A Christian Problem

...True he shows us anti-Semites in action, but he tries to account for their actions by much too simple a concept...

...One can understand why it was hard for him to follow his mythical friend's advice...

...Yakov Bok, the Jew without religion, who curses God for existing but not existing, who has cut his ties with the Jewish community in the hopes of finding work in the Russian world, who dislikes politics but finds philosophy interesting, perhaps instructive, who hates his past because it has led to his meaningless arrest and suffering, is in many ways Malamud's own self struggling with his Jewish heritage...

...These sound, inevitably, like a translation from a Yiddish novel, intolerably folksy and quaint despite all of his efforts to roughen it up...

...I think, in contrast, of Saul Bellow's novel The Victim which explores anti-Semitism in truly revealing terms, since it remains resolutely foreign to all such consoling abstractions and sticks grimly to the personal meaning a particular anti-Semite had for the protagonist...

...The dark residue that remains after all the explanations are given-this is his subject...

...small-time crooks...

...Jarring moments still persist and the blurred diction of the title-a "fixer" is scarcely colloquial usage for a handyman, but rather evokes notions of graft and crooked horse races-typifies Malamud's stylistic difficulties throughout this book...

...but the irony does not stop there, unfortunately for Malamud's neat ending...

...Malamud skirts the real problem...

...There was a man crying out in anguish in the dark, but God was on the other side of his mountain...

...They will remind long-memoried readers of the heavy-footed Spanish that Hemingway put into the mouths of his characters in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and they fail for much the same reason: Malamud is trying to solve a sophisticated literary problem by pseudo-naive means...

...In the end, on his way to his trial, he meets in a fantasy the Tsar himself-"Nicholas the Second, of medium height, with frank blue eyes and neatly trimmed beard a little too large for his face, sat there naked, holding in his hand a small silver ikon of the Virgin Mary"-and he shoots him because, as he asserts, "You say you are kind and prove it with pogroms...

...If that was his intention, his novel departs too often from the established record, which, in its murky complexity and tragi-comic absurdity, is much more appalling than the narrative Malamud has fashioned out of it...

...Death to the antiSemites...

...fanatically anti-Semitic priests...

...wearily Chekhovian liberals whose good intentions are matched by their weird ineffectuality...

...First, the New Testament, then the Old...

...The Russians, whether ordinary people or officials, speak a straightforward, neutral tongue, while Yakov Bok, whose inner thoughts form the novel's main texture and tone, relinquishes the marked Yiddish rhythms for either downright American-colloquial or what might be called literary-colloquial...

...If the state acts in ways that are abhorrent to human nature it's the lesser evil to destroy it...

...If you go to Russia, what will happen to your style...

...A writer could hardly hope for more dramatic, tragically absurd materials: blood accusations that savor of the darkest Middle Ages...

...This is meant to be symbolic of a broad social situation, for the Beilis case and the Jews were indeed a measure of the injustice and misery that produced the Russian Revolution...

...Yakov himself suffers without either Spinoza's intellectual idea of God, or the God of the covenant...

...Malamud is endlessly intrigued by the ironically humorous contradictions which an idea or a faith can produce...

...No, it is clear that Malamud is using these facts to work up his own design, his own parable of what the dark violence and enraged stupidity of anti-Semitism means for us, today, living in affluent and uneasy America...

...If God's not a man he has to be...

...He is against those who are against them...

...it is a Christian problem...

...After all, your forte is interweaving the stilted cadences of Yiddish with the crude argot of American city life...

...To begin with, Malamud is obviously not simply retelling the story of the Beilis case, when Tsarist reactionaries tried, with amazing inefficiency and clumsiness, to use the murder of a boy to manufacture a so-called "ritual murder" and so whip up a wave of mass hatred against the Jews...

...Nobody suffers for him and he suffers for no one except himself...

...Long live liberty...

...And Yakov himself understands all too well the story of Christ's martyrdom...

...From this point of view, I find it difficult to account for The Fixer's existence...

...He believes in their right to be Jews and live in the world like men...

...Yakov's prison is an education, dearly bought...

...This is his covenant with himself...

...But Malamud did not stay away and so we have his new novel, The Fixer (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 225 pp., $5.75), which makes free poetic use of the raw materials offered him by the notorious Beilis "ritual murder" case that rocked Russia in 1913 on the eve of the coming revolutionary wave...

