Conscience of a Lawyer review

Few Americans are familiar with the name, Clifford Durr, and that’s a shame. A tireless advocate for civil liberties, Durr is one of America’s unsung heroes. John A. Salmond’s book, Conscience of a Lawyer, is an excellent starting point for learning about this unusual man who at great risk to his own reputation, fought to defend the constitutional rights of others.

The term, “conscience of a lawyer” sounds oxymoronic, but in Durr’s case it was true. In the interests of upholding the Constitution, he fought for people who could never afford to pay him. Few attorneys would make such sacrifices, but then Durr didn’t hold the profession in high esteem, himself. However, he did have a love for law.

People with a passing knowledge of Durr likely only know him as the white Southern attorney who posted the money for Rosa Parks’ bond after she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Jim Crow era Alabama. That alone is fascinating -- a white man living in the 1950s segregated south standing in favor of racial equality. But by that time, Durr was near the end of his career. His record of fighting for the underdog was long established.

As a young lawyer, he was a New Deal warrior in FDR’s administration. He helped prepare U.S. industry for transition to a wartime economy as entry into World War II loomed closer. While serving as a member of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) during the 1940s, he fought corporate monopoly of the radio airwaves in favor the public interest. Upon leaving public life in Washington D.C, Durr worked on behalf of unionists and took on cases no other lawyer would touch – of people tarnished by anti-communist witch hunts and African-Americans bullied by racist cops and courts.

Salmond sticks primarily to the public side of Durr’s life. He gives a window into the strains that work, health problems, career and financial setbacks put on his marriage and family, but overall the book is about Durr’s professional life. That is as it should be. He’s not a well-known figure and his public battles against the Establishment of his day are the things Americans should know about. There probably wouldn’t be anything juicy to write about anyway. He was a devoutly religious family man married to the same woman for nearly 50 years and his life was free of scandal, unless one considers what people of the time considered to be his scandalous behavior in treating African-Americans and left-wingers with respect.

The book is insightful in describing how his forward thinking evolved, despite the influence from his family and community. The contradictions between Durr’s career and the culture that formed him make for the most fascinating elements of the book. He was born to Southern gentility, the grandson of affluent slave owners who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, and he retained pride in his Southern heritage throughout his life. As a young man, he subscribed to the paternalistic view of African-Americans he had been enculturated into. Yet, in later adulthood, Durr harbored more enlightened, egalitarian views and tenaciously defended African-Americans who had been wronged by the system. Yet because of the way he was raised, Durr probably never felt comfortable around blacks.

His philosophical views were unique and interesting. Durr never considered himself to be a soldier in the Civil Rights movement. Upholding the rights of African-Americans, to Durr, was a civil liberties issue. He defended them, not because they were black, but because they were American citizens. Durr reasoned that if the constitutional rights of one group could be violated, then the rights of all Americans were vulnerable.

He held unique views about the South. As one born and bred in that region, he took personally the South’s failure to become more tolerant, feeling like he had failed too. Interestingly, while so much of the South seemed backward, he reminded people of its more positive contributions in its history – the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers.

Having worked in the news media, I find his views regarding broadcasting to be amazing and more relevant now than ever. Today, the FCC is nothing more than a rubber stamp for corporations. Durr believed the airwaves belonged to the people, that there should be some restraints on advertising and that space should be reserved for news, educational and cultural programming that served the public interest. As an FCC chair, he constantly challenged corporate mergers and decisions that he felt would take away local autonomy and silence dissenting views, maintaining that the airwaves should be open to a diversity of opinion. His progressive views earned him the umbrage of the broadcast industry, and maybe that’s why there is no one in power fighting for those First Amendment principles today. Few people are going to take on the corporate behometh, and that’s why we have a vapid, hyper-saturated, yet homogenous Media Industrial Complex today. Durr’s take on the media as a public interest would be revolutionary today, but it’s a common sense view in need of revisiting. At least, public TV and radio exists as part of his legacy.

