The most salient feature in Bernard Malamud's "The Fixer" is the way he depicts anti-Semitism through the Christ-like suffering of a Jewish man unjustly imprisoned. Yakov Bok, the protagonist, is falsely accused of murdering a Christian boy, hiding the body in a cave and draining the corpse of its blood (blood being a recurring motif) in tsarist Russia in 1911.
Bok undergoes several years in a rancid, rat and bug-infested solitary cell, regularly getting beaten and tortured, while awaiting trial. He's malnourished, confined in chains and subjected to incessant body cavity searches by sadistic guards. He lives in Solzhenitsyn-like conditions -- a foreshadowing of the Soviet gulags and Nazi concentration camps to come in the 20th century.
Hallucinating, contemplating suicide, the man is at the crucible of his existence, an existential affliction not unlike Job of the Old Testament. However, Jesus Christ is the Biblical character Bok most parallels. A "fixer," Yakov is a carpenter. His three-year personal journey begins at age 30. Like Christ, Yakov is railroaded on a trump charge, accused of subversion against the government and the religious leaders and establishment of his day clamor for his decimation. Yakov reads the Gospels in prison and feels an affinity with this man, whom his tormenters worship.
Here, in wonderful irony, is the key -- and most abstract -- parallel. Jesus, a perfect man, paid the penalty of death to atone for the sins of mankind. Yakov, ostensibly incarcerated for murder, is really being punished for a crime he's blameless of -- "Christ-killer." The fixer refers to it in a reference to "bloodguilt" and quotes like, "Since the crucifixion the crime of the Christ-killer is the crime of all the Jews."
However -- and this is where Malamud's writing shows expansiveness -- Yakov is an unlikely martyr. Calling himself a "freethinker," he eschews religion and keenly reads the works of Spinoza. Baruch Spinoza, a 17th century Dutch philosopher, was exiled from the Hebrew community for works deemed heretical, primarily his view of God as an abstraction, synonymous with nature.
An unlikely savior, Bok comes off as a caustic, unlikable man in the book's beginning. Bitter about his life and short on empathy, he stopped sleeping with his wife for her failure to bare any children (a “failure” more likely due to Bok). She leaves him for another man and Yakov calls her a "whore" to her father's face. Unmerciful, he's like a slave driver to his emaciated, old horse.
He's a character many can identify with. Yakov's bitterness could well be that of any of us -- toward a lover we feel betrayed by; living hand-to-mouth, while less intelligent people flourish; not being better educated; and a multitude of missed opportunities and disappointments. Yakov feels detached from history, the world and wants to connect -- tragically unaware of what that will mean for him.
Humanly flawed, an unlikely martyr for the children of Judaism, Yakov rejects his faith, culture and arguably shows cowardice. He leaves his shetl (Jewish community), shaves the beard identified with his culture, changes his name, stops speaking Yiddish and tries to pass himself off as a gentile, hoping it will lead to economic gain. When a ferryman goes on a Hitler-like rant against Jews, Yakov drops his sack of Jewish phylacteries into the river. It's a chilling scene -- the Dneiper River symbolizing the River Hades leading to the land of the dead, the ferryman going on a diatribe like the Holocaust put in words.
"I say we ought to call our menfolk together, armed with guns, knives, pitchforks, clubs -- anything that will kill a Jew and when the church bell begins to ring we move on the Zhidy quarter, which you can tell by the stink, routing them out of wherever they're hiding -- in attics, cellars or ratholes -- bashing in their brains, stabbing their herring-filled guts, shooting off their snotty noses, no exceptions made for young or old because if you spare any, they breed like rats and then the jobs to do all over again. And when we've slaughtered the whole cursed tribe of them...we'll pile up the corpses and soak them with benzene and light fires that people will see all over the world."
It's an excellent use of foreshadowing -- something Malamud does with dead-on effect throughout the novel. Not a word is wasted. Every mention of a sausage, crucifix, bloody eye...is made with deliberateness, the symbols and augurs communicating the novel’s themes and advancing its plot. The writing is taut, achieving depth through subtlety. "The Fixer" has a readability that is the fortunate result of clear pacing, scenes and conversations segueing into the next situation, the next insightful passage. Malamud provokes such thought through intelligently written dialogue that reveals interesting characters and relationships.
Yakov's relationship with his father-in-law, Schmuel, is the book's most endearing. The old man is something of a mentor to Yakov. His gentleness, patience and religious faith complement Bok's abrasiveness, impulsivity and ambiguous view of God. It's significant that, while in prison, Yakov says to himself, "If I must suffer, let it be for something. Let it be for Schmuel."
