The collection that this story comes from – The Magic Barrel – seems to me as coherent and artful a portrait of Jewish-American life in the last century as Dubliners was for its own era and place. In the story, Feld is a shoemaker (many of Malamud’s characters are small businessmen, often heading for penury) whose “old and ugly” assistant Sobel wants to marry Feld’s daughter Miriam, much to our man’s horror. “Then he realised that what he called ugly was not Sobel but Miriam’s life if she married him. He felt for his daughter a strange and gripping sorrow, as if she were already Sobel’s bride, the wife, after all, of a shoemaker, and had in her life no more than her mother had had.” Malamud’s stories are not out-and-out funny, but there’s an energy in the language that is akin to the energy of comedy, so I always read them with a big smile on my face, even when terrible things are happening.
First published in the Partisan Review, Sep-Oct 1950, and subsequently in the collection The Magic Barrel, 1958. Can be read online here
A Personal Anthology 