The Fixer
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Book Description
Stirring Portrait of Injustice December 27, 2000
By richard_t
Format:Mass Market Paperback
Yakov Bok, a rural Ukrainian handyman (a "fixer") in the years before World War I, yearns for something better. His luck has been down all his life, he can't make ends meet, his wife ran off, and what brings him the most injustice of all: he is a Jew. The strangling weight of anti-Semitism in Tsarist Russia ...
MoreStirring Portrait of Injustice December 27, 2000
By richard_t
Format:Mass Market Paperback
Yakov Bok, a rural Ukrainian handyman (a "fixer") in the years before World War I, yearns for something better. His luck has been down all his life, he can't make ends meet, his wife ran off, and what brings him the most injustice of all: he is a Jew. The strangling weight of anti-Semitism in Tsarist Russia clubs the reader page after page and slowly grinds Yakov down when he is jailed for a crime he did not commit. Much of "The Fixer" is jail time, seen through Yakov's disbelieving yet cynical eyes.
Malamud won the Pulitzer Prize for "The Fixer", written in 1976. It was well-deserved. Yakov's struggle is as much with himself as with the gnawing injustice of the state, with the ignorance in Kiev, and the wickedness of local officials eager to see him imprisoned, even knowing he is not guilty. Yakov searches for the god of the Jews, failing to comprehend a god who would let his people be victimized so mercilessly. That Yakov's struggle is as much moral and philosophical as legalistic is the source of much of the book's significance, as well as its occasional tragi-comedy. When Yakov's father-in-law spends a small fortune in bribes to visit him in prison, they spend their precious ten minutes together debating theology. It turns out this scene is seminal because their debate - whether god has abandoned Yakov or vice versa - is the core of the tale. Later, the politico-historical context, the cynical manipulation of anti-Semitic sentiment in Russia, is outlined by Yakov's attorney, but this is a book of morality and justice, much more than of politics.
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