Best of the Backlist Book Club: "The Fixer" by Bernard Malamud

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 M**der 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 M**der. Arrested and imprisoned, Bok refuses to confess to a crime that he did not commit.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:

“Brilliant [and] harrowing . . . Historical reality combined with fictional skill and beauty of a high order make [it] a novel of startling importance.” —Elizabeth Hardwick, Vogue

“What makes it a great book, above and beyond its glowing goodness, has to do with something else altogether: its necessity...This novel, like all great novels reminds us that we must do something.” —Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything Is Illuminated

“The Fixer deserves to rank alongside the great Jewish-American novels of Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.” —The Independent (London)

“A literary event in any season.” —Eliot Fremont-Smith, The New York Times

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

BERNARD MALAMUD (1914–86) wrote eight novels; he won the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award for The Fixer, and the National Book Award for The Magic Barrel. Born in Brooklyn, he taught for many years at Bennington College in Vermont.

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