Durr was both Christian and liberal, making his views extremely relevant in 2010. Today, when the Religious Right has hijacked the word, “Christian,” the term seems incompatible with “liberal.” Durr, however, felt that civil liberties and the teachings of Christ went hand-in-hand. His progressive views took him out of good stead with others in his Presbyterian congregation -- people just as prejudiced, judgmental and retrograde as a lot of church members today. After leaving town to defend people branded as communists in a kangaroo court, Durr returned to church and found the Sunday school class he taught to be empty. I’m a churchgoer and Christ follower, myself, and I wonder if I wouldn’t meet the same kind of reaction. It pains me, but I know some people at my church have shared racist chain e-mails about Mexicans and Middle Eastern Muslims. I also know that a member of my church has “Ann Coulter quotes” as a link on her Facebook page. Like Durr, I don’t think Christian love and hatred go together, but apparently churches have been on the wrong side of history for a long time.

As one studying to become a teacher, I want to guide young people toward discovering the lessons of history. Even kindergartners could take something from Durr’s story. The idea of stepping outside your comfort realm, helping people who may be different from you and refusing to stand by when bullies threaten others – that’s a powerful concept. Most adults don’t want to get involved, but hopefully we can counter the mind-numbing effects of an overly saturated media and impart a sense of civic responsibility in the next generation. By exposing students to little known heroes like Durr, we can help raise the level of social consciousness and awareness.

Best line: “Without ever arguing the shame and superstition of institutional religion, he drew sustenance from the Gospel and for him Thomas Jefferson and the First Amendment were the secular equivalents of universal values.” -- Journalist I.F “Izzy” Stone, commenting on Durr after his death in 1975.

Gateway Reading: Outside the Magic Circle by Virginia Durr. Clifford Durr’s wife was even more diehard in her support of social justice and racial equality than he was. More gregarious and outspoken than her somewhat reserved husband, she was also a product of the Old South oligarchy and had to unlearn prejudice just as he did. Her autobiography is thought-provoking and the account of her social activism from the New Deal through the Civil Rights era is riveting.

Bus Ride to Justice by Fred Gray. He is known today as The Civil Rights attorney, a legend who represented Martin Luther King, Jr., the Freedom Riders, Selma-to-Montgomery marchers and victims of the Tuskegee syphilis study. But in 1955, he was a young, wet-behind-the ears attorney fresh out of law school – one of only two African-American lawyers in Montgomery, Alabama. He was the front man in representing Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, but behind the scenes he had a lot of help from Clifford Durr.

AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: Roads to Memphis Preview Clip 2

AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: Roads to Memphis Preview Clip 1

"Roads to Memphis" review

The DVD, Roads to Memphis, an episode of the spectacular PBS series, American Experience, traces the steps taken by Martin Luther King, Jr. and James Earl Ray leading to the fatal moment when Ray shot King to death on the balcony of a Memphis hotel more than 40 years ago.

King was in Memphis to support the city’s striking sanitation workers. By 1968, many of the seemingly insurmountable aims of Civil Rights movement been achieved. Yet, while federal legislation had been enacted to protect African-Americans from discrimination, economic disparities remained, leaving many shut out from the mainstream of society. King was broadening his activism to fight poverty. The tragic irony in this is that is that King was killed, just as he was poised to help people like Ray

Roads to Memphis reveals how Ray and his brothers were raised in a shack and often deprived of necessities, such as food and heating. Their father was in and out of jail, their mother was a prostitute and the boys were looked down upon in school. The Ray family was at the bottom of the heap, ostracized even by poor people in the community who still had more than they did.

At 40 years-old, Ray was a career criminal and escaped fugitive from prison still craving respect and recognition. “Roads to Memphis” is fascinating in the way it reveals how Ray’s state of mind would propel him to kill the leading figure in the Civil Rights struggle. Like many others, Ray killed for the notoriety. He deluded himself with the false belief that killing King would make him a hero. Ray became absorbed in the racist rhetoric of third party presidential candidate and firebrand segregationist George Wallace. The documentary correctly refers to King’s assassination as the “last spasm” of the segregationist south. Historians commented on how Ray believed that by assassinating King, he would help Wallace, reclaim southern tradition and be lauded as a hero.

Today, King is a revered figure whose birthday is a national holiday. He has rightfully gained mainstream acceptance as a historical figure studied in school by kids of all races. However, this normalization tends to leave a watered down view of history that obscures the volatility that gripped American during the 1960s. Roads to Memphis brings back the intensity and turmoil of an era that is growing steadily hazier. Vivid film images of inner city race riots and African Americans, bloody from being beaten by police batons, captures the mood of the country at that time.

