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.