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The Magic Barrel | Introduction

Bernard Malamud’s short story, ‘‘The Magic Barrel,’’ was first published in the Partisan Review in 1954, and reprinted in 1958 in Malamud’s first volume of short fiction. 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 fiction 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 first 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.

The Magic Barrel 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. Leo’s own parents were brought together by a marriage broker, and Leo is determined to find 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 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 flipped 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 first 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... » Complete The Magic Barrel Summary