NOVEL BY ORHAN KEMAL 

THE COBBLER AND HIS SONS 

Synopsis 

Topal is a crippled, ageing cobbler, a cantankerous, foul-mouthed man, who lives with his wife, two sons, daughter and three grandchildren. He struggles to make ends meet as it is, but when another shoemaker sets up shop across the street from Topal, business takes a turn for the worse. As if that were not enough on its own, Topal has to take on his elder son Mehmet, who finds himself out of work. Trade at the modest store is not on a scale to feed nine mouths.

 Topal accuses Mehmet of being a burden and asks him to find his own job. Mehmet then decides to go off cotton picking. He is not alone either: Topal’s younger son Ali, who also clashes with his father, is determined to join his brother. In the event, Topal will be left all on his own, a situation he refuses to accept. After a succession of rows and fights, it is decided that the whole family will go cotton picking. Their dream is to rent a better workshop on return and move into shoe making rather than just repairs.

 Picking cotton, however, proves to be tough work. Nor is it long before Zeliha, Topal’s daughter, falls for the helper on the truck that takes them to the fields every day. Ünal is a gifted young lad and curries favour with Topal. He helps the family out with everything and anything. But there is little he can do when the entire family is struck down with malaria. The advances they have drawn are almost spent. And the bellicose Topal fuels another fight, blame his children for their predicament. In the end, Topal returns to the city with his wife, Zeliha and her fiancé Ünal.

 It is now Ali’s turn to fall in love with Zeynep, an industrious worker from the cotton fields. But when some of their cotton pickings are stolen, it is impossible to cover the advances they have already drawn. And soon they are driven to the brink of starvation.

 Back in the city, Topal suffers pangs of conscience from having fought with his own flesh and blood. And one day, Ali appears outside his store: he is nothing but skin and bones and faint from hunger. Mehmet and his children are also at death’s door. Plied with food and medicines for days on end, they eventually recover. But in the meantime, the family’s debts have spiralled out of control. Topal is left with no choice but to sell his shoe repair store. And the family is now left with absolutely nothing.

 Not all is lost, however, for Zeynep, now Topal’s daughter-in-law, and Ünal, his son-in-law, have found work in a yarn factory. There is still hope…

ABOUT THE NOVEL

The novel is set in the 1940s, the early years of the Turkish Republic and, therefore, a period of great flux both culturally and economically. It was a time at which Adana, for its part, was making the painful transition from agriculture to industry.

 Beginning with Topal’s father, the novel describes a situation of acute social disintegration and in the process exposes the other face of modernisation. Changing economic relationships and the advent of mechanisation give rise to a class of the newly poor and unemployed. Society reels from the shock of deep-rooted change which affects everything belonging to the past, be it jobs or community values.

 Topal’s desolation reflects the fact that he has no place in the new economic and social regime. He is an anachronism, an emblem of the outdated Ottoman at odds with the innovations of the mechanical age. His pragmatic response to the advances of the age is to embrace religion and its values.

 The tragedy is not that Topal pays for his reluctance to change; it is that he is still unaware of reality and the way things work. What unfolds is a personal revolt, but one that has no economic equivalent.

 As one of the most accomplished examples of the social realism movement, the novel has been adapted for both the screen and, on many occasions, for the stage.

COMMENTS ON THE COBBLER AND HIS SONS BY ORHAN KEMAL

If there’s a need to summarize the main theme of “The cobbler and his sons” briefly in general terms, it can be said that it’s a life episode in which attitudes and manners of old and new, progressive and regressive are in conflict….the drama of the lame cobbler and his family….the mechanization of agriculture…the rise of prices in agricultural products at full speed…..the flux of peasants to the big cities…..the dissolution and collapse of small scale artisans losing their positions against the speed of industrialization.

“From whichever religion,colour and race they may be, whatever language they speak and wherever on earth they may live, humanbeings are engaged in a fight for a happier life.The lame cobbler also conducts this kind of a struggle,who is obliged to make living for his family.”

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THE COBBLER AND HIS SONS BY TAHIR ALANGU

This novel is the most powerful of the works he had created in the recent years.It’s obvious that Orhan Kemal who narrates the dissolution of rooted land owner families and medium and small scale artisans who can’t position themselves against the mechanization of agriculture,rise in prices,peasant influx,the acceleration of economic and social change, in a style peculiar to him is most successful at these subjects.Oriented to certain social issues,more towards the aspect in his lesser novels,Orhan Kemal could find a better way in this novel of his; attempting to enter the novel with a populous artisan family - the lame cobbler and his sons. Crushing of the cobbler who returned from the war of Tripoli, his leg cut and his family under new circumstances and their tumling down to the lowest point of poverty in the cotton fields are conducted with a strong and vivid narration.Here the old and lame cobbler’s unableness to forget his own wealthy family home,his struggling desperately in the pit that he has fallen, his helplessness among the crowd of his sons and grandchildren, the whole family’s writhing in the hands of malaria and mosquitos in the cotton fields and the family of ten people who cling to themselves more and more as they keep falling who do not understand the reasons of what’s happening.because of hunger and misery, standing before the cobbler as an enigma, who indeed could not conceive the things happenning between the earth and the sky, are all told with a competency suitable to the requirements of the essence. According to me,this is the most successful piece that Orhan Kemal has written in the recent years. (1963)

The Cobbler and His Sons -The Change and Dissolution in Rural Towns

By Dr. Mehmet Nuri Gültekin

Translated by Academy Group

Orhan Kemal Kültür - Sanat Merkezi
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