The Magic Barrel

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 1958

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“The First Seven Years”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“The First Seven Years” Summary

Feld, a Polish immigrant who owns a cobbler shop in a big American city, has lost much of his health and mobility over the years and worries for the future of his 19-year-old daughter, Miriam. Max, a young college student, has caught his eye as a potential suitor. Though Max is impoverished, Feld admires his dedication to his studies, an ambition that he wishes his daughter shared. Miriam herself has no interest in going to college; even so, she is never without a book and often reads literary classics that Sobel (her father’s stocky, bald, 35-year-old assistant), frequently lends her. Each book is densely inscribed with Sobel’s own peculiar commentary, all of which she reads religiously. Ignoring Miriam’s outspoken desire to be “independent,” Feld, whom Max hires to repair his shoes, tries to interest the young student in his daughter. Max agrees to go out with her. Hearing this, Sobel creates a ruckus and rushes out of the shop in a passion.

Sobel’s days-long absence soon worries Feld, who, ever since his heart attack five years before, has depended entirely on Sobel to run the shop, paying him miserly wages. A recent Polish immigrant, the prematurely aged, tempestuous Sobel is a survivor of the Nazi death camps and cares nothing for money or advancement; he seems quite content to work for Feld’s meager pay and share his books with Miriam. Now, mysteriously, he has gone, and Feld eventually hires a new helper. Miriam goes out twice with Max but is uninterested in the student, telling Feld that Max is a soulless “materialist” who cares only about “things.” Shortly after, Feld discovers that his new helper has been stealing from him, and suffers a second heart attack. Finally, after three weeks without a helper, Feld trudges to Sobel’s rooming house and begs him to come back. The haggard Sobel shouts that he will never work for Feld again. He reveals that Miriam was the only reason he has worked five years for Feld’s “stingy wages,” and that Miriam fully returns his love. Feld initially resists the idea of Sobel marrying his daughter but eventually relents, stricken with remorse. He reluctantly tells Sobel that he will have to wait two years to ask for Miriam’s hand, since she is only 19. Sobel does not answer, but the next morning finds him back at the shop, “pounding leather for his love” (16).

“The First Seven Years” Analysis

Feld the shoemaker, having for five years reaped the benefits of his assistant Sobel’s passion for his daughter, grapples with a moral choice: whether or not to sacrifice the future of his only daughter to a gloomy, aging man who seems cursed with the wrong kind of intensity—a passion for literature instead of material advancement. Complicating Feld’s choice is the fact that he has been knowingly exploiting Sobel for some time, and nuances in the text imply that he has known the truth of his daughter’s affections all along. Although Malamud’s prose ironically depicts Feld as nearsighted, ostensibly suggesting that he is also metaphorically myopic to Sobel’s feelings for his daughter, his body language nonetheless betrays a half-conscious awareness of the undercurrents that surround him. A multitude of examples abound, including his “twitch” when seeing Miriam pore over Sobel’s “sanctified” commentary; the cagey way he breaks off his sotto voce discussion of his daughter with Max when Sobel stops hammering; and his odd reluctance to ask Sobel to come back to work. These examples prove that his myopia extends to himself and his own feelings, for he has willfully ignored this close-to-home conflict in order to maintain the status quo that keeps his business running smoothly.

Now, however, the shop owner’s absolute reliance on the hard-working Sobel, whose monetary demands are almost nil, conflicts directly with Feld’s desire to marry Miriam off to an educated man who can offer her a “better life” than that of a shoemaker’s wife. However, Feld’s notion of what is good for Miriam proves once again to be short-sighted at best, for his daughter does not share his own fondness for material things and instead prefers to absorb Sobel’s learned, feverish commentary, devouring it as if it were holy writ. Thus, the narrative uses Feld’s obtuse approach to the situation to imply that Miriam and Sobel’s future, should they be allowed to have one, could well be a passionate joining of hearts and minds that would exist well beyond Feld’s meager comprehension. Money and material goods are unimportant to them, and their intellectual life together would be rich and full. By contrast, Feld’s notion of a suitable match for his daughter—the meager, “materialistic” Max, who shows little interest in Miriam and dreams only of being a CPA—bodes an empty, loveless existence for her: one that would possibly be far worse than the “ugly,” impoverished one that Feld himself currently rues.

Such reflections, however, are not central to Feld’s pivotal decision to allow Sobel to propose to his daughter in two years. As often in Malamud, the shoemaker’s moral epiphany is largely one of pity, empathy, and remorse. For the first time, the shoemaker imagines himself in his helper’s shoes, picturing Sobel’s hellish years in a concentration camp, his narrow escape from Hitler’s death camps, and finally, his monkish years of labor and self-denial in America, only to become infatuated with a teenage girl. For the first time, he also acknowledges his own underhanded role in Sobel’s current state of agony and sacrifice, realizing that he has half-knowingly encouraged the love between his helper and his daughter in order to take advantage of five years of cheap labor. Feld’s climactic moral decision, however, is not entirely pure, for because his most recent helper turned out to be a thief, he desperately needs Sobel back and is willing to make extraordinary concessions in order to regain his own status quo. In an prime example of the theme of Biblical Subtext and Transcendence, the title of the story alludes to the biblical tale in which Jacob agrees to work seven years for Laban in exchange for his daughter Rachel’s hand in marriage (Genesis 29:18-27), and this element lends the ending of Malamud’s story a troubling ambiguity. In Genesis, Laban did not honor the contract and instead exploited a technicality to force Jacob to work another seven years to win Rachel. (The word “First” in the title hints that Feld’s arrangement may have a similar codicil.) Additionally, the image of Sobel “pounding leather for his love” (16) shades the story’s last sentence with sexual overtones that complicate and question the ethereal life of the mind that he ostensibly offers Miriam. Sexual heat, as Feld must know, can cool, likewise diminishing love itself.