This resolve to sacrifice himself for another is key to Yakov's transformation. But the best example of his atonement is played out in the emotional scene when his estranged wife Raisl visits him in prison. Not entirely void of his bitterness, he is able to relate to her and acknowledge where he was at fault in the relationship. From a visceral level, this is the most significant scene in the novel. Raisl tells Yakov that she bore a child by the man she had an affair with, whom she has since left. She tells him of being ostracized in the shetl and by the rabbi (another excellent use of irony) for bearing a child out of wedlock, and Yakov signs a form, saying the child is his. The best thing about this magnanimous gesture is that it's made, not as some heroic sacrifice on behalf of an oppressed people, but as an individual act performed for someone with whom he had a tumultuous history.
The second best thing about this scene is Yakov's resolve. The authorities tell him that with a signed confession, he can be released, just as he was earlier told that if he accepted Christ, he could be set free. But he doesn't budge an inch. The show of courage marks a reversal of the cowardice he showed earlier, the denial of who he was. Along with the prison conversion to a bigger humanity, Yakov is shown to be a smarter character. It's a demonstration of Malamud's skill as a writer that he portrayed Yakov as stupid when he needed him to be and smart when the plot called for it. This is done in a subtle way that shows transformation, not inconsistency.
Early in the book, Bok enters the city of Kiev, an area forbidden to Jews. In one of his earliest acts of selflessness, Yakov helps an old drunk man who is passed out in the snow. One can argue over Yakov's judgment in performing this Good Samaritan deed. A button on the man's coat identifies him as a member of the Black Hundreds, an arch-conservative, anti-Jewish organization. From the relationship Yakov forms with this character, Lebedev, all the traps are laid that will ensnare him. Lebedev offers Yakov a job as a bookkeeper in his brick factory, requires that he live on the plant property (in an area forbidden to Jews) and his daughter, Zinaida, does everything to seduce him. As a reader, one can see all the landmines Yakov is blind to, and you want to yell at him to get out.
It's great plot construction. Malamud sets up the scenes with adeptness. Also, it's not without purpose that Malamud has Lebedev read the Bible’s Sermon on the Mount to Yakov. It's significant that Christ's poetic words are belied by the public railing for Yakov's destruction. Malamud goes beyond anti-Semitism to cast light on the human propensity for cruelty, its full-circle, regenerating ubiquity. In Yakov's world, what comes across is that: the piety is false, hatred of Jews is stronger than any professed faith in Jesus; the mass of people don't care about bringing the boy's real killer to justice, only pinning it on a Jew, and if he is acquitted, they'll find another Jew to sacrifice.
Based largely on an actual incident, the Beilis case, "The Fixer" was written some 50 years later in the 1960s. Now, 40 years after the book's publication, its themes are still relevant. For America, the obvious parallel is the long detaining of Guantánamo Bay prisoners denied due process. The issues raised in this novelistic treatment continue to reverberate in America, the world over: justice and humanity as casualties of political ambition; vilification of a group to inspire patriotism, national unity and deflect from societal dysfunction; and the press and religious establishment accommodation in the mass manipulation.
Consistently safeguarding his work from the maudlin, Malamud suggests there is potential for the oppressed to become oppressors. In one scene, Yakov "imagines himself tearing the deputy warden's face apart and kicking him to death." It's a shadowy, uneasy future Malamud hints at. Amid the sacrifice, the heroism, there lurks the danger of creating martyrs, saviors, idols. One can see how a Lennin or Trotsky can happen. Malamud doesn't let the reader off easy.
Gateway Literature: I think of "The Fixer" as part of a trilogy of books, the other two being Kafka's "The Trial" and Albert Camus's "The Stranger." All three novels involve the legal system and take an existentialist view of the absurdity of life. While all the books contain elements of each other, each takes its own focus. "The Stranger" raises the issue of finding meaning in an absurd reality. "The Trial" focuses on the surreal, impersonal nature of modern beuracracy. Significantly, it takes a secular view of man's guilt by nature of being human, while "The Fixer" refers to inborn Jewish "bloodguilt." Interestingly, you can take that back to the Christian view of inherited sin.
Outside the box gateway literature: “Winesburg, Ohio" by Sherwood Anderson. I always hated the line, "Everyone in the world is Christ and they are all crucified." It's so anathema to my beliefs. But after reading Yakov playing the martyr and hearing myself and other people in his complaining, I've come to the opinion that we all have a tendency toward self-pity. We all play the martyr and put ourselves on the cross.
Also, Anderson influenced Faulkner and Faulkner influenced Malamud so really, how far outside the box is it?
Great review!
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