The First Seven Years (1950). Content and Description

Jewish subject matter occupies one of Malamud’s first stories to be published in a major journal, the Partisan Review. The author told Daniel Stern, “Like many writers I’m influenced especially by the Bible, both Testaments. I respond in particular to the East European immigrants of my father’s and mother’s generations; many of them were Jews of the Pale as described by the classic Yiddish writers” (56). “The First Seven Years” refers to the Genesis story of Jacob and Rachel; to win Rachel as his wife, Jacob promises to work for her father, Laban, for seven years.

The characters are the immigrant Jews of the Pale and their American-born offspring. The story is told from the point of view of Feld, the shoemaker, a Polish Jew who has done relatively well in his shop. Though he is slow to realize it, his success is largely due to the skill and hard work of his assistant, Sobel, an unprepossessing Polish refugee he has hired and taught the cobbler’s business. Sobel is by now so good at it that Feld need not work hard; he can lie in bed in the morning, because he trusts Sobel to do the work, to open and close.

Though Feld knows that Sobel deserves to earn more for his hard work and has sometimes offered him a raise, he thinks of him with some contempt. Sobel, after all, is a penniless 35-year-old, homely, bald, with no prospects—not so different, perhaps, from Feld at one point, but having made good, the shoemaker now looks down on Sobel. Feld also aspires for a social rise for his daughter, Miriam.

Miriam is a bit of a puzzle; 19, pretty (at least by her father’s account), intelligent, and bookish, she has shown no interest in college and gone to work in order to be independent. Still, Feld would like to see her with a man of distinction, and he has selected Max, the son of a peddler who is a college student, making something of himself, and thus his idea of a good match for Miriam. His matchmaking efforts provoke Sobel, listening in the background, to a fury of hammering that Feld cannot understand, ending in his smashing his last and walking out.

“The First Seven Years” is rich in ironies. The reader will be aware, long before Feld realizes anything, that Sobel is in love with Miriam. He has been her adviser, lending her books and discussing ideas, for years. Miriam provides the clearest explanation for her father’s blindness; commenting on her boredom with Max, whom she has dated twice, she says:

“He’s nothing more than a materialist.”
“What means this word?”
“He has no soul. He’s only interested in things.” (21)

That Feld himself is equally materialist helps explain his attraction to Max and his indifference to Sobel. He banks on Max’s college attendance, though a bit chagrined to find that he is studying accountancy, not medicine or law; he discounts Sobel’s reading and thinking, ignoring the fact that he is clearly an intellectual with a soul. The narrator tells us that Feld once asked Sobel why he read so much: “He read, he said, to know. But to know what, the shoemaker demanded, and to know, why? Sobel never explained, which proved he read so much because he was queer” (22-23). And, as he brutally tells Sobel when they finally discuss Miriam, “Sobel, you are crazy… She will never marry a man so old and ugly like you” (24).

This comment (though Feld grudgingly takes back ugly) precipitates the denouement, in which the shoemaker sadly accepts the love between his daughter and the refugee, as well as the fact that his ambitions for her life to be better materially than that of her parents have failed. Whether Feld’s yielding to Sobel is motivated by his need for him in the business (his inability to get along without him is what has led him to visit Sobel) or by his sudden pity for him is difficult to say. There is some insight into the life of the assistant, whose behavior up to this point has been either of no interest or just “queer.” As Sobel bitterly cries,

“Why do you think I worked so long for you?” Sobel cried out. “For the stingy wages I sacrificed five years of my life so you could have to eat and drink and where to sleep?”
“Then for what?” shouted the shoemaker.
“For Miriam,” he blurted—“for her.”
The shoemaker, after a time, managed to say,
“I pay wages in cash, Sobel,” and lapsed into silence. (23)

When Feld insists that Sobel wait two more years before asking for Miriam’s hand and the next morning walks in to find his assistant “pounding leather for love” (25), the biblical allusion to the Laban- Jacob relationship is clear.

In his introduction to The Stories of Bernard Malamud, the author writes, “I love the pleasures of the short story. One of them is the fast payoff. . . . Somewhere I’ve said that a short story packs a self in a few pages predicating a lifetime. . . . In a few pages a good story portrays the complexity of a life while producing the surprise and effect of knowledge—not a bad payoff” (xii). “The First Seven Years” is a good illustration of these strengths. It is 12 pages long; within it lies a searching examination of what has been called “the American dream”—a dream that, based as it is on the idea of “making it” and “self-improvement,” often is what Miriam would call materialistic. And yet, it is natural for a father to want a better life for his daughter. The question is: What is “better?”

The reader is granted insight into the gradations of immigrant Jewry, as Feld simultaneously disdains Sobel the Polish refugee and sympathizes with his narrow escape from Adolf Hitler. (His question whether Sobel ever went to college indicates a bland ignorance of conditions beyond the Pale, however.)

Despite the father’s disappointment, the story does deliver a payoff of promising love between two people who value what is important and have found it in each other. And yet—the first seven years? In the Bible, Jacob’s first seven years ended only with his betrayal and marriage to Rachel’s sister, after which he had to work another seven years to win Rachel. The “lifetime” that this story predicates is more troubling than it may appear.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Is Max indeed a “materialist” in the sense Miriam means? Or, is she finding reasons to reject her father’s candidate for her hand in favor of her own preference?

2. Think of other American texts that focus on the idea of the social rise—through hard work, luck, fortunate marriage, or whatever—that is sometimes thought of as “the American dream,” such as Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. With these two works and their protagonists in mind, argue what constitutes the American dream, what its dangers are, and whether the protagonists in these works are responsible for the ideals they choose to follow. Are they as individuals to blame, or does society bear responsibility for their downfall?

3. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is about American success and about working to succeed for a beloved woman. Is Feld, on a much smaller scale, a Gatsbyesque figure? Defend your answer to this question in a well-formulated essay that compares the two works, using quotations and textual references to support your statements.

4. There is a proverb, emphasizing persistence, about a cobbler sticking to his last. (A last is the form on which a cobbler shapes shoes.) Does this have relevance to Sobel’s behavior? How about when he smashes the last after hearing Feld’s recruitment of Max for his daughter?