I’ve just read a short story by Bernard Malamud titled “The Magic Barrel” and ended up utterly confused.
Malamud tells the story of the soon-to-be rabbi, Leo Finkle, who has been urged by his teachers to find a wife before he actually becomes a rabbi; they say he gets a bigger congregation that way. Because he is quite incapable (he recognizes this later on in the story and presumes his studies stole his social life) and has almost finished his studies (and thus has to hurry), he answers an ad from a marriage counselor. Unhappy and terribly sorry about a meeting with one of the proposed women, he retreats back to his studies. The marriage counselor suddenly turns up delivering him photographs of women, which he initially ignores. However, something draws him to them and after viewing several of them, he discovers another one in the envelope. He instantly falls in love with that picture and yearns to meet her. After he’s found the marriage counselor (who left him immediately after delivering the photographs), the girl turns out to be the counselor’s daughter (though at first the counselor states it’s one of the photographs that should have been in the barrel; hence Finkle thinks of the barrel as magic). He gets to meet her anyway; the marriage counselor (her father) is hiding around the corner, “chanting prayers for the dead.”
I assume that the prayer cannot be interpreted as meaning that the two of them were “dead”, as it would have been a very lazy and unimaginative ending.
Does anybody have a more insightful explanation?
by Gaslighting_Lovelorn