The Sharing of Misery

...the central concern is human...

...Angel Levine" is the dream of direct intercession from God although—typically Malamud—the tailor has to save the angel, just as the angel saves the tailor...

...The surface of his stories is immediately commanding...

...Reviewed by Gerald Weales Assistant professor of English, University of Pennsylvania THERE is a trick to getting into a review...

...The Magic Barrel is an impressive book because its author is a writer who observes and understands and who mixes his observation and understanding—as Lieb, the baker, mixes his dough in "The Loan"— with tears...

...The reviewer has always to take a little space, clearing his throat on generalities, before he gets down to the book and the author in question...

...Believe me, there are Jews everywhere...

...Within the first few sentences, he draws the sharp outlines of a palpable character and places him solidly in a tactile and an emotional context...

...The answer: "Who else...

...they offer him trust, and trust (with groceries) turns out to be a greater burden than poverty...

...I started this review by discussing Malamud as a Jewish writer...

...In a few cases, an important variation is worked upon the idea of sharing pain...

...And they are saved, even though, at the end of "The Magic Barrel,' on the last page of the book, Salzman chants the prayers for the dead...

...Simple endurance or the strange brotherhood of suffering would not be enough to save the characters about whom Malamud writes...

...The hundred imaginary books of George Stoyonovich in "A Summer's Reading" become his shield...

...Her eyes are Salzman's eyes, just as her mother is familiar to the student...

...it is a hunger that allows one man to identify his own suffering in terms of another...

...You never really got what you wanted...

...There is also not one of them that is not plainly by Bernard Malamud...

...This theme is treated most beautifully in "The Magic Barrel," certainly one of the best American stories since World War II, when the student races, flowers outthrust, to greet Salzman's fallen daughter...

...Fidelman, the would-be art critic of "The Last Mohican," angered by the needling presence of the refugee peddler, cries out: "Am I responsible for you then, Susskind...

...Mitka, at the end of "The Girl of My Dreams," waltzes around his room with a ghostly Madeleine, in the dimensions of the real Olga...

...So he lay on the bed and whether awake or asleep dreamed the recurrent dream of the burning barrel (in it their books commingled), suffering her agony as well as his own...

...Characters like Salzman and Susskind, although they are as real as the fish they eat or the knickers they wear, take on a dimension of fantasy...

...The idiom is Jewish...

...Most of Malamud's stories have to do with the raising or the lowering of that shade...

...Let's take the latter first...

...One cannot say simply that Bernard Malamud, a real, honest-to-God writer, has collected into one volume thirteen of his stories, several of them already well known to readers of magazines, quarterlies and prize collections...

...The idea is most fully treated in the strange story, "Take Pity," in which Rosen, the coffee salesman, tries everything, even suicide, to get Eva to accept something from him for herself, for her starving daughters...

...Go way from here...

...So Gruber, the landlord in "The Mourners," grabs up a bed-sheet and sinks down on the floor beside the aged Kessler, mourning with him and for him for all the misery that man suffers and brings...

...There is always the absence, but there is also always the filling of the absence...

...Although the stories in The Magic Barrel differ in quality, none of them fails to place the reader with the protagonist in space, time and pain...

...These stories are not Jewish simply because they deal with immigrants, often on Manhattan's Lower East Side, and, less frequently, with the Americanized second generation...

...Mitka, the failed writer in "The Girl of My Dreams," after having burned his own novel and having read a story about the accidental destruction of another writer's manuscript, begins to identify with the unknown (and, it turns out, nonexistent) Madeleine Thorn...

...Rosen pulls down the window shade to shut out the vision...

...Malamud's greatest force as a writer is that he speaks directly to all men...

...Two things: wonder and Jews...

...The responsibility is never in any sense dogmatic or doctrinaire...

...When Tommy in "The Prison" (which is life) tries unsuccessfully to protect the little girl who steals candy from his shop, he discovers that his tentative gestures toward her make no contact (because he is really reaching toward an earlier self): "At the door she managed to turn her white face and thrust out at him her red tongue...

...all suffering bears a family resemblance and in the last rush ("Violins and lit candles revolved in the sky"), Finkel goes to embrace his own misery and that of Stella, of Salzman, of all men...

...In attempting to define the ways in which he is Jewish, I have become involved in the recognition of agony, the love that is the sharing of pain, the fear that is the rejection of pity and the wonder that is the strengthening of men...

...Go home to your children...

...Every one of the stories is suffused with a spirit, an attitude, even an allegiance that might be, and probably has been, described by making an adjective of the word shtetl...

...With varying degrees of intensity and with an invariable play of wry humor, the stories are concerned with poverty—physical and spiritual—and with endurance...

...Willy Schlegel in "The Bill" comes to hate the Panessas simply because they extend him credit in their store...

...That is precisely what Malamud does not do in his stories...

...Tommy Castelli (do not let the Italian name mislead you...

...at the end, broken and still uncomprehending, he has only the strength of violence, the ability to scream out at a real or imagined Eva, now offering him pity, "Whore, bastard, bitch...

...Leo Finkel, the rabbinical student in the title story, harried by Salzman, the matchmaker, and his difficulty in finding a bride, "drew the consolation that he was a Jew and that a Jew suffered...

...One of the recurring themes in Malamud's stories is the sharing of misery, the need of one man to take on another's pain, to make it his own...

...Malamud is a fantasist who writes about dreams that become reality...

...The quality that is peculiar to all these stories can best be expressed in the words of Manischevitz, the tailor, at the end of "Angel Levine": "A wonderful thing, Fanny...

...Now to the second element: wonder...

...the core of them is finally compelling...

...The would-be sharer is rejected because his unvoiced demand is greater than the agony itself...

...Sobel, in "The First Seven Years," works in Feld's shoe repair shop out of his love for Miriam (his Rachel), who may not be attainable and, if attainable, may turn out a Leah...

...in one sense all of the characters are landsmen) lies on his bed in "The Prison": "He thought about life...

...So, even in stories in which the sharing is not primary, there are gestures, glances, sudden perceptions that give the characters a glimpse of each other's pain...