[In the following essay, Alter explores differences in Malamud's interpretation of historical significance in The Fixer, which Alter categorizes as a novel of “Jewish historicism,” and The Tenants, which he calls a “work of a disillusioned American idealist.”]

From the mythic transliteration of baseball history in The Natural to the adaptation of the Beiliss case that forms the basis of The Fixer to the angry eschatology of The Tenants, Bernard Malamud has been concerned, either obliquely or overtly, with the ways in which history shapes the individual, defining the nature of inward perception and controlling the relationships with the institutions and personnel of the external environment. Indeed, the ambivalence and growing pessimism of the later fiction might be attributed to the anomic tendencies, the nihilistic futility, and the overpowering violence of contemporary history. To be sure, most critics are quite correct when they find as the predominant theme in Malamud's work a continuing affirmation of man's capacity to mature, to accept responsibility, and to create through experience a moral structure within which to function. Yet it cannot be denied, it seems to me, that the ethical system so prized by Malamud, called mentshlekhayt by Josephine Zadovsky Knopp,¹ becomes increasingly ineffective as a force to insure order or stability and increasingly ambiguous as a determinant of personal emancipation when confronted with events occurring in historical time. No longer does the development of a principled sensibility liberate in the presence of the anarchic disorder that seems so much a condition of modernity. Rather, such a sensibility would appear to imprison and isolate,² producing only internal psychic changes. Granted that to Malamud it is precisely this altered consciousness that is of the utmost significance; nonetheless, there seems to be a radical disjuncture between the transfigured self and the world in which the transformed individual ultimately must act.

Malamud has illustrated in the course of his novels and short stories that history has proven the American dream to be corrupt and the possession of Eden illusory, that race and sex lead to war rather than harmony, that the artist's power to discipline chaos is negligible, while the attempt to do so is often self-destructive. What then is man to do in the face of history's power? The prophetic chronicle of Yakov Bok, the fixer (1966), and the chiliastic tale of Harry Lesser and Willie Spearmint (1971), tenants in the crumbling house of history, offer two different responses to the question of man's involvement in history and his ability to utilize the multiple perspectives of history in order to fashion an identity that might be applicable in society at large. It is interesting to observe too that the implications of these variant responses have themselves been conditioned by dissimilar historical times. It should not be particularly surprising that this subject absorbs Malamud's imagination given not only the sacralization of history that is a major component of Jewish theology,³ but also the evangelical impulse that seeks to explain and justify the events of the American past.

Judaism, as a religious force, exalts history. As a social and cultural phenomenon, its fate has been frequently determined by interaction with the historical moment. In fact, for Judaism history is theophany: the Jews confirm and reconfirm their sacred identity as the Chosen People through God's active intervention in the historical process.

For the first time, we find affirmed, and increasingly accepted, the idea that historical events have a value in themselves, insofar as they are determined by the will of God. This God of the Jewish people is no longer an Oriental divinity, creator of archetypal gestures, but a personality who ceaselessly intervenes in history. … Historical facts thus become “situations” of man in respect to God, and as such they acquire a religious value that nothing had previously been able to confer on them. It may, then, be said with truth that the Hebrews were the first to discover the meaning of history as the epiphany of God. … In the Israel of the Messianic prophets, historical events could be tolerated because, on the one hand, they were willed by Yahweh, and on the other hand, because they were necessary to the final salvation of the chosen people.⁴

This strategy of sanctification effectively transmutes both personal suffering and historical catastrophe from negative conditions to experiences with positive spiritual content, and may, perhaps, provide a partial explanation to account for the continued existence of the Jews as an identifiable, coherent group in spite of the Diaspora, the absence of geographical nationhood, the lack of similar racial characteristics, almost endless persecution and pain, and the constant pressures from within and without calling for assimilation:

Among the Hebrews, every new historical calamity was regarded as punishment inflicted by Yahweh. … No military disaster seemed absurd, no suffering was vain, for beyond the “event,” it was always possible to perceive the will of Yahweh. Even more: these catastrophes were … necessary, they were foreseen by God so that the Jewish people should not contravene its true destiny by alienating the religious heritage left by Moses. … Only historical catastrophes brought them back to the right road by forcing them to look toward the true God. …⁵

More to the point, as Will Herberg asserts, “the Jew becomes a ‘true Jew’ and makes available to himself the resources of divine grace under the covenant by making Israel's past his own, its sacred history the ‘background’ of his own life.”⁶ This requisite identification of the individual Jew with the destiny of Israel is a particularly significant symbolic motif in The Fixer and will be explored further.

