SOURCE: "Akedah and Community in 'The Magic Barrel'," in Studies in American Jewish Literature, Vol. 10, No. 2, Fall, 1991, pp. 188-96.

In the essay below, Adler interprets the interaction between Salzman and Finkle as a father-son relationship that culminates in Finkle's reintegration into the Jewish community.

In the stories of Bernard Malamud, a father-and-son pairing typically exists, either symbolically, as in the case of "The Jewbird," in which the bird Schwartz is a symbolic father to the anti-Semitic Cohen, or literally, as in the case of Mendel and Isaac in "Idiots First." Although several critics have noticed the presence of father and son pairings in Malamud, identifying it as a "recurrent motif" and a "massive theme," the intricacies and ambivalences involved in the interaction between these fathers and sons have yet to be fully plumbed. This is especially true of "The Magic Barrel," perhaps Malamud's most celebrated short story and...