The Fixer

Yakov Bok is a humble Jewish fixer (carpenter) living in Russia in 1910. He leaves his small village and moves to Kiev, looking for work and a better life. His wife has left him for another man and he has no significant relations to speak of. It's a dangerous time to be Jewish, as the pogroms are widespread and practically government sanctioned. Pretending to be a gentile, Bok finds work with an anti-semite at a brickyard and moves into an area that is off limits for Jews. Things go well for a while, until a young Christian boy is killed and Bok finds himself framed for the murder. Although there is no evidence against him, other than hysterical, unreliable anti-semite "witnesses", things look bad for Bok and he is thrown in prison to await a formal indictment. The majority of the book covers Bok's time in prison and solitary confinement. It becomes clear the prosecution is dragging its feet, not delivering the indictiment, as they have a shaky chance of winning the case if it ever goes to trial. It's a fast book, but a very painful and somewhat depressing one. It deals heavily with anti-Semitism. Some of the anti-semitic passages are almost breathtaking in their ferocity. It becomes very painful, at times almost (but not quite) tragi-comic. In particular, a lengthy sermon (?) given by a priest that basically likens the Jewish to vampires. In many ways the book reminded me of "1984". A man up against the monolithic powers of the state. Not quite as imposing though, because Bok seems to grow stronger and more resiliant in his spirit even as his body and mind are broken. The prosecution repeatedly dangles a confession in his face but Bok refuses steadfastly to sign, even at the risk of triggering a pogrom. It's interesting to note that Bok is also an avowed aetheist, and stolidly refuses to seek solace in God. He reads the bible only as a way of keeping himself from going insane, and the only thing that really seems to comfort him is philosophy (Spinoza, in particular) and the philosophical concept of freedom. Part of what is so painful is that for long stretches the entire world seems to be against him. EVERYONE he encounters is either a thug, a snitch, a backstabber (or all three!). An excellent book. A fast read, but very painful.

Yakov Bok, a rural Ukrainian handyman (a "fixer") in the years before World War I, yearns for something better. His luck has been down all his life, he can't make ends meet, his wife ran off, and what brings him the most injustice of all: he is a Jew. The strangling weight of anti-Semitism in Tsarist Russia clubs the reader page after page and slowly grinds Yakov down when he is jailed for a crime he did not commit. Much of "The Fixer" is jail time, seen through Yakov's disbelieving yet cynical eyes.Malamud won the Pulitzer Prize for "The Fixer", written in 1976. It was well-deserved. Yakov's struggle is as much with himself as with the gnawing injustice of the state, with the ignorance in Kiev, and the wickedness of local officials eager to see him imprisoned, even knowing he is not guilty. Yakov searches for the god of the Jews, failing to comprehend a god who would let his people be victimized so mercilessly. That Yakov's struggle is as much moral and philosophical as legalistic is the source of much of the book's significance, as well as its occasional tragi-comedy. When Yakov's father-in-law spends a small fortune in bribes to visit him in prison, they spend their precious ten minutes together debating theology. It turns out this scene is seminal because their debate - whether god has abandoned Yakov or vice versa - is the core of the tale. Later, the politico-historical context, the cynical manipulation of anti-Semitic sentiment in Russia, is outlined by Yakov's attorney, but this is a book of morality and justice, much more than of politics.Yakov never loses his compassion for others, keeping a good thought for his faithless wife, for fellow prisoners, and even those jailers who show him occasional compassion. As Yakov's lucidity waivers in his worst moments of despair or physical weakness, so does the narrative. This is how Malamud does such a wonderful job of placing the reader in Yakov's icy cell to share his outrage and hopelessness. Yakov's confusion is mirrored in Malamud's prose. We suffer with the prisoner. "The Fixer" is a wonderful story, calling to mind Kafka's "The Trial" as well as the dense internal dialogues of Dostoevsky. Yakov Bok is not a hero, but manages to be heroic just the same.

