Word: fixer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...FIXER, by Bernard Malamud. A severe moralist, Malamud pits a helpless man against guilty authority in this poignant account of a Jew condemned to die for a crime he did not commit...
...Fixer, Malamud...
...Your review of Malamud's The Fixer [Sept. 9] focuses its critical beam upon a nonexistent work: the "contemporary American" novel that the reviewer wishes Malamud had written. The book is judged in terms of what it is not, and therefore is found to have "missed." There is nothing more contemporary than Malamud's theme; that of identity. Within the "innocent-guilty" framework is embedded the hard, solid nut of Yakov's stubbornness: I am what I know is true. Malamud speaks for contemporary Americans as well as for one Russian Jew. Man's inner quantum...
...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...
...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...