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.
Character Analysis
Feld
Feld, a Polish immigrant, shoemaker, and father who lives in New York, is the protagonist of the story. He is a dynamic character who is forced to surrender his single-minded focus on material success as the measure of a good life.
At the start of the story, Feld sees himself as a pragmatic man who wants his daughter to get an education or marry an educated man so that she will have greater status and a more financially secure future than what Feld has been able to offer her as a struggling tradesman. Feld is forced to shift from this perspective when his daughter rejects Max, a man Feld believes to be good husband material because he is studying to be an accountant.
Feld’s sense of himself as a practical man is eroded further when he has two epiphanies—that Sobel, his poor assistant, has managed to woo his daughter with nothing more than books and margin comments and that it would be wrong to stand in the way of love between Sobel and Miriam, though life with Sobel almost guarantees constant financial struggle for his daughter. In the end, Feld’s evolution of a character occurs because he recognizes the importance of living an upright life, valuing knowledge for its own sake, and centering life on relationships with others.
Sobel
Sobel, a refugee and survivor of the Holocaust, is Feld’s highly emotional assistant who mostly communicates his desires through actions rather than words. At 35, Sobel is a man whose appearance shows that he has lived a hard life. Sobel is mostly characterized through the lens of Feld, the point of view character in the story, so he appears to be a mysterious person whose motivations are not clear.
Nevertheless, even Feld is forced to recognize Sobel’s sterling character traits, which include his strong work ethic, his willingness to sacrifice for love by working for poor pay to impress Feld, and his commitment to self-education through reading. Malamud hints at Sobel’s motivations but only explicitly states them at the end of the story when he declares his love for Miriam. At both the opening of the story and the resolution, Sobel is hard at work creating a shoe, an indication that he is a static character whose motivations become clearer because of Feld’s insights.
Miriam
Miriam, Feld’s daughter, is the first-generation daughter of Jewish immigrants to the United States. Like many children of immigrants, Miriam embraces values that fly in the face of those of her immigrant parents. Miriam is an independent young woman who works to earn her own money, refuses her father’s insistence that she date a man whom she cannot respect, and makes her own choices when it comes to self-improvement and education. Beyond Feld, the biggest influence on Miriam from the time she is 14 is Sobel, whom she develops a connection with through the books he sends to her.
Miriam is the only female character in a story written during a time when women were frequently expected to abide by the dictates of their families and societal gender roles. These limitations are made apparent by her father’s understanding that he has the right and duty to pick possible mates for her and his belief that marrying an educated man is just as good as having an education. Miriam is a young woman who fights for her own vision of the future, even in the face of pressure to be a more traditional woman.
Max
Max is the upwardly mobile son of a peddler and Feld’s choice of mate for Miriam. Initially, all the reader and Feld know about Max is that he is enrolled in college to be an accountant. Max is directly characterized by his boorish interactions with Feld (he only agrees to the date with Miriam after seeing her photo and then remarks that she is average enough in looks to merit a first date) and indirectly characterized as a soulless materialist by Miriam, who is bored by their interactions after just two dates. Max represents the dangers of placing too great an emphasis on material success as the measure of achievement of the American Dream.
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By Bernard Malamud
