The Fixer

By Bernard Malamud

This book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1967.

This is a political novel, detailing the imprisonment of a Jewish man wrongly accused of killing a boy. It is set in Russia in the early 1900s, shortly before the Russian revolution. It is a story of prejudice and antisemitism. It is also based on the true story of Menahem Mendel Beilis.
Beilis worked in a brickyard and he was a Jew, but not devout. He was accused of killing a boy in a ritual murder. Basically, the state had no case against him. As in Malamud's novel, the state decided to coerce a confession out of Beilis. To that end he was imprisoned in the worst conditions, treated inhumanely and accused of the most ridiculous crimes, all in an attempt to break his will and get him to confess to the murder rather than take the case to trial. The blatant antisemitism of the case attracted international attention and the outcry against the Russian regime helped bring Beilis to trial. He was acquitted and later immigrated to Palestine and then to the USA.
In Malamud's version, Beilis is Yakov Bok. Bok is also a non-devout Jew who works in a brickyard and he is accused of a murder he didn't commit. He is imprisoned for two years under terrible despicable conditions all to force him to confess to a crime he didn't commit. He knows he is innocent and he refuses to knuckle under. One reason he does this is because he wants to protect his people, the Jews: "So what can Yakov Bok do about it? All he can do is not make things worse. He's half a Jew himself, yet enough of one to protect them. After all, he knows the people; and he believes in their right to be Jews and live in the world like men. He is against those who are against them. He will protect them to the extent he can. This is his covenant with himself." Bok knows if he caves and signs the confession, it will be used as an excuse to attack and slaughter the Jews living in Russia.

This was a difficult novel to read. The antisemitism portrayed in it is disgusting and nauseating, especially as it is a true picture of antisemitism then and now. Bok spends two years locked away in solitary under horrible conditions. It was depressing to read about what he endured. I can't say I enjoyed the story and I especially didn't like its inconclusive ending. Still, I had never heard of Menahem Mendel Beilis, so in doing a little research for this review, I guess I learned about an important event in history.

For another review, see the NY Times review from 1966.

In a side note, I am currently reading the next Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, a fictionalized account of a slave rebellion in Virginia in the 1830s. Malamud, in The Fixer has this to say about slavery: "There's something cursed, it seems to me, about a country where men have owned men as property." An interesting coincidence, I thought.

Something new: I thought I would list the words I came across with which I was not familiar. So here goes.

New Words

Meliorist: reformer. "That is how I feel, but having made that confession let me say, as you may have guessed, that I am something of a meliorist."

Peculating: embezzling. "He was arrested for peculating from official funds."

Shochet: a kosher animal slaughterer. "Before Yakov was permitted to leave the office, the Prosecuting Attorney, his face darkened by blood, reading from his notebook, asked the prisoner if he was related to Baal Shem Tov or Rabbi Zalman Schneur of Ladi, and whether there had ever been a shochet in his family."