his hyped prospects, one, Lily Hirschorn, interests Finkle enough to arrange a meeting; she is described by Salzman as “this fine girl that she speaks four languages and has personally in the bank ten thousand dollars? Also her father guarantees further twelve thousand. Also she has a new car, wonderful clothes, talks on all subjects, and she will give you a first-class home and children. How near do we come in our life to paradise?”.

Salzman has suavely lowered her acknowledged age from the original 32 to 29, but Finkle later judges her as past 35. His conversation with her, though it is hopeless for finding a mate, leads to a surprising acknowledgment: Asked when he became “enamored of God,” he admits that he “came to God not because I loved him but because I did not”. This epiphany leads to another, even starker realization when Finkle admits that he had never loved anyone but his parents, and “his whole life stood starkly revealed and he saw himself for the first time as he really was—unloved and loveless”.

This realization—which the narrator rather oddly says was bitter but not unexpected—changes Finkle’s ideas about women and love, leading him to decide that he no longer wants an arranged marriage but prefers to love someone first, then marry. When Salzman leaves him a selection of photographs, he finds them all disappointing but for one, included by mistake supposedly, that “gave him the impression of youth—spring flowers, yet age—a sense of having been used to the bone, wasted; this came from the eyes, which were hauntingly familiar, yet absolutely strange”. The more he stares at this photograph, which seems obscurely evil and inspires both fear and fascination, the more he loves the woman in it.

He finds Salzman in the Bronx and extorts from him the admission that the picture is of his disgraced daughter, Stella, who is described as wild, not the wife for a rabbi—apparently a prostitute. Finkle insists on meeting her, and as the story ends, he sees her standing on a corner smoking and wearing “white with red shoes, which fitted his expectations”; Finkle “ran forward with flowers outthrust,” while nearby, hidden, Salzman “chanted prayers for the dead”.

The title of the story reflects Salzman’s claim that he has so many female clients he has to keep their details in a barrel. The barrel does not exist, but there is a touch of magic about the marriage broker, whose office, his wife tells Finkle, is in the air; when Finkle returns home after failing to find him, Salzman is mysteriously already waiting for him there.

“The Magic Barrel” invites a number of different interpretations. One is that it is a trickster fable, in which the shrewd Salzman manipulates the unworldly Finkle into marrying his damaged- goods daughter, pretending to be horrified by the idea but somehow arranging for the photograph that so bewitches the rabbinical student to appear in his fishy-smelling briefcase. Even Finkle, having insisted on meeting Stella, leaves “afflicted by a tormenting suspicion that Salzman had planned it all to happen this way” (143).

But has Finkle been tricked, betrayed? Perhaps it is the opposite. Perhaps the desiccated, finicky, loveless, and almost antilife student has been saved, and Pinye Salzman is his redeemer. Despite his brief suspicion, Finkle is faced with real life and a possibility of love (for once in his life), as the story ends, and if Stella is his salvation, then Salzman is the agent of that salvation. Interpretations of Salzman, summarized by Gary Sloan, make him “an insoluble mixture of the preternatural and the prosaic, ethereal mentor and plebeian hustler,” a shaman, the god Pan, a “scheming pimp,” a prophet, and nearly everything in between (51).

Sloan leans toward the view of Salzman as tricky procurer, manipulating Finkle from the beginning toward a union with his daughter, who, he suggests, may be no more a prostitute than Finkle is a clergyman (the narrator says that she waits for him “uneasily and shyly,” her eyes “filled with desperate innocence” [143]). In stark contradiction, Stephen Bluestone identifies Salzman as God—initially just a “matchmaker- God,” but in his conclusion insisting that “God, as parent and matchmaker, is left at the end to justify to himself the painful and glorious ways in which He has been defined by a Creation in whose making He has allowed himself to share” (406).

Sidney Richman sees the story as about Leo Finkle’s rebirth, the conclusion as the salvation for his secretive heart, and its Salzman as “half criminal, half messenger of God” (327). And indeed Finkle reads his story this way: “He pictured, in her, his own redemption. Violins and lit candles revolved in the sky” (143).

But, Malamud has added the final one-sentence paragraph: “Around the corner, Salzman, leaning against a wall, chanted prayers for the dead.” Is he mourning for his daughter, of whom he has insisted that through living like an animal she has made herself dead to him? Or for Finkle? And if Finkle, is it the dead shell of the frigid rabbi, the old dead Finkle, to be replaced by new life? Or is it for Pinye Salzman and his own guilty role? Sloan briskly declares that the “dead are Stella Salzman and Leo Finkle” (57). As Richman says, such multiple possibilities enrich the story: “If the ironies undercutting the story preserve it from a kind of mythic schmaltz, the myth preserves the story from the irony” (331).

For Discussion or Writing:
1. How do you believe the end of the story is to be read and interpreted?

2. The story begins with Leo Finkle, and in its course he learns something about himself and, perhaps, finds love. But, it ends with Salzman. In what way is he the focus of Malamud’s fiction?

3. How does this story fit into the literary tradition of the “marriage plot”—as seen, for instance, in a classic Victorian novel such as Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility or Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence? What is significant about this tradition and the way each of the authors draws upon it?

4. Compare this story with Chaim Potok’s novel The Chosen, which also deals with a protagonist wrestling with faith and religious beliefs. What do both works reveal about identity and how it is formed?