‘The First Seven Years’ by Bernard Malamud

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

‘The Last Mohican’ by Bernard Malamud

I love when a writer falls for their own character and brings them back in multiple short stories. Here’s the debut of Fidelman, a “self-confessed failure as a painter” who arrives in Rome to work on a monograph on Giotto. Almost immediately, he’s targeted by Susskind, a Jewish-Italian scrounger who wangles a few bucks from the scholar – although not the “spare suit” he hopes for as he eyes Fidelman’s suitcase. This first encounter is not to be their last, and Fidelman’s project is about to go very far wrong. The two are intractable opposites, as signified in their initial exchange, in which Fidelman’s lofty false modesty (“He coughed a little … ‘I’ve given a great deal of time and study to his [Giotto’s] work’”) is brought low by Susskind’s ambiguous but wonderfully skewering response: “‘So I know him too.’” Fidelman is the classic Malamud mensch who, believing himself well-meaning, is about to discover the limits to his good humour; Susskind is his mirror image, his tormentor, but maybe also his conscience, and his educator. When Fidelman’s briefcase, containing the invaluable first chapter of his manuscript, goes missing, he immediately suspects the several times denied Susskind and, abandoning his wallowing in classical history, pursues his quarry through signifiers of a much more recent history: the ghetto, its synagogue, Rome’s Jewish cemetery. What the two men reach is not an accord or mutual respect, maybe not even an understanding, but something more complex and nuanced, a kind of merging.

First published in the Paris Review, 1958 and collected in The Magic Barrel, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1958 and The Stories of Bernard Malamud, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983

‘The First Seven Years’ by Bernard Malamud

I could have chosen any number of stories by Malamud, especially those in his marvelous first collection, The Magic Barrel. The title story, featuring Salzman, a ravenous marriage broker (“always in a rush,” he mutters to a client as he takes a smoked herring from an oily paper bag and strips it from its skin), would have made a fine choice. As would ‘The Mourners,’ in which Kessler, a former egg candler no one much likes, refuses to leave the apartment he feels he has wrongly been evicted from. Or ‘The Bill,’ about a man who takes the credit offered him by the proprietor of the corner store across the way (the same kind of store Malamud’s parents owned) without any earthly way to pay it back.

But I had to choose ‘The First Seven Years,’ the story of Feld, a shoemaker, and his assistant, Sobel, a Polish Jew “who had by the skin of his teeth escaped Hitler’s incinerators,” a nebbish who falls in love with the boss’s daughter. ‘The First Seven Years’ has many pleasures: its reworking of the story of Jacob and Rachel; its infusion of Yiddish syntax and diction into its English (Feld, remembering how Sobel came to work for him: “Thinking that with, after all, a landsman, he would have less to fear than from a complete stranger, Feld took him on and within six weeks the refugee rebuilt as good a shoe as he”); its depiction of the American-born Miriam, Feld’s daughter and Sobel’s beloved, who battles lovingly but firmly against her father’s expectations (an unfortunately rare example in Malamud’s work of a fully-realized female character); and its exploration of how selfishness can be mixed with love.

My students and I spend a long time parsing the subtleties of the story’s first sentence: “Feld, the shoemaker, was annoyed that his helper, Sobel, was so insensitive to his reverie that he wouldn’t for a minute cease his fanatic pounding at the other bench.” We note the characteristic Malamud interest in work, such that name and occupation appear as a unit. We consider the connotations of “helper,” as opposed to “right-hand man” or “assistant.” And we think about narrative perspective, the way we inhabit Feld’s point of view. (Who is insensitive, the hardworking helper or the boss who resents the labour being done on his behalf?) And we explore the difference between “reverie” and “fanatic.” The latter sounds worse than the first. But here as elsewhere in the story, Sobel proves to be devoted rather than zealous, while Feld is self-serving instead of dreamy. The pressure to assimilate to American life may be inescapable, but it seems the Old World still has things to teach the New.

First published in Partisan Review, September-October 1950. Collected in The Magic Barrel, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1958, The Complete Stories, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997, and Bernard Malamud: Novels and Stories of the 1940s & 50s, Library of America, 2014. Read the story here