The Fixer

A classic that won Malamud both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award

The Fixer (1966) is Bernard Malamud's best-known and most acclaimed novel — one that makes manifest his roots in Russian fiction, especially that of Isaac Babel.

Set in Kiev in 1911 during a period of heightened anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young Russian boy. Bok leaves his village to try his luck in Kiev, and after denying his Jewish identity, finds himself working for a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Society. When the boy is found nearly drained of blood in a cave, the Black Hundreds accuse the Jews of ritual murder. Arrested and imprisoned, Bok refuses to confess to a crime that he did not commit.

Concerned with many of the moral and spiritual questions at the heart of the Jewish-American experience, Bernard Malamud brought to his fiction the need to ask serious questions in the guise of compelling, page-turning stories. In stories set in America, Europe and Russia, Malamud s characters speak in a rich, provocative language that captures the ear and shows a master eavesdropper at work.