The Magic Barrel

The Magic Barrel, whose stories hew closer to fable than to realistic fiction, makes frequent use of biblical analogues, both Jewish and Christian, in order to amplify its themes and resonance. As if to stress this allusivity, the title of the first story, “The First Seven Years,” refers explicitly to the Book of Genesis and the Jewish patriarch Jacob’s seven-year courtship of his future wife, Rachel. Like Jacob, the shoemaker Sobel must complete seven years of labor before asking for the hand of his taskmaster’s daughter, Miriam. Also like Jacob, who was forced into the wilderness by his brother Esau’s murderous will, Sobel is a refugee who narrowly escaped Hitler’s death camps.

The next story, “The Mourners,” continues the Jacob subtext with the epiphany of a harried landlord named Gruber, who must repeatedly climb a tall staircase to evict a troublesome tenant. Like “Jacob’s ladder” (Genesis 28), the stairs trigger, in the story’s final scene, a vision of exaltation that leads to Gruber’s spiritual transcendence. The fourth story, “Angel Levine,” likewise recasts Jacob’s act of wrestling with the angel in Genesis 32 as a long struggle by a Job-like tailor to accept the divinity of a Black angel who has come to test his faith.