The First Seven Years

“The First Seven Years” is a story that is deeply rooted in the Jewish American experience of the 1940s and 1950s in New York. Well before the publication of the story, Jewish immigrants, particularly those from Eastern Europe, came to urban centers like New York to rebuild their lives after fleeing persecution in Europe. They arrived in pursuit of the opportunities offered in America, an industrialized and urbanized country. After World War II, some of these immigrants were survivors of the Holocaust, and they brought different experiences, many of them traumatic, to the American Jewish communities they joined. In this particular short story, there is tension between the aspirations of the immigrant Feld and the refugee and Holocaust survivor Sobel.

The story opens with Feld in reverie about his idle days in Poland, a time he remembers with a nostalgia that contrasts the work-driven life he has built in New York. Feld rejects this nostalgia to focus on his ambition for himself and his daughter. He sees himself as “a practical man” (Paragraph 1) who intends to secure a future for his daughter either by educating her or marrying her off to a man capable of creating the culture and financial stability Feld has not been able to secure for his own wife. What Feld wants is the achievement of the American Dream for his daughter.

Feld’s aspirations are driven by idealism, particularly the belief that hard work will result in success, but his blind spot is his materialism, namely his belief that financial security is enough to secure success. His focus on material success to the exclusion of nonmaterialistic values such as community, familial and romantic love, and prioritizing the life of the mind place him in lockstep with a wider American emphasis on materialistic values that characterized these decades.

On the other hand, these values place him out of sync with the values of other characters in the story. Malamud directly and indirectly represents these alternative values. We learn that Feld’s wife has stood by him through financial ups and downs, suggesting she’s less materialistic than Feld. Likewise, Miriam is a young woman who values her independence, self-culture through reading, and “soul” (475), the lack of which Max cannot overcome in her eyes.

The character who most exhibits nonmaterialistic values is Sobel. The material conditions under which Sobel lives are poor, given the description of his room, and Feld’s offer of money is not enough to overcome Sobel’s offense at losing out on the chance to marry Miriam. When Feld asks Sobel about his constant reading, presuming there must be some payoff for all of Sobel’s studying, Sobel’s answer—“to know” (Paragraph 476)—makes it clear that Sobel values learning and knowledge for its own sake, a belief that sits comfortably among longstanding ideas about the importance of education and literacy in Jewish culture.

It is telling, then, that Sobel comes out the victor in the contest to court Miriam. Heart wins out over dollars. Malamud underscores the importance of values other than material ones through the evolution of Feld: He begins the story as a man who attempts to marry his daughter off to a future accountant and ends the story as one who recognizes the quality of a man who survived the Holocaust and sacrifices his own advancement for the sake of love. Feld’s heart attacks are, in a sense, attacks of conscience that drive him to make decisions on the basis of some sense of Jewish morality.

Malamud foregrounds the struggle to live an upright life in the face of hard realities as an eternal one in Jewish culture by alluding to the story of Jacob, who labored for his father-in-law for seven years to marry Rachel. Rachel then became one of the matriarchs of the Jewish people. In the Hebrew scriptures, Laban, Rachel’s father, agrees to give Jacob Rachel’s hand in marriage in exchange for seven years of work. At the end of seven years, Laban tricks Jacob into first marrying Leah, Rachel’s eldest sister, and Jacob must then work an additional seven years to marry Rachel. Laban is a figure who is not above using trickery to secure his daughters’ futures and extract work out of Jacob; Feld, who engages in matchmaking and bargaining to make a path for Miriam, serves in this role in “The First Seven Years,” while Sobel occupies the role of Jacob, the patriarch of Israel. Malamud’s choice to make Sobel the Jacob in this story and the man who wins out over Max implies that belief in values like love, connection, and the importance of knowledge are ones that are essential to American Jewish identity.

Malamud leaves the reader with some uncertainty: Jacob had to work another seven years before he could marry Rachel, so the parallel between the stories implies that Feld might change his mind about allowing Sobel to marry Miriam after another two years. The title of the story, with the inclusion of the word “First,” supports this theory, as it predicates a “second” seven years.