The most unsettling thing about this view of the past, however, is not how it differs from today, but how it is the same. Oh sure, King is today looked upon as a hero. There’s even a black president, which would have unheard of 40 years ago. But one only has to see the old film coverage of men in gray Civil War era uniforms unfurling the Confederate flag at a George Wallace rally suffused with rabble-rousing, race-baiting fervor to recognize the parallels with America in 2010.

Today’s ultra conservative politicians and talking heads aren’t attacking African-Americans. Not directly at least. It’s not fashionable today to make African-Americans the enemy; today’s smear artists have new scapegoats -- Mexicans, Muslims and homosexuals. It is chilling to hear historians talk in Roads to Memphis about how southern whites feared racial equality for blacks would mean the loss of their jobs and an end to their way of life.

Racism against African-Americans is not as out in the open as it was 40 or 50 years ago, but isn’t it interesting how the stars and bars and glorification of Confederate soldiers and “southern tradition” occasionally pop up in hyper-conservative pockets, hostile to the Obama presidency? In the tea party movement, opposition to healthcare reform is just a convenient veil to legitimize the underlying racism that becomes more expressive in the sign slogans and crude caricatures of Barack Obama at their rallies.

King laid down his life for people who, for too long, had been kept down by the system. Advocating for the sanitation workers -- their rights to a living wage, safe working conditions and to be treated with dignity – was part of a broader human rights issue. King was on the side of progress and encountered backlash for it. It’s the same deal today. People who push for economic and social justice are scorned by right wing extremists.

Roads to Memphis illustrates how the loaded hate speech of demagogues helped lodge the bullets inside the chamber of the Remington rifle that would cut down the life of a man, for whom non-violence was a way of life. Given the toxic level of rancor polluting the airwaves today, it is something to think about.

People today are being misled into sabatoging their own interests, just as they were 40 years ago. As disenfranchised groups, African-Americans and poor southern whites would have been formidable allies, but such a natural union would have been heretical to the crowds enflamed with white supremacist vituperation. The ruling class had a vested interest in keeping it that way. As long as these two groups were enemies, they were no threat to them.

Gateway film: I Am a Man. Elmore Nickelberry and Leslie Moore -- Memphis sanitation workers who took part in the strike more than 40 years ago --- talked about the tumultuous period in Roads to Memphis. The documentary, I Am a Man, approximately 30 minutes in length focuses on their story. The film can be accessed on-line at http://www.iamamanthemovie.com/.

Gateway Literature: Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign by Michael K. Honey. This book by a labor historian gives a detailed account of the strikers’ plight and King’s efforts to help them.

jguyreview: "Elmer Gantry" review

jguyreview: "Elmer Gantry" review

"Elmer Gantry" review

The protagonist of the Sinclair Lewis novel, “Elmer Gantry,” is a sham preacher who uses the church pulpit to advance his insatiable lust for power and self-glorification. Pugnacious, provincial and unscrupulous, he’s a character many would recognize – the burly, baritone-voiced pastor, always seeking publicity for his “moral crusades.”

Lewis’s book is picaresque in its portrayal of a rogue character going from one adventure to the next, never finding redemption. Part of the fun in reading the book is finding out what despicable thing Elmer Gantry is going to do next.

At times, the book lags as the story transitions to Elmer’s next adventure, but overall it keeps the reader engaged. The book’s most page turning appeal is in its portrayal of the cozy relationship between church and commerce. Church life is depicted as affectation – rotarianism in the guise of devout worship. The backroom politics, in-fighting and rivalries of the church business are a world in which the self-aggrandizing Elmer thrives.

In this respect, “Elmer Gantry” follows the vein of Lewis’s earlier novels, “Main Street” and “Babbitt.” Written in the 1920s, the books are a social critique of post-World War I mainstream America, portrayed as vapid, soulless and with an unthinking drive toward affluence. In “Elmer Gantry,” the white-bred Protestant church is an arm of the Establishment, preserving the status quo. The novel reflects a trend of the era – propagated in best-selling books like Bruce Barton’s “The Man Nobody Knows” – of equating Christianity with capitalism, a forerunner of the recent “prosperity theology” trend.

