The Magic Barrel
by Bernard Malamud
Summary
Thirteen stories, mostly set among poor Jewish shopkeepers, students and luftmenschen in New York, written in a voice that mixes plain American realism with the rhythms and logic of Yiddish folklore, so that a story can proceed with perfect sobriety into the impossible and never blink.
The title story is the masterpiece. Leo Finkle, a rabbinical student who has studied for six years and never loved anyone, engages Pinye Salzman, a matchmaker who smells of fish and produces photographs from a much handled portfolio. The negotiations, comic, sad and increasingly desperate, strip Leo of every illusion about himself, and then a photograph falls out of the barrel that should not be there, of Salzman's own daughter, and the story walks to an ending, under a street lamp, with violins and lit candles in the air, that has been argued about in classrooms ever since.
Around it: The First Seven Years, a shoemaker's assistant serving for love like Jacob; Angel Levine, in which a Job named Manischevitz is sent a Black Jewish angel and must find the faith to say so; The Last Mohican, where the schnorrer Susskind pursues a would be critic through Rome and steals exactly the manuscript he deserves to lose; The Mourners, a landlord and an evicted tenant grieving each other alive.
Nobody has ever made stories look simpler or been less simple.
Around two hundred pages.
Best for readers who want the short story as moral fable with all the sugar removed, and the best single introduction to Malamud.
Historical Context & Significance
The Magic Barrel won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1959, a short story collection beating the year's novels, which the award's history shows almost never happened. It was Malamud's first collection, following The Natural and The Assistant, and it fixed his position in the triumvirate American criticism spent the next two decades assembling: Bellow, Malamud, Roth, three Jewish writers redrawing the centre of American fiction, a grouping Malamud bore with famous weariness.
The stories' fusion of immigrant realism and folk miracle, suffering treated as a vocation and grace arriving in terrible disguises, made his manner instantly recognisable and much imitated; The Jewish Publication Society co published the volume, a signal of how squarely it sat in that tradition even as it remade it.
Malamud won the National Book Award again for The Fixer in 1967, along with the Pulitzer, and the title story here remains among the most anthologised American stories ever written.