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Title: The Fixer by Bernard Malamud ISBN: 0-374-52938-8 Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Pub. Date: 05 May, 2004 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.39 (33 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: the book upon which his reputation should rest
Comment: 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 Fixer
In 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, years-long, battle of wills, in which Yakov takes on truly heroic dimensions : a simple, non-political, nonbeliever, is transformed before our eyes into a powerful symbol of resistance to anti-Semitism, injustice, tyranny and hatred. By the end of the story he resembles nothing so much as one of the Titans--an Atlas holding the weight of the world on his own shoulders; a Prometheus, having his innards picked out by carrion birds every day; or a Sisyphus, futilely pushing a boulder up a hill every day, only to have it roll back down every night. Yakov too seems sentenced by God to bear a punishment for all mankind, and he too bears up under it with superhuman strength and transcendent nobility. Superficially then it seems to resemble an existentialist novel, but Yakov derives his strength, and the story derives its universality and its power, from his determination to prove his innocence, a determination which would not matter to an existentialist.
Through the culture-consuming hegemony of the movies, Malamud is today best remembered for The Natural, but The Fixer is the book upon which his reputation should rest. It is a great novel; one that deserves a place on the shelf with the works of George Orwell, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Arthur Koestler, and the other great novelists of the Twentieth Century whose theme was the struggle of the individual against the machinations of the State and against the soul-destroying ideological pathologies which undergird totalitarian states.
GRADE : A+
Rating: 5
Summary: an unforgettable book
Comment: "The Fixer", written in clean clear prose that has terrific strength is one of those seminal books that the reader will most likely never forget. Malamud understands (as the author of the negative review clearly does not) that good prose is architecture, not interior decoration. The story of Jakov Bok is a story of the triumph of the human spirit over the crushing weight of anti-semetic hatred. It ought to be on the shelf of all Christian reading rooms and church libraries so that the full bestiality of the persecution of the Jewish people can be understood. The story is riveting. The only thing that disturbs me is that the ending is unresolved and we never know Bok's fate. No other reviewer has mentioned this and I would be interested to know if this disturbed anyone else, considering the fact that the entire novel is building up to Bok's trial.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Classic Novel of Anti-Semitism WIll Resonate With All!
Comment: Bernard Malamud's Pulitzer Prize winning novel of a poor Ukrainian Jew imprisoned for a murder he did not commit in Tsarist Russia, is one of the great Jewish interest novels ever written. But like all great works of literature, Malamud's hero, Jacob Bok, moves beyond the parochial and into the realm of the universal. In short, although the novel is about the Jewish experience in the anti-Semitic world of pre-Soviet Russia, the hero's predicament will resonate with readers of all backgrounds.
Jacob Bok is a classic yiddish character who will be familiar to anyone versed in the works of Isaac Baashev Singer or Shalom Aleichem. He is a miserable young man of the shtetl, without faith in God and desperately poor his barren wife has run off with another man and left Bok with nothing. Bok is a "fixer.", a tradesman who today would be known as a handyman. Poorly educated, the fixer is an intelligent man with a bent for philosophy. He calls himself a free thinker and is inspired by the works of Spinoza. With only his tools and a pathetic horse he sets off for Kiev, hoping for a better life. Instead, a series of mistakes and bad circumstances lands him in jail, accused of the ritual murder of a Christian boy. The remainder of the book chronicle's Bok's experience in the Kafkaeque world of Tsarist justice. For a poor unknown Jew, there is no justice and Bok's suffering is harrowing.
But what makes this novel great is not the narrative of unjust suffering but the inner workings of Bok's mind as he attempts to reconcile his lost Jewish faith, his notions of justice and the words of Jesus to which he is exposed with the catastrophe of his situation. Bok changes, from a man who conceals his Jewishness to work for an anti-Semite to a man who, despite his lack of faith, refuses to either confess to a crime he did not commit or to implicate other Jews in the blood libel. There is no melodramatic ending and, indeed the book is quite ambiguous. But what Malamud makes clear is that Bok's ultimate physical fate is irrelevant. By making a stand against injustice, Bok has won his humanity. And by insisting that he be brought to trial and refusing to be just another anonymous cog in the Tsar's vast machine of repression, Bok re-asserts his humanity and his individuality. Malamud is no existentialist. Bok continually asks why such bad luck should happen to him. He gets no answer because there is no answer. This is the existential dilemma. But Malamud rejects the existentialist answer, that man exists in the absence of any universal justice. As Bok realizes, freedom is not only physical but intellectual as well. At no time does Bok compromise his humanity. He struggles with insanity from the loneliness of his predicament. But ultimately he succeeds. A man can live or die with his head held high. He can remain a man until the end, whatever the cost. This is something Jews came to realize throughout their history and is a large part of the reason the Jewish faith has survived for four thousand years. But it is a lesson for all of mankind as well.
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Title: The Assistant: A Novel by Bernard Malamud ISBN: 0374504849 Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Pub. Date: 07 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron ISBN: 0679736638 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 January, 1993 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Executioner's Song by NORMAN MAILER ISBN: 0375700811 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 28 April, 1998 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: The Magic Barrel: Stories by Bernard Malamud ISBN: 0374525862 Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Pub. Date: 07 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: A Death in the Family by James Agee ISBN: 0375701230 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 August, 1998 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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