With “Elmer Gantry,” Lewis responded to several trends and news events of his era, which sound strangely contemporary. Elmer is a fundamentalist preacher who denounces the Godless teaching of evolution – an issue that first arose out of the Scopes trial. He rides to fame by attacking immorality. If Elmer Gantry were around today, he would be lashing out against gay marriage, abortion and fighting the “culture wars.” In the novel, he rails against alcohol and other forms of vice like gambling, tobacco and prostitution – the political footballs of his day. Like many clergymen of recent years, Elmer indulges in the same illicit pleasures he condemns from the pulpit. He is an incessant womanizer and carries on extra-marital affairs.

The novel begins around 1902 when Elmer is a college football star at a Baptist school in rural Kansas. Nicknamed “Hellcat,” he is rebellious, irreverent and disdains piety. He is revealed in the first few paragraphs to be a drunkard and bully. One night, he picks a fight with men heckling a proselytizing fellow classmate and his actions are misinterpreted to be a public conversion to the Christian faith.

Initially, Elmer vacillates between trying to please his atheist roommate, Jim Lefferts, and those trying to bring him into the fold. But Elmer has a sonorous voice that buttresses his powers of elocution. His ability to command an audience can yield him the dominance and adoration he desires. The ministry seems a perfect fit for his inexorable narcism so Elmer Gantry becomes a Christian.

Privately, Elmer is indifferent to the ideas he espouses so bombastically from the pulpit. He feels there may be something to this Christianity, but essentially he neither believes nor disbelieves. Extremely shallow, it’s as if he lacks the most fundamental introspection needed to comprehend spiritual matters. Elmer is drawn to the business side of church, pulpit orotund, officiating over the various components of church beauracracy and using sales and marketing techniques to publicize his churches – and himself. He is described at various points with words like “commercial” and “ward politician.”

The book follows Elmer through seminary school and his ministerial career as he advances to the helm of bigger and wealthier congregations. He progresses from backwater country churches ultimately to a large metropolitan church in the fictional city and state of Zenith, Winemac, the same setting as the novel “Babbitt.” Everywhere Elmer goes, he leaves behind scandal and shattered lives, while he emerges unscathed. Under the scrutiny of today’s aggressive media, he would be exposed as has been the case with many modern Gantrys. Towards the end of the book, however, there is a question about whether this Teflon preacher’s luck has run out.

Lewis appears to have fun with this character, mocking him with a sense of humor. He sets up scenes in which it appears that Elmer will finally show a shred of compassion, then hits the reader by having him do something cruel. In the final chapters, however, his ambitions and rising power grow pernicious, foreshadowing disturbing trends of the coming decades. He becomes the head of an organization, NAPAP (National Association for the Purification of the Arts and Press), which sounds uncannily similar to such future operations as the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family. He appears alarmist, fear-mongering and McCarthy-esque, when addressing a meeting of clergymen and running down a list of saloons and brothels, and proclaiming that they be shut down. He convinces the police to make him a lieutenant leading a vice squad.

In the most chilling scene of the book, a young woman is humming “Onward Christian Soldiers” when Gantry’s posse forces its way into her home like the Gestapo. Then they barge into the bedroom of her half-dressed roommate and a man, bent on arresting them for the crime of pre-marital sex.

Elmer’s ego grows dangerously delusional in the final chapters of the book as he imagines becoming “super-president” and “emperor of America.” While Elmer is one-dimensional, other characters provide the depth that gives the book its substance – particularly the characters Jim Lefferts and Frank Schallard. They are counter-weights to Elmer.

While Elmer is domineering over everyone else, he is the subordinate one in his friendship with Lefferts, whose approval he is always seeking. The best of friends, the two are opposites. Elmer is crude, uncultured and eschews books. Jim is elegant, scholarly and possesses a personal library. While Elmer “swallows ideas whole,” Jim is contemplative, deliberate. Even their positions on the football team denote their differences. Elmer plays tackle, a supplier of brute force; Jim is quarterback, the team strategist. (Elmer is only strategic in dreaming up his own PR.)

Frank is a fellow student at the seminary where Elmer trains for the ministry. Scholarly, pensive, empathetic, he is everything Elmer is not. The son of a Baptist minister, he is tortured by doubts that go against his religious training. Still, he feels a responsibility toward the people to whom he is ministering.

