The Fixer – Bernard Malamud

Posted on | August 6, 2010 | Comments Off

Hooray! This is the first novel in my “War, Violence and Suffering” series! Are you as excited as I am to plumb the depths of human misery?

No?

Well, I’ll start with an easy one. Bernard Malamud is considered one of America’s greatest writers, having written The Natural, which, like any great American novel, is about some sport.

Less famous but perhaps more moving for those who are bad at sports is The Fixer, a story set in Russia moments before the Russian Revolution of 1917. Yakov Bok is a Jewish man living without identification outside the designated Jewish ghetto, in a town where that’s easily a crime in itself. He’s then framed for a vicious murder and is forced to endure a trial of cruelty, loneliness, and indignity. Through it resolves to keep his religion, not because he was particulary religious before the imprisonment began, but because they keep trying to get him to convert.

I know, it sounds like a horrible book – but really, it’s fantastic. Yakov as a character is inspiring and enthralling. This is the kind of book that you could sit on the beach and read for hours while your skin got crispy, and you wouldn’t even complain about the sun burn because you were reading about real survival. You’d wonder how you could have sat on the beach all day when they’re real injustice going on in the world – people imprisoned for the wrong reasons, whole communities oppressed to the point where even thier hope dies, land and water destroyed by carelessness and incompetence.

Fortunately for those who don’t like to read about suffering, I’ll say that there is a feeling of reprieve at the end. Let’s just say that the story starts in 1911, and ends at a point of no return for revolution of Russia, which drastically overturned the leadership from a dictator with a strong sense of religious entitlement to a provisional government that eventually abdicated all power to the soviets – the people’s party. Of course, everybody knows that this story ends with Stalin the evil mustache dictator turning the U.S.S.R. into an Animal Farm, but think of the glory of that first taste of freedom - it must have felt glorious, like flying or falling in love.

I think for a certain generation of Americans, the most difficult thing we have to overcome is our own ennui. Those of us who were lucky to grow up with everything we ever needed didn’t realize how complicated solving the world problems would be until our parents declared us launched, and told us to go get real jobs (and no, sitting in a Green Peace raft isn’t a job). We spend a lot of time trying to recapture that “Unique snowflake” feeling that we experienced whenever we got an award in grade school – the but the awards are far more competitive now and mean very little in terms of real progress. What will an American Idol trophy mean in a hundred years, if our grandchildren can’t afford to eat fresh produce?

This is the sort of book that reminds you that there is a power in a set of determined values, and I think that’s why it spoke to me. It’s harder to see oppression in 2010 – we don’t have Evil mustache dictators (unless you include Bush) but that doesn’t mean the battles over.

A great companion book for this is Nicholas and Alexandra, the non-fiction, highly researched story of the last imperial family of Russia and their lives on the eve of the revolution. It’s also, incidentally, my mother’s all-time favorite book.