The Fixer by Bernard Malamud
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968 (originally published 1966)
Until I went to university I was not only parochial, but bigoted in my literary taste. I read very little American literature. Thankfully university opened my eyes to the wealth and greatness of American literature, but, to be honest, I have still barely scratched the surface when it comes to reading many well-known modern American novelists.
Bernard Malamud being a case in point: of course I have been aware of his work for most of my adult life, but The Fixer is my first foray into Malamud and I can state it was not what I expected. It is a novel of Jewishness, what that meant in Russia, and what it still meant in sixties America, and what it has meant throughout history. The story of Yakov Bok is the story of any Jew and every jew - a story of ill-omen, a story of a world that conspires against happiness, and a story of defiance in the face of monolithic power.
Accused of committing a ritual murder of a Christian youth, The Fixer is the story of Bok's incarceration and indictment for a crime he didn't commit. His Kafka-esque interactions with the legal system highlight the absurdity of the anti-Semitic urge that gripped Europe: everything that Bok is accused of: corruption, falsity, bribery, coercion, collusion and murder, are in fact the crimes that the state and people of Russia commit against him. The dreadful irony is not lost on the reader, and exacerbates the pain felt for Bok as he struggles against a force that he cannot see, that changes the rules whenever it needs to, and blames him for the mistakes they make.
Malamud - through the characters of Bok, his father-in-law Shmuel and his faithless wife Raisl - shows us the eternal pessimism that was ingrained into the Jewish culture of those living in the Pale of Settlement. Faith in God was the only thing left to them: they had no agency, no ability to raise themselves from their destitution. This makes the Government's fear of the Jews even more irrational: that they could be so worried about such a rag-tag part of society, who's only thought was how to survive the next day without starving, is one of the eternal mysteries of the anti-Semitic urge.
As Bok states on more than one occasion the mistakes he made were to be born a Jew and to try and better himself. He was paying a personal price for the fate of his people. And it doesn't matter that in Bok's case he was not a practicing Jew: just to be born racially as Jew means that you are eternally so, and that is the tragedy of their race.
While some small glimmers of hope appear from time-to-time in the novel - hope spawining from the changes in Russian society brought on by the revolution in 1905 - they are, for Bok at least, continually snuffed out. Malamud knows that whatever progress is made is forever undone by human nature and the power of history and ancient hatreds.
So, at the end of the book, as Bok heads off finally to face his trial, the reader knows that he cannot win: even if found not guilty and avoiding being lynched, his future is to return to the shtetl and a life of grinding poverty. As a statement against anti-Semitism, The Fixer is powerful; as a story, moving; as a novel, enjoyable.
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