The Fixer by Bernard Malamud -1968

The Fixer by Bernard  Malamud 1968

National Book Award Winner and Pulitzer Prize For Fiction.

Born 1914 Brooklyn 

Died 1986 Manhattan 

The Fixer is Bernard Malamud’s masterwork.  Based on a real life event, it begins in  Russia in 1910.  Jews were subject to terrible discrimination, restricted as to where they could live and despised by most Russians.  Social revolution was in the wings and the government, including the Tsar, put the blame for this on a vast international Jewish conspiracies.  Jews were seen by the common people as the killers of Christ.  Absurd ideas about Jews were widely believed and encouraged by the Russian Orthodox Church including a very pervasive belief that as part of the Passover rituals Jews killed young Christian boys, drained their blood and used it in making matzahs, an unleavened bread that is traditionally consumed at Passover.

Yakov Bok has never had a lot of luck.  After five years without a child his wife left him for a Goyim.  He was a fixer, he could repair most anything.  Feeling down on his luck, he left the small shtetl where he grew up looking for a new start.  He seems to catch a break when he comes upon a wealthy man passed out in the snow from drinking and takes him to home.The man, Yakov never tells him he is Jewish, offers him a job as manager of a brick factory he owns.  Yakov is nervous because it means he will have to live at the factory, an area where Jews are not allowed to reside unless rich enough to buy permission.

Yakov rubs others at the factory the wrong way when he turns the Forman  in for embezzlement.  One day some boys break into the factory and Yakov chases them out.  To his utter horror he is arrested and accused of ritual  murder of one of the boys.  He is put into prison.  A truly horrible place.  His employer tells the authorities he was never enforced he was  a Jew.  The employer proudly wore the pin on a notorious anti-Semetic organization. The employer’s adult daughter accuses him of attempted rape, factory workers testify they saw, which never happened, meetings of Jews in Yakov’s room.  The boys mother, a woman of bad repute is presented to the court as s wonderful Christian widow who knows Yakov murdered her son.  We never learn how the boy was killed but it looks like the boyfriend of the mother killed him.

Prison is a nightmare.  The way the system worked was you could not have an attorney until you were indicted.  Yakov waits two years for this. One horrible thing  after another happens with brief periods of false hope.  This is a riveting novel.  I kept hoping for Yakov.

The power in this novel is in the feel you get for the treatment of Jews, for life in Russia in 1910, in the persona of Yakov.

The Fixer is high art.