...He doesn't see us and he doesn't care," he is also, I believe, expressing something that is deeply felt by his creator...

...The Revolution came and, as we know, Russian antiSemitism still goes on...

...This is, in its way, an exceptional literary feat, especially when one considers the pitfalls and traps Malamud has had to avoid...

...He is eloquent, racy, witty and moving without ever again descending to the bathos of blatant translationese...

...Thus, insofar as novels are written with words, the words Malamud has hit upon are rich and raw, solemn, gay and sardonic, wonderfully in key with the gravely ironic purposes of his theme...

...threats of pogroms...

...But he holds out, refuses to confess, remains loyal to his people out of some nagging, absurd sense of justice...

...He punishes the suffering servant for being godless.' This is Yakov at the bottom of the pit, in the blackness of his despair...

...But Yakov wonders why, if Christianity is based on Christ's innocent suffering, his jailors still keep him in prison, knowing that he is innocent...

...Novels, however, are also written with feelings, ideas, intellectual biases and "positions...

...Yakov has completed his education...

...Jesus cried out help to God but God gave no help...

...His daughter entices Yakov to his bed, but he refuses to sleep with her because she is unclean...

...From the Old Testament he learns that the God of the Jews is the God of experience, of suffering...

...The Russian prison guard Kogin, who sacrifices himself suddenly, inexplicably, for Yakov out of some notion of common suffering, is a fragment of the novel Malamud tried to write and failed...

...and how he hung on the cross at night...

...Eventually he does manage to solve it in a reasonably satisfactory manner, but only after some rough going in the first pages of his book...

...While history may push the Jew into a pogrom or a revolution, the appeal to history is not a novelist's solution...

...In the end he was deeply moved when he read how they spat on him and beat him with sticks...

...He (Jesus) was a strange Jew, humorless and fanatic, but the fixer liked the teachings and read with pleasure of the healing of the lame, blind, and of epileptics who fell into fire and water...

...One thing I've learned, he thought, there's no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew...

...You ll lose half of it, and the most important half...

...That blood which disgusts him seems to obsess his jailors, and they wait impatiently for him to menstruate, since they believe that Jewish males are capable of such monstrous acts...

...But, as I say, these grating or cloying blemishes diminish sharply once the story starts moving...

...To be sure, he knows quite well the nuances of such a term, the irrepressible echoes it will have for American ears, yet he wants to compel us, his readers, to use the dictionary vocabulary in his eccentric, lop-sided way...

...fumbling, reactionary officials...

...The purpose of the covenant, Yakov thinks, is to create human experience, although human experience baffles God...

...Yakov reads the New Testament to his prison guard, Kogin, who is both attracted and revolted to the spectacle of Jesus' words issuing from the Jewish murderer's mouth...

...The rod of God's anger is Nicholas II, the Russian Tsar...

...Take my advice, fellow, stay away from it like from the plague...

...brutal prison wardens who blunder around in a selfinduced nightmare of superstition and fraud...

...As soon as Yakov Bok, the "fixer" of the title, reaches Kiev, the style sloughs off most of its quaintness and settles down into a solid, drab, often crudely majestic prose which may lose something in folk flavor but gains greatly in impact and immediacy...

...There was, of course, that troublesome matter of a style, but Malamud most likely felt that he could lick it...

...AntiSemitism is not an occasion for a search for Jewish identity...

...Or at the least what it means for him, a writer who has spent most of his time writing about Jews and their special relation to the world around them...

...Luckily, though, they prove to be an excrescence, an uncertain expository introduction...

...Long live revolution...

...The drunken anti-Semite whom Yakov rescues in the street weeps over the "Sermon on the Mount" but seems totally unaware of its message of love and mercy...

...He also learns that "We're all in history, that's sure, but some are more than others, Jews more than some...

...And when Yakov cries out that God is inhuman and distant, that "We live in a world where the clock ticks and he's on his timeless mountain staring in space...

...WRITERS & WRITING A Christian Problem By Raymond Rosenthal I can easily imagine some friend of Malamud's, after hearing of his plan to write a novel set in Russia, saying to him: "For God's sake, Bernie, stay away from it...

...The Russia of Tsar Nicholas II was the classic land of anti-Semitism, the perfect setting for a kind of ultimate fable about the Jews and the persecutions they have suffered...

...He will protect them to the extent that he can...