The characters, Jim and Frank, juxtaposed with Elmer illustrate one of the book’s most prevailing themes: provincialism versus intellectualism, or “Fundamentalism” versus “Higher Criticism,” terms which recur throughout the book. Fundamentalism first came to prominence in the 1920s. The conservative Christian movement promoting literal interpretation of scripture was a response to Higher Criticism, a school of thought that originated in Europe during the 1870s and spread to America at the turn of the century. Higher Criticism did not accept the Bible as literal or infallible and judged it by the same standards as other literary and historical works.

Lewis’s book piques interest in early 20th century history with quick mentions of the Four Minute Man movement (a PR campaign to drum up support for World War I), the Klu Klux Klan (at the peak of its popularity in the 1920s) and violent labor strikes. These passing references place in concrete terms the intolerant ideas Elmer and other well-heeled church leaders perpetuate: prejudice, nativism and paternalism. Church is depicted as a social mechanism for the affluent to keep the common people in their place, an idea Lewis first introduced in “Babbitt.” Today, with declining attendance, churches probably don’t wield that much social control, but it is interesting to examine their cultural role 80 to 100 years ago.

Along with references to such forgotten trends as “muscular Christianity” and the “New Thought” movement, “Elmer Gantry” makes allusions to famous people of the time, obscure today. Some say Elmer’s character was inspired by Billy Sunday, the vitriolic, two-fisted professional baseball player-turned-evangelist. Interestingly, Sunday was accused of plagiarizing the writings of agnostic Robert Ingersoll into his sermons, something Elmer does repeatedly throughout the novel.

The character Sharon Falconer is a dead ringer for Aime Sempe McPherson, a renowned evangelist of the ‘20s. McPherson, a self-styled “phrophetess,” and “faith healer” was a shrewd businesswoman who pioneered the concepts of Christian enterprise, megachurches and the use of glitzy showbiz theatrics in church services. She was known to be difficult to work for and to have had several lovers -- all characteristics that Sharon has in spades.

Sharon is the female counterpart to Elmer, but much more compelling. The only true love of Elmer’s life, she is sensual, passionate and delusional, believing in the cult of her own marketed image. Under her tutelage, Elmer cuts his teeth in the religion business. Like no other character in the book, she is the quintessence of the gimmickry and tacky commercialization of Christianity today. When Lewis describes the ostentatious cross revolving iridescently above Sharon’s just constructed dream temple, one can see it vividly. Sharon is Joan of Arc-like in the most climactic scene in the book. A few of the side characters in “Elmer Gantry” are worthy of being protagonists in their own novels, but none more than Sharon. In the most eldritch scene of the book, she and Elmer make love before a pagan altar – a scene that seems over the top until one learns that it mirrors an account told by a man who claimed to be a former lover of McPherson’s.

Most of the material for “Elmer Gantry,” however, was gleaned from Lewis’s direct observations of regular, everyday people – more interesting than the celebrity references. Lewis modeled Elmer’s character much more on the Kansas clergymen he observed than he did on Sunday. He attended several church services in the Kansas City-Overland Park area, became acquainted with several clergymen and took part in Bible studies. Lewis did his research; he brilliantly captures vernacular and colloquialisms of the early 20th century Kansas. He evokes images of the prairie, small village life and the rustic sounding names he gives his fictional towns are irresistible. It has been speculated that Terwilinger College where Elmer attends is based on Ottawa University, a Baptist school in northeast Kansas and that Thorvilsen College, Tewillinger’s rival is modeled on Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas.

The most common criticism leveled against “Elmer Gantry” – and a legitimate one -- is its one-sidedness. From the tone of the book, it would be easy to conclude that Lewis was atheist or agnostic, but the record of his personal views is opaque. While some of his early writings attack religious hypocrisy, in his youth, Lewis considered becoming a missionary. One could speculate that he was afflicted with an inner conflict of faith versus doubt like Frank – the character he would create. One might also surmise that he turned his back on religion and became an atheist like Jim. However, Jim had polish and Lewis was awkward and gangly. There is another interesting possibility. Eddie Fislinger, a somewhat dim-witted college student, is something of a pest with his constant declarations of religious piety. As a student at Oberlin College in Ohio, Lewis was known to drive fellow classmates crazy with his persistent religiosity. So perhaps Eddie is a version of the youthful Lewis. Maybe all three characters possess components of Lewis’s personality. Lewis’s own comment on Elmer does nothing to clear the ambiguity: “I kind of like that guy.”

