Isadore Finkelstein

Isadore Finkelstein is a tailor, a former tank gunner, and a painter whose work remains unknown until after his death. His life joins the novel’s worlds of wartime violence, everyday craft, and artistic creation: he outfits Rabo Karabekian and his friends on credit, tells a small, devastating story about the end of the war in Europe, and is finally disclosed as an artist himself. The suit he makes for Rabo outlasts their acquaintance as a treasured possession and the garment in which Rabo plans to be buried.

Identity and Work

Finkelstein runs a tailor shop above the tavern where Rabo and other painters gather. He is not regarded by them as a painter; to their knowledge, he is a tailor who can nonetheless talk about painting as well as anyone. He connects that knowledge to family history, recounting that his grandfather, also a tailor in Vienna, made several suits for Gustav Klimt before the First World War. The detail quietly places the work of making clothes beside the work of making art, without making the two professions identical.

Finkelstein’s trade is also practical service. When Rabo and fellow painters complain, half-jokingly, that their clothing and grooming are holding back their careers, Finkelstein offers to solve the clothing problem for anyone who thinks they have one. He asks for a small down payment and manageable installments, turning a tavern conversation into a visit upstairs for measurements. The suit he makes for Rabo remains in Rabo’s possession years later, its durability a material testament to the quality of his work.

Wartime Experience

Finkelstein’s account of war arrives while he is measuring Rabo for that suit. With his mouth full of pins, he tells Rabo that he served as a tank gunner in Patton’s Third Army. Two days before the war in Europe ended, a rocket launcher fired by a boy blew the track off his tank. The soldiers shot the boy before realizing that he was only a child. Finkelstein’s brief account gives the approaching end of the war no clean or triumphant finish: even in its final days, combat leaves a boy dead and a gunner carrying the memory of what happened.

The episode also establishes a contrast between Finkelstein and Rabo. Rabo notes that Finkelstein, like Terry Kitchen, had been a real killer in the war, while he himself had not. The distinction is made in the context of a group of artists and former servicemen, where artistic identity does not erase the different kinds of violence its members experienced. Finkelstein’s own story is not enlarged into a military résumé; its force lies in the specific incident he chooses to tell while the tailor’s pins are in his mouth and Rabo is being fitted.

Generosity and Artistic Community

Finkelstein’s offer of suits draws a group of painters into his shop, including Rabo and Kitchen, while Jackson Pollock and Paul Slazinger come only to watch. Since the others lack money, Rabo uses the traveler’s checks left over from his trip to Florence to cover the down payments. The arrangement is collaborative but uneven: Finkelstein makes the clothes available on installments, while Rabo temporarily finances the group. The painters’ clothes, like their jokes about professional respectability, become part of the social comedy of artists trying to make a living.

The transaction also leads to a small exchange of art. Painters X, Y, and Z repay Rabo the next afternoon with pictures. One of them has a key to the apartment, and he and the others deliver their paintings before Rabo’s wife, Dorothy, can defend herself. Finkelstein is not responsible for that intrusion, but the scene grows out of his offer: the attempt to dress the artists properly sends them upstairs for suits, while Rabo’s generosity and the painters’ improvised repayment turn the episode into another entanglement of money, friendship, and pictures.

The Hidden Painter

Three years after Finkelstein’s death from a stroke, when the painters are beginning to do well financially, his friends discover that he had secretly painted throughout his life. The revelation revises the apparently settled division between the tailor and the artists who gathered in his shop. The person who measured their bodies and listened to their talk had also been making pictures outside their knowledge. His painting was private rather than a public career, and the novel presents its discovery as a surprise, not as an earlier ambition Finkelstein had announced.

His young widow, Rachel, organizes a one-man show in the shop before closing it forever. Rabo describes Finkelstein’s work as unambitious but strong and as representational as he could make it, comparing its approach to the painting practiced by Winston Churchill and Dwight David Eisenhower. The show gives his private work a brief public life in the very place where his better-known craft had been practiced. Finkelstein’s art is not described as a bid for recognition or as a neglected masterpiece; its importance is that painting belonged to him too, even when his friends did not know it.

The Suit and Its Afterlife

Finkelstein’s name continues to appear in Rabo’s story through the suit. At Rabo and Edith’s wedding reception, Edith introduces her husband to a female relative from Cincinnati as her tamed raccoon. Rabo is wearing his Finkelstein suit. He later says that he will be buried in it, and his will specifies burial beside Edith in Green River Cemetery in the dark blue, made-to-order suit bearing the label, “Made to order for Rabo Karabekian by Isadore Finkelstein.” The garment links Finkelstein’s skilled labor to Rabo’s marriage, memory, and anticipated death.

That final attachment gives Finkelstein’s work a different kind of endurance from the paintings revealed after his death. His own pictures receive a one-man show and then the shop closes; the suit, meanwhile, remains in use and is named in the will. Rabo’s recollection of Finkelstein therefore does not rest only on the surprise that the tailor was also a painter. It rests on an object made for him, worn at a defining personal occasion, and chosen to accompany him to the grave.