Fixer (Malamud)

The Fixer 
Bernard Malamud, 1966
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374529383


Summary
Winner, 1966 Pulitizer Prize and National Book Award

The Fixer is Bernard Malamud's best-known and most acclaimed novel—one that makes manifest his roots in Russian fiction, especially that of Isaac Babel.

Set in Kiev in 1911 during a period of heightened anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young Russian boy. Bok leaves his village to try his luck in Kiev, and after denying his Jewish identity, finds himself working for a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Society.

When the boy is found nearly drained of blood in a cave, the Black Hundreds accuse the Jews of ritual murder. Arrested and imprisoned, Bok refuses to confess to a crime that he did not commit. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—April 28, 1914
• Where—Brooklyn, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., City College of New York; M.A., Columbia
   University
• Awards—National Book Award (twice); Pulitizer Prize

Bernard Malamud, perhaps more than any Jewish-American author in the twentieth century, including Saul Bellow, translated the literature of the Eastern European shtetl to the streets of America. So carefully written, so diligently constructed, are his stories and novels that one could erringly view them as narratives that represent a certain current of "Jewish" writing, or as period pieces. Upon numerous re-readings of his many works, the exact opposite feeling is engendered. This is one of the most profound literati of our age, and his contributions will surely transcend the earthly time in which they were written.

Because of the reconstruction of The Natural (1952) as a movie with a happy ending, belying the bitter pill swallowed by slugger Roy Hobbs at the end of the book, Malamud's popularity has enjoyed a revival, particularly for elevating the game of baseball—already an American fantasy—to the realm of mythos. The truth was that true to his literary forebears, I.L. Peretz and Sholom Aleichem, Malamud's reliance upon myth, legend, and magic often helped convey the most intimate details of existence, and consequently, life's pathos and sadness as much as life's joy and fulfillment. Malamud explicated the tragic role of the Jew in many of his stories, including The Fixer (1966), which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and later was adapted into a motion picture. That novel was based on the true story of Mendel Beilis, victim of the Kiev Blood Libel of 1913.

The stories are marked by a faithfulness to accent and tone that lends an unmistakable reality to every sentence and idea Malamud chose to set forth. The Magic Barrel (1954) is the diadem of his many short pieces. The sufferings of a rabbinic student, Leo Finkle, and his heroic but ungainly attempt to turn his life inside out, as he grasps desperately with his forlorn search for a marriage partner, are wrenching and inexpressibly moving. Suffering is Malamud's focus, and no author probed the subject more intensely.

The crowning literary achievement for Malamud came with the publication of The Assistant (1957). Again, mixing myth with reality, a virtual monk, Morris Bober, a grocer, welcomes into his cell the itinerant ne'er-do-well, Frank Alpine, whose initials most surely stand for the wonder-worker, St. Francis of Assisi. In the strictness of his prose, Malamud reshapes the grocery into a kind of Jewish monastery, as Frank, the repentant, becomes Morris's disciple in training for a new vocation. At a certain point in his novitiate, Frank asks Morris: "Tell me why it is that Jews suffer so much? It seems to me that they like to suffer, don't they?" Morris answers: "Do you like to suffer? They suffer because they are Jews." Frank responds: "That's what I mean, they suffer more than they have to." Morris replies: "If you live, you suffer. Some people suffer more, but not because they want. But I think if a Jew don't suffer for the Law, he will suffer for nothing. What do you suffer for Morris?" said Frank. "I suffer for you," Morris said calmly. "What do you mean?" asked Frank. "I mean you suffer for me."

The aching reality. The underlying mythos. The seeming simplicity. All point to the immeasurable depth of a master artisan and artist whose literary bequest remains one of the Jewish community's most priceless possessions. (From Barnes & Noble, courtesy of Congregation Emanu-El of the City of New York.)

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Book Reviews
A literary event in any season.
Eliot Fremont-Smith - The New York Times

The Fixer deserves to rank alongside the great Jewish-American novels of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.
The Independent (London)

Brilliant [and] harrowing . . . Historical reality combined with fictional skill and beauty of a high order make [it] a novel of startling importance.
Elizabeth Hardwick - Vogue

What makes it a great book, above and beyond its glowing goodness, has to do with something else altogether: its necessity...This novel, like all great novels reminds us that we must do something.
Jonathan Safran Foer (Introduction to this edition)

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Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Fixer:

1. What is the thematic significance of the title? Why is the novel called, "The Fixer"?

2. The New York Times reviewer, Eliot Fremont-Smith wrote that all Malamud's books deal with the theme of redemption: redemption being...

the movement from "fate or the way things unspeakably are...to individual acts of courage or conscience" and to the realization that "hope is part of the way things are, part of what is given."

In what way, then, might The Fixer be seen as a story of redemption?

3. Why does Yakov leave the shtetl for Kiev? What is he looking for, what does he want? Might Malamud be drawing a possible parallel between Adam & Eve...or Faust?

4. Following up on Question 3: is there a way in which Yakov is responsible for his misfortunes...or is he thoroughly passive, a victim of fate and the machinations of a corrupt system? Does it matter when it comes to how we view Yakov—as hero...or victim...or martyr? Or is he all of those? Or none?

5. Why does Bibikov, the prosecutor, come to believe in Yakov's innocence?

6. Why does Yakov reject religion. Why, even when imprisoned and subjected to brutality, does he not seek solace in God? What does the philosopher Spinoza's teachings offer him that he doesn't find in Judaism? You might do some investigation of Spinoza's life—his ideas and works.

7. Yakov and his father-in-law debate whether God has abandoned Yakov, or Yakov abandoned God? Which do you think? Has Yakov been singled out to bear the punishment of humankind? This is a central question of the Book of Job, as well as The Fixer. Does that question still have resonance today, in the 21st century?

8. In what way is Yakov transformed during his harrowing years in prison?

9. Comment on this passage from The Fixer: "In chains all that was left of freedom was life, just existence; but to exist without choice was the same as death." Yes? No? (Existentialists, like Jean Paul Sarte, believe that we always have choice—even in chains. So...following this passage's logic, it would mean that life has worth—chains or not.)

10. Talk about the historical roots—and practice—of anti-semitism in Russia. Do some research into the many pogroms Jews were subjected to throughout the millennia. How was anti-semitism manifested throughout Europe, Britain, and America...even before the Holocaust. Has the face of anti-semitism changed today?

11. Can you compare The Fixer to other works you might have read in which an individual confronts an unjust, brutal monolithic state—works by Camus ... Orwell ... Dostoyevsky ... Solzhenitsyn ... the myth of Prometheus? Others?

12. The book ends as Yakov is finally to undergo his trial, a long awaited event. What do you think the verdict will be? Given the logic of the narrative, will he be found innocent or guilty?

13. Malamud's story is based on a real murder in Russia and the imprisonment and trial of Mendel Bielis. Beilis was eventually exonerated—after his plight became an international cause celebre. Does this knowledge change the way you see this story? Does it undermine Malamud's intent in The Fixer? Does it lessen Yakov's struggle with life's meaning — or rob him of redemption? Or none of these?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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