Malamud's "Subject Matter": Reading "The Magic Barrel" as Story, Collection, Philosophic Reflection, and Redemption

"Am I responsible for you then, Susskind?"

"Who else?" Susskind loudly replied.

"Lower your voice, please, people are sleeping around here," said Fidelman, beginning to perspire. "Why should I be?"

"You know what responsibility means?"

"I think so."

"Then you are responsible. Because you are a man. Because you are a Jew . . ."

—Bernard Malamud, "The Last Mohican"

In these days of Internet dating (or, as it is called in the Jewish community, "jdating"), meeting a suitable partner would seem a more difficult prospect than ever. It is not that opportunities are lacking. In fact, to the contrary, there would seem to be a superabundance of opportunities. But the putting of human relations ahead of social, religious, and cultural categories, the search for connection, for emotional intimacy, for that face that you could look at the rest of your days on the planet, amid the veritable sea of information real and virtual, would appear no easier than it has ever been.

Why is that? Is it so hard to love? "The course of true love never did run smooth," our most famous bard has his fairy book characters tell us.¹ And "happy love has no history," chimes the literary historian. "Romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon and doomed by life itself."² Virtual love would appear no exception. If love flourishes in a context in which values, modalities, and codes are genuinely similar (at least to some extent), if chemistry is possible only within the crucible of comfortable familiarity, the internet would still appear to get things precisely wrong. It would appear to reverse priorities. Gathering selected pictures, self-conscious descriptive and declarative language, and factual details, from both candidates, putting before us more concrete information than ever before, it requires of prospective partners (should the potential for a match appear open and the parameters right) that they hunt for ways to justify that union retrospectively, that they look for the spark in the wake of the categories rather than vice versa. If satisfactory relationships do emerge from it, their success would seem more in spite of the Internet than because of it.

Written in 1958, Bernard Malamud's short story "The Magic Barrel" (which is also the title of a volume of Malamud's stories) would appear to confirm the difficulty of establishing fruitful relationships in the face of so much information.³ Leo Finkle is an aspiring rabbi. He has pretty much devoted his life to rabbinic study and preparing to enter the rabbinate. As a final gesture to the life of pious devotion, he contemplates, as a way of putting a kind of finishing touch on it, so to speak, he decides to take for himself a wife. He decides he will do things the way they have always been done in his community, by consulting a matchmaker.

Enter Pinye Salzman, a living relic of a bygone universe. The consultant presents his client with a list of potential candidates. And from the list Finkle picks one: Lily Hirschorn. The meeting proves a disaster. The woman appears to the young man too old (thirty-five at least, he proclaims), and to have received from the consultant a representation of the student that in the latter's view is decidedly false: namely, that he aspired to the rabbinate as the consequence of passionate prophetic inspiration. Complaining to the consultant, Finkle receives from his business associate a packet of potential alternatives, one of which in particular intrigues him. He asks about the picture only to learn she is in fact the consultant's own daughter, a young woman from whom the father is estranged. More determined now than ever to meet her, suspecting she has been withheld from his considerations for reasons having to do with the consultant's lies about the other women, he demands the contact. Confronted, the consultant obliges. And in the final scene, declaring her to be his "redemption," the young man meets the mysterious Stella, a cigarette-smoking young woman whom we encounter standing at night by a lighted lamppost...