Word: fixers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Aristotle, tragedy's effect was tripartite; it moved from pity to terror to catharsis. By those tenets, as valid as they are venerable, Bernard Malamud's Pulitzer Prize novel The Fixer misses greatness by a third. It has the first two requisites, but it omits any purge of the emotions. Malamud brings his hero, Yakov Bok, to the brink of destruction-or salvation-and freezes the action. There, in Auden's phrase, "the seas of pity lie, locked and frozen in each eye." By definition, the film of The Fixer can aspire to be only two-thirds...
Alan Bates plays Bok-a handyman, a fixer of broken things. His home is the shtetl, a rural Jewish village in 1911 Russia. It is a time of pogroms and malignant rumors of Jews who murder Christians as part of their religious rites. Bok, possessed of a barren, faithless wife (Carol White), abandons his emotions, his conscience and his home. His destination is the ancient Russian Orthodox city of Kiev, where he promptly sends himself to hell by passing as a gentile. In scenes that seem to have emerged from the mainstream of Russian literature, Lebedev (Hugh Griffith), a rabid...
...confess to his "crimes." As the universal sufferer, Bates wears the exhausted eyes, the depleted physique, the rime of salt about the parched lips like indestructible medals. In Malamud's view and in Bates' playing, Bok becomes a second Job who grows from suffering to manhood. The fixer finally fixes himself, and, symbolically, all sufferers. Like the book, the film has no end, only a conclusion: there is no such thing as indifference; an abstention from humanity is a vote for evil. When Yakov goes to trial the story halts, as if the future were epilogue. Unfortunately...
...same time, They can accept feminine ideals--gentleness, passivity, endurance--if actual femininity is rejected. In Bernard Malamud's The Fixer, the hero partakes of the heroic aspects of femininity but is revolted by actual femininity to the point of refusing sexual intercourse. Conversely, They revile women for manifesting masculine qualities, aggression in particular. Women's books are reviewed as if they were women--criticized for being "shrill," praised for being "not shrill." Critics call Marianne Moore "the best women poet in America." Why not the best blue-eyed poet? In the Nov. 1 issue of Time Magazine...
...high-powered intellect, combined with a legendary ability as a problem-fixer and a penchant for never repeating a confidence made Lawyer Fortas one of Washington's most influential private citizens long before his court appointment. It also made him a trusted adviser of President Johnson on everything from the Walter Jenkins scandal to the Dominican crisis. When Arthur Goldberg resigned from the court to move to the U.N., Johnson's first choice to replace him was inevitably Fortas. It was a political convenience that Fortas also happened to be Jewish and it was the court...