In chains all that was left of freedom was life, just existence; but to exist without choice was the same as death. -Bernard Malamud, The FixerIn this National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, Bernard Malamud presents a fictionalized account of a notorious anti-Semitic incident, the arrest and eventual trial, following a great outcry in the West, of Mendel Beilis in pre-Revolutionary Kiev. Beilis was accused of murdering a Christian boy, despite evidence pointing toward the boy's own mother. After being held from 1911 to 1913, he was finally brought to trial, where he was exonerated.In this novel the protagonist is Yakov Bok, a nominally Jewish handyman ("fixer")--nominally because he has abandoned his Jewish beliefs for a Spinoza influenced kind of "free thinking"--leaves his village after being cuckolded by his wife. Eventually ending up in Kiev, he one day comes upon a man collapsed in the street and decides to help him, despite noticing that he is wearing a Black Hundreds pin (symbol of a vicious anti-Semitic organization). The man, who turns out to be a local merchant who was merely drunk, offers Yakov a job managing his brickyard, not realizing that he is Jewish. Yakov accepts, despite much trepidation, goes to work under an assumed name, Yakov Ivanovitch Dologushev, and moves into an apartment in an area forbidden to Jews.Once on the job he runs afoul of : the merchant's daughter, whose sexual advances he deflects; local boys, who he he chases out of the factory yard; and the employees, who he warns about stealing bricks. These seemingly petty disagreements prove to have disastrous results when a local boy is found murdered, stabbed repeatedly and drained of blood. Yakov, who the authorities have discovered is Jewish, is accused of committing the murder as a form of ritual killing to harvest Christian blood for use in some imagined rites for Passover celebration : The ritual murder is meant to re-enact the crucifixion of our dear Lord. The murder of Christian children and the distribution of their blood among Jews are a token of their eternal enmity against Christendom, for in murdering the innocent Christian child, they repeat the martyrdom of Christ.The victim is one of the boys that Yakov had chased, and both daughter and fellow employees are only too willing to give false testimony against him. The initial prosecutor assigned to the case is relatively friendly, and obviously skeptical about this theory of the case, but he does not last long.His rivals and replacements try with great brutality to wring a confession from Yakov. In part, they are motivated by an understanding that the evidence they have against him is terribly inadequate : they are determined to keep the case from going to trial. Yakov, on the other hand, recognizes that he if he can just get to a courtroom he has a chance to clear himself, and Jews generally, of this blood libel. There follows a harrowing, yea

When I went to start Malamud's "The Fixer" I expected that I would find a work of great brilliance. Being that it was the first book ever to win both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, only done once since, I expected unusually inspiring prose. I was not disappointed. Malamud's depiction of a man, in prison, in terrible conditions, virtually concentration camp scenarios, of a man, accused of a crime he did not commit, due to anti-semitism in Russia during the period 1904 through 1907 or thereabouts. Malamud not only gives us the full impact and feeling of the isolation, desolation and frustration of a prisoner in terrible conditions, waiting just for a "letter of indictment", not even knowing whether he would be accused of the terrible rumor that abounded. Malamud takes us through periods of hope for the prisoner, and then dashes those hopes. He takes us through the feelings of worthlessness, hopelessness and the struggle that such a combination creates with the concept of suicide.Written without any fanciness in terms of high language, but using only words that one could understand with a 9th grade education, Malamud constructs what is a classic novel of our just past century. It reveals itself with both the absurdity of a Kafka story and the intensity of "Blindness" by Saramago (Nobel Prize for Literature, 1998). For serious thinkers of the human mind and the places it takes one in conditions of great extremity, this book is a must read item. To get close to the real feelings of prison hopelessness combined with intense anti-semitism, read Malamud's book and then come to a new understanding of the human condition and its obscurity as an individual in a world turned against one.

I am a sophomore at Orange High School and a child of Russian immigrants, but was born in the U.S. I had to read "The Fixer" as an English summer reading book, and I was completely moved. This book is probably the best book I have ever read, at least one that was assigned for school! When our teacher asked us if it was too offensive, I said "It is offensive at times. But it tells it how it really was, and it makes us feel just as Yakov Bok felt at the time of the persecution." I may be a high school student, but I know a good, mature book when I see one. This is a very-well written, moving book that is worth the while to read. But once you start, you may find yourself not putting the book down until you finish!