The Fixer

A Jew in Tsarist Russia is accused of murdering a Catholic boy and suffers from mistreatment in prison. The Fixer (1966) 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."Through all of his books – four novels and two collections of stories – Bernard Malamud has dealt with the great theme of redemption in this world. The world is grotesque, horrifying and unjust; yet redemption, individual by individual, is possible, and is indeed the reason and the glory of life... Mr Malamud is a superb writer and "The Fixer" is one of the year’s richest novels, a literary event in any season." - Eliot Fremont-Smith, The New York TimesBernard Malamud was an author of novels and short stories. Along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, he was one of the great American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, The Natural, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford. His 1966 novel The Fixer, about antisemitism in Tsarist Russia, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Review "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, author of_ Everything Is Illuminated _ "The Fixer deserves to rank alongside the great Jewish-American novels of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth." --_The Independent (London)_ "A literary event in any season." --Eliot Fremont-Smith, The New York Times -- Review Product Description Set in Czarist Russia, The Fixer is the story of the strains and anxieties that beset a man who finds himself a stranger in his community and a victim of irrational prejudice as a wave of anti-Semitic hysteria engulfs a town after the murder of a boy. From the small crossed window of his room above the stable in the brickyard, Yakov Bok saw people in their long overcoats running somewhere early that morning, everybody in the same direction.