The Fixer (Masterplots, Revised Second Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Bernard Malamud
- First Published: 1966
- Type of Work: Novel
- Type of Plot: Historical realism
- Time of Work: Shortly before World War I
- Setting: Around Kiev, in the Ukraine, Russia
- Principal Characters: Yakov Bok, Bibikov, Nikolai Maximovitch Lebedev, Zinaida Nikolaevna, Shmuel Rabinovitch, Raisl Bok
- Genres: Long fiction, Psychological fiction, Historical fiction
- Subjects: Prisons, 1910’s, Jews or Jewish life, Anti-Semitism, Existentialism, Russia or Russian people
- Locales: Kiev, Ukraine
The Story:
Yakov Bok, a fixer, decided in his thirties to leave his native village and go to the big city of Kiev, in search of a better life. His father-in-law, Shmuel, came to see him off. They talked, a bit gingerly, about the fact that his wife, Raisl, daughter of Shmuel, had left him a couple of months earlier and run off with a stranger. Yakov felt humiliated by this, because he was the laughing-stock of the village. Yakov reminded Shmuel that his daughter was also barren, for in the nearly six years they lived together she had failed to give him a child. Yakov was also...
[The entire page is 1922 words long]

