The Fixer

"All men are Jews, though few men know it." --Bernard Malamud

Lately, I have been re-reading Bernard Malamud's stunningly memorable novel The Fixer (1966). I say "stunningly memorable" because I first read it in 1977 (the Fall semester of my senior year in high school). I have not read it since. And yet, picking it up again in 2014, I recall scene after vivid scene--as if I had read the book just recently. And I recall, as well, my own confusion as a white Protestant and reasonably affluent seventeen year-old male who was being exposed, for the first time, to the reality of rabid anti-semitism.

Growing up during the high tide of the civil rights era, I had been sensitized to the plight of people of color living in the United States as second or third class citizens. But Jews? I thought of the Jews I knew--and, granted, my exposure at that point in my life was fairly narrow--as privileged white people like myself. And so they were; what they were not was Christian. At the time, I did not see why that fact should occasion intense hatred of Jews by Christians (and still don't) and so, although I was aware that anti-semitism existed, I regarded it as an anomaly--like Nazi Germany. And, like Nazi Germany, I regarded it also as largely a thing of the past.

Malamud's novel brilliantly evokes how bigotry, superstition, and modern scientific rationality sat together quite comfortably in 19th century Russian society and, when combined with the Czarist state's legal bureaucracy, could create a tidal wave of blind cruelty capable of crashing down on an unsuspecting life: in this case, the life of one Yakov Bok, an impoverished handyman who, though born to Jewish parents, considered himself a "free thinker" in the mold of Spinoza, and left his native village amidst the wreckage of a bad marriage in the hope of starting fresh (and passing as a gentile) in Kiev.

And therein lies the true genius of the novel: for, try as he might, Bok cannot escape his Jewishness because it is thrust upon him repeatedly throughout the story--not by fellow Jews, but by the gentiles who wish to see him suffer because he had the temerity to be born to the "wrong" parents. This insanity--for there is no other word for it--is a brokenness that the fixer cannot fix.

In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Richard Rorty argued that part of our moral education as Americans at the close of the 20th century should include books that "help us become less cruel." (CIS, 141). He does not mention Malamud's The Fixer, but it would have made a superb example of the kind of book he had in mind.

And at the beginning of the 21st century, with Muslims now filling the social role of the "new Jews" in the U.S. and elsewhere, Malamud's book is as relevant a read as ever.