The Fixer
by Bernard Malamud
Summary
Yakov Bok is a fixer, a man who mends whatever is brought to him, and at the start of the book he has nothing left in his village: no work, no money, and a wife who has left him and is said to be carrying another man's child. He takes his father in law's horse, sells it at the river, conceals the fact that he is a Jew, and goes to Kiev to start again.
He does well for a few weeks. He pulls a drunk out of the snow, the drunk turns out to own a brickworks, and Yakov is given a job as overseer and lodgings in a district where Jews are forbidden to live. Then a boy is found stabbed in a cave nearby, the newspapers call it a ritual murder, and the police come for the foreman with the false papers.
Most of the novel is a cell. Yakov is held for two years without an indictment, chained, searched, starved, and offered a confession every few weeks with a pardon attached, and he will not sign it. The plot is entirely a question of whether one stubborn and unremarkable man can be made to say what the state wants said.
Malamud writes plainly and the book is hard going on purpose: cold, humiliating, and occasionally funny in the driest way available. It ends before the trial begins.
Around three hundred and thirty five pages.
Best for readers who want the political novel stripped to its frame, and who can accept endurance as a plot.
Historical Context & Significance
The Fixer won both the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 1967 National Book Award, Bernard Malamud's second National Book Award after The Magic Barrel, and it is the book his reputation rests on.
It retells the Beilis case. Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Jewish clerk at a Kiev brick factory, was arrested in 1911 and tried for the ritual murder of a Christian boy. His acquittal by a jury of the Tsar's own subjects became an international scandal about Russian antisemitism. Malamud wrote the novel in the early 1960s, and readers then and since have taken the Tsarist frame as a way of approaching the Holocaust at one remove.
Beilis's descendants have long argued that Malamud took too much from Beilis's 1926 memoir, The Story of My Sufferings, and a 2011 edition of that memoir sets out thirty five parallel passages. Malamud's biographer accepts the verbal echoes and defends the novel as a different achievement. John Frankenheimer filmed it in 1968 with Alan Bates, who was nominated for an Academy Award.