22 pages • 44 minutes read
Bernard MalamudThe First Seven Years
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1950A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Allusion
An allusion is a reference to a person, place, thing, or other literary work. In “The First Seven Years,” the central allusion is the story of how Jacob, one of the patriarchs of the Jewish people, labored for Laban for seven years to secure the hand of Rachel, Laban’s younger daughter, as his wife. Laban tricks Jacob by substituting Leah, Rachel’s older sister, for Rachel after Jacob completes the seven years of labor as Rachel’s bride price. Jacob is so entranced by the beauty of Rachel that he agrees to work a second seven years to take her as a second wife.
In “The First Seven Years,” Feld’s focus on a financially sound future for Miriam, his daughter, makes him the Laban character in this modern tale. Sobel, the longsuffering man who works year after year for little money to ingratiate himself with Feld, is the Jacob figure. Miriam, the object of all this maneuvering, is the Rachel in this retelling, although she exercises more autonomy than those Biblical figures by objecting to her father’s first choice.
Malamud’s use of allusion underscores that although the historical and geographic settings have changed, modern Jewish people continue to grapple with what it means to be a moral person and the sacrifices people are willing to make for the sake of love and connection to others. The differences between the Biblical tale and this more modern story, especially Miriam’s insistence on having a say in her love life and American Dream ideology, highlight the impact of changing gender norms and immigration on Jewish identity.
Dramatic Irony
Dramatic irony is a situation in which readers or viewers of a text have knowledge that the protagonist or characters in a text do not. In this short story, the careful reader will notice early on that there is some connection between Sobel and Miriam, despite Feld’s apparent blindness to this connection. In Paragraph 1, Miriam responds to her father’s argument that she needs an education by noting that she is getting an education by reading books from Sobel. That this exchange is important to Miriam is obvious when Feld describes her reading Sobel’s comments in these books “as if the word of God were inscribed on them” (Paragraph 25). Sobel’s first walk-off from his job comes after Feld asks Sobel to stop sending so many books to Miriam (Paragraph 26), and Sobel, a conscientious, careful man, breaks the shoe last after overhearing Sobel Feld set Miriam up on a date with Max almost five years later. Most readers will notice that Sobel seems to lose his self-possession when his tenuous connection to Miriam is threatened.
Feld, blinded by his sense of Sobel as an old man and an object of charity, fails to recognize Sobel as a suitor until close to the end of the narrative. These blind spots help to characterize Feld as a well-meaning but clueless father.
Epiphany
An epiphany is a moment in which a character comes to a realize or recognize an important truth about the events of the story. Feld has multiple epiphanies later in the story. As he talks with Sobel after Sobel refuses to come back to the shop, Feld “had a sudden insight” (Paragraph 84) that Sobel has been courting his daughter through gifts of his marked-up books. When Feld firmly rejects Sobel as a suitor by calling him unbalanced and ugly, Sobel begins crying, forcing Feld to “realiz[e] that what he had called ugly was not Sobel but Miriam’s life if she married him” (Paragraph 89). In the aftermath of this conversation, Feld “walked with a stronger stride,” with the implication that these series of revelations have made him a stronger and more moral person.
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By Bernard Malamud
