Books: The Outsider

THE FIXER by Bernard Malamud. 335 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $5.75.

Down in Melville’s Great White Whale—which might stand for the tragic tradition that lives pelagically deep under the choppy surface of American life—there may be a Jonah of genius who will one day emerge with a great tragic novel. The critics have been whooping it up in the Malamud salon for so long now that it seemed as if the author of The Fixer might be the man. In his new book, Bernard Malamud retains all the literary expertise and moral concern that has won him his deserved prominence. But he is not Jonah, despite the publisher’s declaration that The Fixer is a “great” novel.

It misses by very little, however. Malamud’s novel is a fictional version of the Beiliss Case in Kiev, 1911, in which a Jew was wrongly accused of the ritual murder of a Christian child and of milking his blood for the purpose of making Passover matzos. The incident, followed by an obscene wave of antiSemitism, was documented in a bleak narrative by Maurice Samuel in Blood Accusation, published this year. Malamud coincidentally worked on the same gruesome subject, but he has gone beyond journalistic intention.

Surrounded by Russia. He aims to pose the universal question of innocent man put to nothing by guilty authority. His hero is a Jew whose complaint against Gentiles is not that they are not Jews but that they are not Christians. He is called Yakov Bok (a name that suggests scapegoat), a Russian who is a stranger to Russia, who makes himself a stranger to his own Jewish tradition, and who is finally a stranger to everyone but the reader.

He is just a handyman, a fixer, carefully pared and peeled down from every commitment but to his own identity. His wife has left him for a goy. He leaves his village (“an island surrounded by Russia”) for a new life beyond the Pale—the ghetto areas that the Czar designated for the Jews. He also leaves behind him the Law, takes off in a ramshackle, horse-drawn contraption for the future. He has shed everything but Spinoza, whom he had read by night in his ratty hut, and from whom he gleaned the notion that man is without history, God merely an idea in the mind of man, and man perhaps an idea in the mind of God.

But history and men betray him. His cart breaks down, so he rides bareback to his fate. He cannot leave himself behind; the horse “looks like an old Jew,” and as he canters, ambles, trots and staggers across the black plain, Yakov can only be seen as a Jewish Quixote. It could also be said of his dream of “good fortune and a comfortable house,” in the conditions of the Ukraine of that day, that nothing could be more hopelessly quixotic. He trades his Rosinante for a ferry ride and enters the holy city of Kiev. As a final renunciation of his historic identity, Yakov gives himself a Russian name: “Yakov Ivanovitch Dologushev.”

Medieval Miasma. Here horror, in a mounting cadence, begins. Yakov the crypto-Christian seals his fate by becoming a good Samaritan. On an icy night he drags home a man who has fallen drunk in a gutter. The man is an eminent anti-Semite, a member of the Black Hundreds,* and the owner of a brick factory. Yakov, whom the law does not permit to work in Christian territory, gets a job as his reward. His quixotic dream has almost come true. But can he sleep with the boss’s daughter? His Jewishness would be revealed.

Can he bury his identity? Can he keep peace with himself?

All questions are resolved as he is arrested for the “ritual murder” of a boy. He is instantly Bok, the scapegoat, the “Christ killer,” the “sucker of blood from Christian bones.” The whole foul miasma of medieval superstition envelops him, and for 21 years, without trial, he is subjected to every cruelty and indignity that a jailer can commit upon the jailed.

Escorted by Cossacks. Through all the brutalities of a prison regime, Yakov survives as a man rather than a Jew.

His defending lawyer is a Christian, and through official disapproval becomes a martyr himself, a suicide in the cell where he is held on a false charge. Yakov reads the New Testament and recites the Beatitudes on his knees. The act, observed through a spy hole, becomes the basis for evidence of Jewish religious practices. In a horrible re-enactment of the via dolorosa, he is made to crawl on bloody knees from one cell to another.

There are the beatings and endless interrogations by mindless and malevolent men. There is a wonderful quality to some of Yakov’s invincible Jewish moral irony, such as: “Are you a father?” “With all my heart,” answers the childless man. Of course the outcome is known: the innocent man is taken in a sealed carriage with a Cossack escort to his doom.*

Fallen Angel. In the power of the narrative and the wit of the talk, The Fixer is a remarkable work. Malamud is a severe moralist, and he employs his fictional craft to give shape, substance and reality to the moral theorems that obsess him. Feeling himself to be an outsider, or made to feel so, he asks for hospitality for the stranger —a notion that haunted the theme of his last novel, A New Life, where his hero, an Eastern intellectual in a lowbrow Western college, broods over a thesis that is to be called The Stranger as Fallen Angel in Western Fiction.

Yet The Fixer is ultimately a disappointment. It owes a great deal to Kafka, not as much as it should to Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, too much to the cult of Jewish sensibility in U.S. fiction, and most significantly, nothing whatever to the current U.S. scene. It is an abdication for a novelist to reject the contemporary texture of the life about him and retreat into the horrors of someone else’s history. It might be argued that there are analogies between the violence of Kiev and Selma and Watts, but an analogyis not a novel.

If Americans want a tragedy with a happy ending, Malamud will not supply it. But he has achieved something comparable—a tragedy, if that is possible, with a humanistic ending. His drama is of a martyred, muddling man; the death of his reasonable hero is also the death of the unreasonable men who have caused it. It is only a pity that this stranger is set down in a land and a time that are also strange to the reader.

*A superpatriotic society of prerevolutionary Russia resembling in many ways the Ku Klux Klan.* Mendel Beiliss was at length exonerated, but not before his show trial had served its purpose. He died, at 60, in obscurity in New York in 1934.