The First Seven Years

“The First Seven Years” is a short story that Bernard Malamud originally published in 1950. The story subsequently appeared in several collections, including The Magic Barrel, which won the 1959 National Book Award for fiction. Malamud’s exploration of the complications of the American Dream for immigrants and the aftermath of the Holocaust make the story an important contribution to American Jewish literature of the twentieth century. This guide is based on the short story as it appears in Library of America’s print edition of Bernard Malamud: Novels and Stories of the 1940s & 1950s (2014).

Set in New York during the late 1940s, “The First Seven Years” opens with Feld, a struggling shoemaker, watching Max, a college student, walk to class through the snow. Feld wants Max to date Miriam, a clerk and Feld’s independent-minded daughter who spends her evenings reading books given to her by Sobel, a refugee and Holocaust survivor who serves as Feld’s assistant. Feld believes marrying an educated man like Max is the next best thing to going to college since Miriam isn’t interested her father’s dream of her pursuing higher education.