Fish and The Book of Tobit in Malamud's "The Magic Barrel"

Almost everyone who has written on Bernard Malamud's acclaimed short story "The Magic Barrel" notes that Pinye Salzman, the matchmaker, smells "frankly of fish, which he loved to eat."¹ Most critics pay no further attention to this strange fact, which suggests that this detail, which is insisted upon a number of times in the text (e.g., p. 200, where he eats a small smoked white fish; p. 208, where Salzman's briefcase "stank of fish"; p. 211, where Salzman's apartment is full of a "odor of frying fish"; p. 213, where Salzman is sitting in a Broadway cafeteria "sucking the bony remains of a fish") has mostly defeated interpretation.² If one wished to be particularly prosaic, one could suggest that the fish are nothing more than what Roland Barthes calls a "realist operator," and that Salzman, in smelling so strongly of fish, is suffering from a metabolic disorder known as trimethylaminuria, or fish-odor (or fish malodour) syndrome.³ The problem here is that Malamud's story is certainly not readable as a realist text, and so such a diagnosis adds nothing to a reading of the story.

Charles May offers an interesting reading when he suggests that the smell is associated with sex and Leo Finkle's discovery of his real wants and needs: "What Finkle truly desires, although it disgusts him, has the genital smell of fish, connected here with turning over cards, which smack of the pornographic deck."⁴ Although this psychological reading may be initially attractive, it is ultimately unconvincing as in the text it is specifically Salzman who smells of fish, and not the object of Finkle's desire, Salzman's daughter Stella, nor, indeed, Finkle himself nor any part of his body. Nevertheless, May is correct to point to the importance of sexual desire in the text, an aspect which is also supported by David Kerner's identification of the source of Malamud's story in an "old Yiddish joke or folk story" where a young man declares that he will only marry for love, to which a marriage broker responds with a double entendre: "'I have for you that kind [of woman] too.'"⁵ Moreover, the story is, after all, a story of a search for a marriage partner. Salzman's pervasive smell and predilection for fish must therefore be associated with marriage.

If we read beyond this single story, it is possible to suggest that Malamud, especially in his early stories, seems to associate the smell of fish with divine beings. Pirjo Ahokas claims that in Malamud's work "fish often symbolizes life, knowledge and Christ."⁶ I do not think there is enough evidence in the text of this one short story to identify Salzman firmly as Christ even though he does bring Finkle to a broader understanding of life and deeper knowledge of himself. The divine beings in Malamud's works include the Angel of Death, who appears in "Idiots First" as a man named Ginzburg who has "hairy nostrils and a fishy smell." Noting this may help to support Stephen Bluestone's reading, which is similar to Ahokas's when he sees Salzman as "an enigmatic figure who seems to foreknow all, [Salzman] is the matchmaker-God (frankly smelling of fish) of the Sixth Day."⁷ I would not like to follow Bluestone quite that far, but I will argue that Salzman is to be read as an angel figure, an angel with matchmaking duties. In fact, Malamud includes another angel in the same volume with "The Magic Barrel," namely, Alexander Levine in the story "Angel Levine." It is true that Levine is not described as smelling of fish, but there is no doubt that he is what he claims to be, a "bone fide angel of God" (p. 46).⁸ In the light of all I have noted so far, I would like to suggest that one way of approaching "The Magic Barrel" and especially the enigmatic figure of Pinye Salzman within it, is to draw attention to its correspondences with the Book of Tobit and...