Leo Finkle, the rabbinical student, decides he needs a wife. With considerable trepidation, he contacts Pinye Salzman, the matchmaker, who eagerly describes an array of women. Leo finds fault with all of them. Finally, after a disastrous date arranged by the matchmaker, Leo discovers a photograph, seemingly left with the others by accident.
Malamud describes the moment in lyrical language: "Her face deeply moved him. Why, he could at first not say. It 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 ... she leaped forth to his heart - had *lived,* or wanted to ... 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."
And yet, "he received an impression, somehow, of evil. He shuddered, saying softly, it is thus with us all .... Only such a one could understand him and help him seek whatever he was seeking."
The mysterious woman in the photograph turns out to be the matchmaker's daughter, Stella. At the end, over the matchmaker's objections, Leo and the woman meet. Malamud writes: "She was ... waiting under a street lamp. He appeared, carrying a small bouquet of violets and rosebuds. Stella stood by the lamp post, smoking. She wore white with red shoes, which fitted his expectations, although in a troubled moment he had imagined the dress red, and only the shoes white ... her eyes ... were filled with desperate innocence. He pictured, in her, his own redemption."
The story ends with a famously ambiguous one-line paragraph: "Around the corner, Salzman, leaning against a wall, chanted prayers for the dead."
Many interpretations are possible for that last line. Earlier, Salzman had told Leo, "She is not for you. She is a wild one - wild, without shame. This is not a bride for a rabbi.... Like an animal. Like a dog. For her to be poor was a sin. That is why to me she is dead now."
Stella, perhaps, had been a prostitute, but that isn't totally clear. One reason that the story's ending is so open to different interpretations is because we don't know exactly what, if anything, Stella had done that was so terrible. Another reason for the ending's ambiguity is that we don't know who Salzman is praying for when he chants the prayers for the dead. Is it for his daughter? Does he see her as dead to him now because of what she has done? Or is he praying for Leo, for falling into Stella's clutches? Or could Salzman even be praying for himself? Is it he who is dead to himself?
Another fascinating question raised by the story is why Leo finds "his own redemption" in Stella. Earlier, on his first unsuccessful blind date with a woman named Lily, Leo had become enraged when Lily asked him "When did you become enamored of God?"
"'I am not,' he said gravely, 'a talented religious person,' and in seeking words to go on, found himself possessed by shame and fear. 'I think,' he said in a strained manner, 'that I came to God not because I loved Him, but because I did not.'"
Leo later reflects on what had happened, how Lily's questions had shocked him into a moment of "terrifying insight." He realized that "apart from his parents, he had never loved anyone. Or perhaps it went the other way, that he did not love God as well as he might because he did not love man."
A rabbi who does not love God is like an empty shell, and a person who does not love other people, Leo comes to learn during the course of the story, cannot truly love God. And so he seeks redemption in his love for Stella, a woman he knows only from a photograph, and from his own sense of her mixture of innocence, deeds now regretted, and suffering. He resolves to "convert her to goodness, himself to God." It's her imperfections, it seems, that draw him to her. To redeem himself, he needs to first redeem someone else.
And so they meet, with her father around the corner, chanting his ambiguous prayers for the dead. It is a moment of redemption for Leo and of mourning for Salzman. Or is it? Earlier, Leo had been "afflicted by a tormenting suspicion that Salzman had planned it all to happen this way" all along.
The words of the Jewish prayer for the dead, the Kaddish, do not actually mention death or mourning. Instead, they offer praises to God: "Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and honored, adored and lauded be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He." Saying Kaddish is a way to honor and remember the dead, but also to affirm that life goes on, and that even in times of great sorrow and loss, God should be praised and not rejected.
Near the end of the Kaddish, the mourner prays that redemption will occur "in your lifetimes and in your days and in the lifetimes of the entire family of Israel, swiftly and soon."
This provides another way to interpret Salzman's prayers for the dead. His prayers for redemption for all echo and amplify Leo's hopes for redemption for himself. Rather than rejecting Stella or Leo as dead to him now, Salzman, by chanting the words praising God, might actually be blessing their union, a union the story strongly suggests may have been Salzman's doing all along.
"The Magic Barrel" was first published in 1954 in The Partisan Review. In 1958, it was republished as the title story in Malamud's first story collection, which is still in print, and it also appears frequently in short-story anthologies.
You might enjoy:
No comments:
Post a Comment