The Magic Barrel

Like “The Mourners,” “Angel Levine” is best characterized as a magical fable of a double salvation, for the story tracks the spiritual growth of two people who are able to use compassion to recognize each other’s worth, thereby saving each other. Manischevitz, an impoverished tailor who has borne so many hardships that he represents a modern-day version of the biblical Job, feels that his suffering “goes nowhere,” thereby representing another example of Biblical Subtext and Transcendence. However, in a marked contrast to the baker in the later story, “The Loan,” who magically sweetens his bread with the tears of his suffering, Manischevitz has never learned the miracle of turning his pain into wisdom or strength. Bewildered by the absurd superfluity of his woes, Manischevitz regards the Black “probationary” angel, Levine, as just another cruel cosmic joke. Rigidly orthodox in his notions of Jewish angelology, he initially rejects Levine’s claim of divinity, and as the story demonstrates, he must first become fully human before Levine can become fully angelic. Thus, Malamud suggests that salvation is found in reciprocity and is not an outright gift.

Meanwhile, the succession of scenes in the Harlem bar also prove that the rejected almost-angel is fully susceptible to the lures of the flesh, for upon Manischevitz’s first visit to Bella’s, both he and Levine are tested in a sordid psychomachia of flesh versus spirit. As Levine gazes imploringly at the fainthearted Manischevitz, temptation jiggles between them in the bosomy form of Bella. Manischevitz, who is still weak in spirit, hesitates; and flesh wins the first contest for Levine’s halo, for he succumbs to Bella’s enticements. As Bella cocoons the fallen angel in her plump arms and lifts him in the air, the gesture is intended to be a fleshly parody of angelic flight. The scandalized Manischevitz flees back to his squalid apartment, where things go quickly from bad to worse. His wife is soon at “death’s door,” and Manischevitz himself at the brink of a lonely, living death. In a synagogue, he pours out his heart to God but finds no relief, leading to a crisis of faith. His subsequent dream of Levine preening a pair of decaying wings injects yet another element of magic into the story, implying that God’s answer to Manischevitz’s prayers is to confirm that the angel he rejected is real. As in “The Last Mohican,” this possibly prophetic dream stirs the protagonist’s conscience, for the “decaying” state of Levine’s wings suggests that the angel may be in mortal crisis.

Back in Harlem, Manischevitz has a waking, epiphanic vision that is similar to Gruber’s hallucination of sweetness and daylight in “The Mourners.” In this vision, Bella’s dive bar has been subsumed by a synagogue where Black Hebraic scholars dissertate on the spirit—which, being immaterial, is colorless, but which sanctifies all things, whatever their color. The topic of this vision stands as a significant rebuke of Manischevitz’s prejudices, dispelling his racist doubts of the Black angel’s authenticity. Suitably humbled, he asks the scholars where he might find Levine. When Manischevitz beholds the angel surrounded by sycophants and arrayed in sharp new clothes, this change of wardrobe and demeanor signifies the new depths of depravity to which Levine has fallen. However, Manischevitz now faces a second moral test, for he must brave a hostile crowd, as well as the “half-drunken” Levine’s own menacing coldness, in order to save the angel and himself. Levine’s new wardrobe evokes an image similar to the bad boys with the “mazuma” who lead Tommy astray in “The Prison,” but Manischevitz spurs himself on to his public leap of faith. The angel sobs, both from relief and from recrimination at the tailor’s long, humiliating doubt. In short order, he puts on his old, ragged clothes and answers Manischevitz’s miracle with his own, restoring the tailor and his wife to average, middle-aged health. Through a broken window, Manischevitz glimpses Levine’s apotheosis, soaring skyward on “magnificent” black wings, not the wan, decayed ones of his dream. Meanwhile, as Mrs. Manischevitz sweeps away the cobwebs of the past, the tailor’s soul, too, has been swept clean, for Jews, he realizes, are “everywhere.” Color is immaterial, and everyone, even angels, suffer and fail, and must look to their fellow man for sympathy and faith.