Based on the historical imprisonment of Menahem Mendel Beilis, an innocent Jew whose 1913 trial in Tsarist Russia created an international uproar, Malamud's novel focuses more on the personal experience of Yakov Bok. Fed up with his life in the Pale of Settlement as an abandoned husband and unprofitable handyman (fixer), Bok ventures to Kiev to turn his fortunes around. From this point his life becomes like that of the biblical Job - passing for a Gentile, he is hired to supervise a brick factory, and is doing well until a Christian child is murdered, and he is blamed for the murder (and numerous other charges) in a revival of the Blood Libel against Jews. The majority of the book chronicles Bok's transformation in prison from an unforgiving, non-religious, apolitical man "of a little education" to a gradual political awakening and a rediscovery of his humanity. Bok's horrendous experiences of torture and mental abuse at the hands of his prisoners lead him to eventually forgive his unfaithful wife and to view his plight as that of all Jews in Russia, forcing him to refuse to take the Ts's easy way out and condemn his fellows in the process. The book ends before the trial has begun, but closes with Bok having achieved peace in his political convictions and faith in the potential humanity of Jews and Christians alike.
Malamud employs a lyrical, folk-based prose in description of Bok's thoughts and words, mixed with Jewish proverbs, biblical allusions, and the simple, often profane everyday language of the common laborers, prison guards, and peasants who populate the novel. Bok maintains a world-weary sense of humor throughout, making the graphic descriptions of torture bearable, and giving way to terror or guilt only during the worst of his ordeals in prison. All in all, the book delivers a powerful message of the need to take action in the face of inhumanity, casting light on the uselessness of passive knowledge of iniquity. Explicit violence, language, and some sexual dialogue throughout.

Based on a true story, The Fixer is the story of a Russian Jew who, in the early 1900s, is unjustly accused of murdering a Christian boy. Bernard Malamud’s 1966 novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Yakov Bok has a hard luck life as a handyman, or fixer, in the Jewish Pale of Settlement. Although political reforms following the 1905 revolution gave Jews new freedoms and political clout, life in the Pale had not improved. After his childless wife abandons him for a goy, Yakov leaves the shtetl for Kiev, where he ends up working in, and living above, a Christian-owned brick factory. With an assumed name, no papers to allow him to live in that part of the city, and anti-Jewish sentiments on the rise, Yakov is headed for trouble.

When the mutilated body of a neighborhood boy is found stuffed in a cave, the evidence – circumstantial and fabricated – mounts against Yakov. He is arrested and left to rot in prison while the sham investigation drags on for years as anti-Semitic authorities try to build a case of ritual murder. With no indictment, no lawyer, and no idea of what is to come, Yakov’s situation is a downward spiral of gloom.

Yakov is motivated by his dwindling hope of exoneration, only meagerly spurred on by a few rare contacts with the outside and tidbits of news about his case. Although claiming to be non-religious and non-political, Yakov worries that his case will spark violent retribution or even a new pogrom against the Jews.

Malamud incorporates Yakov’s tragedy into the larger picture by having characters discuss Russia’s anti-Semitic history and Tsarist politics. It is this contextual detail that raises Yakov’s story above that of one individual’s tribulations and makes it a morality tale about freedom and responsibility in the face of evil and suffering. One of the characters explains Malmud’s thesis:

I am somewhat of a meliorist. That is to say, I act as an optimist because I find I cannot act at all, as a pessimist. Once often feels helpless in the face of the confusion of these times, such a mass of apparently uncontrollable events and experiences to live through, attempts to understand, and if at all possible, give order to; but one must not withdraw from the task if he has some small thing to offer – he does so at the risk of diminishing his humanity.

Or, as Yakov put it more succinctly as he was finally being taken to his trial, “[T]here’s no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew.”

Malamud is an incredible writer. Even though this story is horribly grim, he grabs the reader and does not let go. The Fixer is a book that everyone should read and, once read, ponder.

Also posted on Rose City Reader. ( )

985 The Fixer, by Bernard Malamud (read 5 Dec 1968) (Pulitzer Fiction prize in 1967) (National Book Award fiction prize for 1967) I had read Malamud's The Assistant on Feb 6, 1966, and was mightily impressed by it. So when this book won the Pulitzer prize I was glad to read it. Unfortunately I did no post-reading note, but my memory is that it is well worth reading. ( )

At times painfully funny if viewed absurdly, unfortunately reality seeps in and all becomes cruelly plausible as you realize too many people still cling to superstitions and ignorance where "different" people and races are concerned. Read at your own risk. ( )

What a difficult book to read, and, I can only imagine, to write. We start with the injustice of poverty and lack of opportunity in the shtetl and move almost directly into a variety of unjust accusations leveled against Yakov Bok, who has become a scapegoat for all the imagined evil deeds of all the Jews in Russia.

Bok leaves the shtetl with hopes of a better life in Kiev. At first, things look up for him. Serendipity finds him a good job, and he is able to afford some books, and even put away some money. The catch is that he has to live in a district from which Jews are forbidden from living. All goes well, although Bok is not a popular figure, until a young boy is found murdered in a cave nearby.

The police show up at his door, arrest him, and summarily throw him in prison. Things go from bad to worse as he is forced to submit to increasingly cruel and dehumanizing treatment, not least of which is having to repeatedly listen to the many crimes he is supposed to have committed. But he steadfastly declares his innocence, and it is this that is supposed to make him one literature's greatest heroes. I'm not so sure about this, but certainly he is a strong character.

His strength almost makes this book harder to read, though. I found myself almost wishing he would confess, even though I knew he was innocent, just so the horribleness would end. But he and I both knew that confessing to a crime that he didn't commit wouldn't help at all, either his own dignity, or the plight of the Jews in Russia. So we endured together until the trial, to which Bok is on his way at the end of the book. At first I was disappointed that we don't fight out what happens at the trial, but then I realized that the result of the trial isn't the point of the book. It's the persecution and the strength that it reveals that really matter. ( )