The irony inherent in Judaism, reflected in the self-deprecation of Jewish humor and pervasive not only in Yiddish literature but also in the fiction of the Jewish-American writers, is clear: affliction and disaster are necessary to prove uniqueness and to reinforce the idea of chosenness. Theology and experience compel the Jew to deal with the disparity between the ideal and the actual and the contradictions arising from the union of God's Promise with the reality of the ghetto, in a world where the possibilities of redemption are everywhere and fulfillment nowhere.⁷ It would appear to be the paradox of Jewish identity that in order to endure as a people and to sustain their position as moral exemplars, the Jews must continue to be civilization's scapegoats. No wonder, then, that the Jew seems to have become a paradigm for modern man trapped in the inexplicable forces of the twentieth century.

For the American, as for the Jew, history is exemplary, a moral process, rather than a compendium of irrational acts. Beginning with the Puritans, whose Old Testament philo-semitism molded, in part, their historical awareness, Americans have attempted to read their past as a series of redemptive gestures and occasions coupled with an intense messianic nationalism and a fervent missionary zeal to stand as the model for right societal development, a pattern traced by such historians as Hans Kohn, Ernest Tuveson, and Cushing Strout.⁸ But unlike the calamitous archives of Jewish existence, the American experience, mingling religion and politics as it does, seems to be an unending chronology of successes, conquests, and consummated opportunities. The effects of this millenarian attitude have been briefly described by John Schaar:

The close interrelation between religion and politics has been, on the whole, of such a sort as to support uncritical patriotism and the powers that be, and to encourage Americans to think of themselves as superior in virtue and mission to other peoples. Ever since the Puritan founding, many of our prominent statesmen and religious leaders have spoken and acted as though God had once again entered history as the Lord of Hosts, and had concluded a covenant of nations with this people, choosing it to fight His battles.⁹

But there is an equally strong countervailing tendency within the national consciousness that legitimizes the denial of history's permanence. It has been a cornerstone of this country's regenerative image that individuals could deny an unsatisfactory past and an inadequate identity for a new life independent of all that has gone before in personal terms as well as in an historical context. If the Jew is imprisoned in history, the American can reject its demands because that very history has shown that negation is not only permissible, it is even necessary if one is to conform to the Edenic ideals of this society. The results of two such disparate, warring views of man's place in historical time can be seen in Malamud's short story, “The Lady of the Lake.”¹⁰ Settling in Italy, Henry Levin, following the resurrective American design, believes he can assume a new persona, becoming a Freeman without any consequences, only to discover that in spurning his Jewish birth and sacrificing the heritage of the Holocaust, he loses love's redeeming grace. In this cautionary tale, it becomes obvious that the American predisposition to forever reshape the self breeds an unprincipled irresponsibility, while adherence to an inheritance that insures inevitable persecution is a sign of ethical strength. If The Fixer is a novel controlled by this concept of Jewish historicism, then The Tenants is the work of a disillusioned American idealist driven to apocalyptic rage by disappointment.

The Fixer is informed by the spirit of Old Testament historiography. It is prophetic fiction as defined by the critic Robert Alter: “… a courageous engagement in even the most threatening history. … The prophets of the Hebrew Bible … were not oracles; they evoked the future as vividly as possible because they believed that human actions could determine what the future would be, and they wanted desperately to affect their auditors' actions.”¹¹ In fact, The Fixer can be seen as an extended meditation on history: the various and often antagonistic kinds of historical perception that operate to determine the course of events in the world; the relationship between man and the historical forces that act upon him; and the ways in which an individual can manipulate the engine of history, if he so chooses.

For the Russian and the Jew who exist within the confines of Malamud's novel, as well as for the present reader, who translates the horrors attendant on their fictional encounter in Kiev during the pre-Revolutionary years, 1911-1913, into the facts of actual historical circumstance, the past is so awash in violence and hatred “there's no getting rid of the blood any more.”¹² Indeed, the imagery of blood runs through the novel like a red thread, from the accusation of ritual murder to the hemophilia of the young Tsarevitch, from the menstrual flow of Zina Lebedev to Yakov's visions of bloody pogroms, as a constant reminder of history's poisoned inhumanity to men.

The majority of the Russian characters appearing in The Fixer, regardless of occupation, social position, and education, perceive history to be a succession of demonic acts perpetrated against Christian civilization by the satanic Jews. They are dominated, to the point of paranoid obsession, by the traditional, grotesque anti-semitic fantasies rooted deeply in Western culture in which the Jew is viewed as the wicked son denying the saving power of Jesus, the terrifying father re-enacting the crucifixion by murdering innocent children, and finally, as the Devil's agent corrupting the world and the Word:¹³

When the old eschatological prophecies were taken up by the masses of the later Middle ages all these phantasies were treated with deadly seriousness and elaborated into a weird mythology. … The Jews tended to be seen as demons attendant on Satan. … They were often shown as devils with the beard and horns of a goat while in real life ecclesiastical and secular authorities alike tried to make them wear horns on their hats. Like other demons, they were imagined and portrayed in close association with creatures which symbolize dirt and lust. … Conversely Satan himself was commonly given Jewish features and was referred to as “the father of the Jews.” The populace was convinced that in the synagogue Jews worshipped Satan in the form of a cat or a toad, invoking his aid in making black magic. Like their supposed master, Jews were thought of a demons of destruction whose one object was the ruin of Christians and Christianity.¹⁴