The concepts of faith and belief are explored in an exchange between Frank and a theology professor Bruno Zechlin. In the most penetrating dialogue of the book, the older man confides that he’s an atheist. Their conversation introduces the most thought provoking theme to appear in the book: Is religion, even if proven false, a good thing because it brings hope to peoples’ lives?

Lewis squanders an excellent opportunity to produce a counter-argument from the perspective of belief and spiritual authenticity. Andrew Pengilly, an old Civil War veteran turned Methodist minister, is the only truly virtuous and genuine clergyman in the book. At one point, he and Elmer meet and the old man asks him, “Mr. Gantry, why don’t you believe in God?” There is a thud as the chapter ends. Lewis could have produced lively dialogue, exploring the theme of sincere religion versus churchy pretensions, but he lets the opportunity slip by.

Lewis also makes some disappointing decisions in the development of certain characters late in the book, mostly with Frank. He turns this likable character into a whining crybaby as he launches on a tirade about his fellow ministers and loss of faith. Clearly, Lewis was casting Frank’s intellectualism as effeminate in contrast to Elmer’s simple-mindedness in connection with virility, but it’s not worth it. This was the sad waste of a good character.

Also, Lewis’s treatment of two female characters -- Lulu (Elmer’s mistress) and Cleo (his wife) -- late in the book is unrealistic. They remain obsequious to him despite the emotional abuse he heaps on them. In reality, Cleo probably would be servile to Elmer, but more out of resignation or fear, than love, which is what she does in the book. Also, early in the book, Elmer gets Lulu in trouble and deserts her. How likely is it that she is going to show up years later and throw herself at his feet? Or did he really get her pregnant? She tearfully gives every indication that she’s in the family way, yet when she reappears years later, married with two kids, there is no mention of whether one of them might be Elmer’s child. So what happened? Did he knock her up or what?

This is the only flaw in the plot development, but it’s a bothersome one. The problems with plot and character keep “Elmer Gantry” from being a great book, but it is very good, well worth reading and definitely a classic.

“Elmer Gantry” was written at a time when people were more naïve and apt to put blind faith in their ministers. No doubt, that mindset contributed to the controversy the book provoked. Sunday called Lewis one of “Satan’s cohorts.” The book was banned, Lewis was threatened with jail and lynch mobs wanted to get hold of him, ironically the same kind of violence intolerant thugs resorted to in “Elmer Gantry.”

Today, after so many evangelists have been exposed as frauds, Elmer Gantry appears a familiar character. In our era of megachurches marketing “hip” services, “Intelligent Design” controversies, court battles over church and state boundaries and the mega-hot-button issue of gay marriage, “Elmer Gantry” is timely.

Best line: “Oh, I hate the little vices – smoking, swearing, scandal, drinking just enough to be silly. I like the big ones – murder, lust, cruelty, ambition!” – Sharon Falconer

Gateway literature: “White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement” by Allan J. Lichtman. This book traces the origin of the Christian conservative movement to the 1920s.

“In His Steps” by Charles Sheldon. This book, written in 1896 by a Kansas minister, introduced the phrase, “What would Jesus do?” Although the phrase has been adopted by conservative evangelicals, Sheldon was a liberal pioneer of the “social gospel” movement. If not his book, one would do well to at least read Timothy Miller’s essay on Sheldon in the book, “John Brown to Bob Dole: Movers and Shakers in Kansas History.”

“Oil” by Upton Sinclair. A character in the novel is based on Aimee Sempe McPherson.

“The Scarlett Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. This classic novel gets a mention in “Elmer Gantry and if you haven’t read it, you should.

Outside the Box literature: “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison. At one point in “Elmer Gantry,” the cynical, worldly attorney and church deacon T.J. Rigg describes his role with the church as a “hobby.” He takes a paternalistic tone that reminds me of Mr. Norton, a minor character in the “Invisible Man” who uses his trusteeship of a black college to boost his ego.

"The Fixer" review

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?