The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Saturday, January 13, 2024

Storytime: Malamud’s “Angel Levine,” first published in Commentary in December 1955. Manischevitz is a 51-year-old Job. He’s a tailor, but his business burned down. His son was killed in the war. His daughter “married a lout and disappeared with him as off the face of the earth.” He’s in physical pain. His wife Fanny is in worse pain. She’s wasting away. She had to stop sewing and washing. Manischevitz doesn’t understand the “sheer quantity of woe, incomprehensible,” lavished on him by an invisible, indifferent god. He comes home one day to find “a black man reading a newspaper” in the living room. Manischevitz is astonished, but he doesn’t panic, as a white man coming home in 1955 New York might (as a white man coming home in 2024 still would, though it’s not clear how color would have anything to do with the astonishment). He asks the man –“a large man, bonily built”–what he’s doing there, simply. The man introduces himself as Alexander Levine, an angel in the making. He’s not yet there. Not yet an angel. He’s in a transition, an apprentice of sorts. He has to earn it, and he tells Manischevitz that he’s here to help. “I was translated,” is how he got into the apartment. Also, he’s not just any kind of angel. He’s a Jewish angel. Jewish or not, Manischevitz throws him out. What is one to make of a line like this: He had heard of black Jews, but had never met one. It gave an unusual sensation.” The line gives an unusual sensation. But he soon seeks him out. His woes are too much. He finds Levine in a Harlem honky-tonk, where a woman is gyrating lusciously against him. This, before the era of lap dances. Or about 300,000 years into the era of lapdances, homo sapien wise. Manischevitz is turned off, leaves, goes to a synagogue, asks god why he’s been abandoned, goes back to Bella’s, where he’d first seen Levine in Harlem, or what he thinks is Bella’s–it isn’t, or no longer is. He finds it to be changed, as if it had become “a synagogue in a store,” with four Negroes with skullcaps reading and discussing a scroll spread before them. It’s a vaguely philosophical or theological gathering, until one of them tells Manischevitz where he could find Levine: at Bella’s down the street. He goes. He’s not welcomed there, but he sees Levine, who tears up when Manischevitz doubts him: “How you have humiliated me,” he tells him. (I did not understand the line, unless it’s not more than it says: Manischevitz doubted the angel in the making, denying him a chance to prove himself, the angel was hurt.) But the two of them walk to Manischevitz’s apartment building and walk up to the roof, where “the door was already padlocked.” The transition here are vague, but it’s a Malamud trait, this intentional suggestiveness, just enough to keep Malamud from having to be accountable for realistic prose. Through a small broken window Manischevitz hears “an odd noise, as though of a whirring of wings,” and “could have sworn he saw a dark figure borne aloft on a pair of strong black wings.” It looks like the angel got his wings. Downstairs, Fanny is feeling fine again, wielding a dust mop. “A wonderful thing, Fanny,” he tells her. “Believe me, there are Jews everywhere.” The charm of the story, if charm there is (I am not sold) is in the matter-of-factness that had to have been a touch inspired by a combination of “It’s a Wonderful Life” nine years earlier and Brown v. Board of Education a year earlier, if with a bit of a patronizing tone: why a Black angel? Malamud is exploring Job through Black-Jewish comity and comedy, garlanding his thread with the supernatural, what would in a decade or so be called magic realism: Garcia Marquez’s richer, less didactic “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” is 13 years in the future. That angel also finally flies away after a few struggles. But I find Garcia-Marquez’s angels more convincing, in this country where seven in 10 Americans still believe in angels. Come to find: Jan Kadar directed “The Angel Levine” in 1970, with Harry Belafonte as the angel. Belafonte had been away from moviemaking for 10 years. He returned, on his own wings, to produce this. Roger Greenspun of the New York Times, Wikipedia quotes, wrote that “given the reputations of the talents involved, [the film is] a failure of major proportions. I have seen worse movies. But I cannot remember having seen a movie so nervously at odds with itself, so timid in its impulses, and so mistaken in its choices.” Oddly, that’s how I felt about the story, though I seem to be a minority of one on that score.

—P.T.

 

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Manischevitz was profoundly disappointed at the return of his active pain and suffering. He had hoped for a longer interval of easement, long enough to have a thought other than of himself and his troubles. Day by day, minute after minute, he lived in pain, pain his only memory, questioning the necessity of it, inveighing, though with affection, against God. Why so much, Gottenyu? If He wanted to teach His servant a lesson for some reason, some cause–the nature of His nature to teach him, say, for reasons of his weakness, his pride, perhaps, during his years of prosperity, his frequent neglect of God–to give him a little lesson, why then any of the tragedies that had happened to him, any one would have sufficed to chasten him. But all together the loss of both his children, his means of livelihood, Fanny’s health and his- that was too much to ask I one frail-boned man to endure. Who, after all, was Manischevitz that he had been given so much to suffer? A tailor. Certainly not a man of talent. Upon him suffering was largely wasted. It went nowhere, into nothing: into more suffering. His pain did not earn him bread, nor fill the cracks in the wall, nor lift, in the middle of the night, the kitchen table; only lay upon him, sleepless, so sharply oppressive that he could many times have cried out yet not heard himself this misery.

–From Malamud’s “Angel Levine” (1955).

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