“Manischevitz, a tailor, in his fifty-first year suffered many reverses and indignities. Previously a man of comfortable means, he overnight lost all he had” (43). So begins Bernard Malamud’s Angel Levine, the fourth story in The Magic Barrel (1958), his first collection of short fiction. The story was originally published three years earlier in Commentary (September 1955). As does “The First Seven Years,” also in The Magic Barrel, “Angel Levine” has roots in the Hebrew Scriptures. As “The First Seven Years” recalls Jacob’s 14 years of labor to gain Rachel as his bride, so “angel Levine” initially echoes the tribulations of Job, bewildered over the extent of his suffering and grief despite his loyalty to God; “it was in sheer quantity of woe incomprehensible” (44). However, where Job is cajoled by a series of tempters who try to overcome his faith in God, Manischevitz is confronted in his living room by one Alexander Levine, a black man wearing shabby clothes topped by a derby, who claims to be a Jewish angel sent by God. If Manischevitz will request his help, Levine can assist him, but because he is still in a state of angelic internship, Levine says that he cannot restore the health of the tailor’s dying wife without being acknowledged as an angel. When Levine tests him as a Jew with probing questions, Levine responds well, but the answers do not assuage his doubt, and the professed angel leaves, vaguely advising the woe- begone Manischevitz that if needed he may be found in Harlem.

As he continues to suffer and his wife declines fur- ther toward death, Manischevitz relents and finds Levine in a Harlem honky-tonk. Dissuaded anew by such an ungodly atmosphere for an angel, however, he leaves, refusing to acknowledge the possibility that Levine is what he claims to be. Soon afterward, when his wife seems to be breathing her last, Manischevitz returns to Harlem and finds Levine under even more abhorrent circumstances, but seeing no alternative, he addresses the black man as an angel of God. With this remark, the two return to Manischevitz’s dingy apart- ment building. Levine climbs the stairs directly to the roof, locking the door behind him before Manischevitz reaches it. Hearing what sounds like a rush of wings, the tailor peeks through a small broken window and sees a dark figure aloft on large black wings. When Manischevitz returns to his apartment, his wife is out of bed, dust mop in hand. “A wonderful thing,” he tells her; “believe me, there are Jews everywhere” (57).

Bernard Malamud, 1980/TLS

“A wonderful [wonder-full] thing,” indeed, is this story, which creates its effect in a multitude of ways. It is fanciful and fantastic; it depicts profound suffering and sordid conditions yet qualifies them with poignant humor, leaving readers with relief and the pleasant sensation of having tasted the bittersweet. It is also socially rewarding through its humanistic representation of interracial harmony, especially when one considers it as having been published only a year after the Supreme Court ruled that segregated public schools are unconstitutional (Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka) and a few months before Rosa Parks refused to relinquish her bus seat to a white passenger in Selma, Alabama (December 1, 1955). But Malamud’s seemingly hopeful vision of black-Jewish relations in “Angel Levine” was no harbinger of imminent changes. As Cynthia Ozick has pointed out, the “redemptiveness of ‘Angel Levine’” and “the murderous conclusion of The Tenants” (1971), a novel also by Malamud, are thematically at odds although separated by only 13 years (Field and Field 83). Yet a careful read- ing of “Angel Levine” shows that Malamud was not as sanguine as Ozick suggests about an early resolution to interracial conflict in the United States when he depicts Manischevitz in Harlem as the object of both anti-Semitic and antiwhite derision and scorn. In 1963 Malamud focuses more specifically on such hostility in another story, “Black Is My Favorite Color,” which implies little hope of assimilation or even harmonious racial relations in the near-future. The Ten- ants, then, does not mark a change but a reinforcement of his earlier views.