The Charon who ferries Yakov to the hellish city of Kiev is a peasant whose poverty and ignorance are necessary to maintain the Tsarist autocracy: his limitations, his prejudices, his discontents can be directed and exploited by the regime for its own preservation. This nameless representative of Russia's poor knows for a fact that “a Jew's a devil … and if you ever watch one peel off his stinking boot you'll see a split hoof, it's true. I know, for as the Lord is my witness, I saw one with my own eyes. He thought nobody was looking, but I saw his hoof as plain as day” [27]. And as the personifications of diabolic maleficence, the Jews deserve anything that the past has inflicted upon them, or that the future might provide as damnation.

And the only way to save ourselves is to wipe them out. … Wipe them all out. …

“And then when we've slaughtered the whole cursed tribe of them—and the same is done in every province throughout Russia, wherever we can smoke them out … we'll pile up the corpses and soak them with benzine and light fires that people will enjoy all over the world. Then when that's done we'll hose the stinking ashes away and divide the rubles and jewels and silver and furs and all other loot they stole, or give it back to the poor who it rightfully belongs to anyway. You can take my word—the time's not far off when everything I say, we will do, because our Lord, who they crucified, wants his rightful revenge.”

[27-28]

It takes little for the reader to extend the ferryman's monstrous vision into the reality of Nazi slaughter; the imagery demands an identification be made between the deliberately shaped fictive environment of Tsarist Russia and the actual history that is to come. And it is this insistent, purposeful fusion of imagined events and the reader's presumed knowledge of authentic history that is used by Malamud to help establish the truth of the fixer's experience.

To Marfa Golov, herself a thief and murderess, the Jews are arch-criminals and sexual perverts, while to Father Anastasy, in a mad theological analysis, they are Christ-killers and destroyers of the only true faith whose most profound rituals, as Bok notes, with no small irony, depend on devouring the body and blood of the dying god. For Grubeshov, the prosecuting attorney, the Jews represent a political threat, a vast conspiracy which he must expose and overcome if he is to fulfill his ambitions: “The Jews dominate the world and we feel ourselves under their yoke. I personally consider myself under the power of the Jews; under the power of Jewish thought, under the power of the Jewish press. To speak against the crimes of the Jews means to evoke the charge that one is either a Black Hundred, an obscurantist, or a reactionary. I am none of these things. I am a Russian patriot! I love the Tsar!” [226].

Even Tsar Nicholas II, whose absolute authority should guarantee protection, cannot escape the touch of the omnipotent Jews: “It isn't only that the Jews are freemasons and revolutionaries who make a shambles of our laws and demoralize our police by systematic bribery for social exemptions—I can forgive that a bit but not the other things, in particular the terrible crime you are accused of, which is so repellent to me personally. I refer to the draining of his lifeblood out of Zhenia Golov's body” [331-332]. It is noteworthy that not only does each character effectively project his or her own particular weakness onto the all-powerful, mythic Jew, but in subduing a figure of such potency, he or she proves capable of controlling his or her psychic fate, as well as fabricating the essential illusion that the individual can determine his or her political and social future. That the fantasy of pervasive Jewish domination is an imaginative construct created to meet personal and societal needs, rather than a validation by history, goes without saying; that the Russians in the novel (and anti-semites, in general) choose to respond to the demonic mythology rather than learn to perceive the truth of actual events is equally obvious. But the Jew, in this instance Yakov Bok, is entrapped by this diabolic historiography. Because Bok has been transformed into an all-powerful symbol of evil by the requirements of the collective imagination and the needs of the individual psyche rather than by a confrontation with the facts of Jewish existence, there is little he can do or say that will contravene that assumption or prove that he is simply human. Important, in fact, by custom and law, Yakov can be freely punished for his supposed misuse and perversion of power. In the conflict between history and demonology, the reality of the historical situation has become irrelevant in the face of the multiple satisfactions derived from the myth. Thus Yakov Bok and, by extension, the Jews become history's losers.

Prior to the murder of Zhenia Golov and the confinement that would alter forever his life, Yakov Bok wished only to avoid history, to escape its dominion (symbolized by his rejection of Judaism and its agonized past): “I am in history … yet not in it. In a way of speaking I'm far out, it passes me by. Is this good or is something lacking in my character? What a question! Of course lacking but what can I do about it? And besides is this really such a great worry?” [60]. However, once accused, jailed, and tortured, in order to make his experience comprehensible Yakov must counterpoise to the view of history as collective madness a system that endows his suffering with both means and limits. Several factors assist the fixer in his attempt to order, explain, and utilize the history that has imprisoned him metaphorically and quite literally: the Russians—Bibikov, Julius Ostrovsky, Suslov-Smirnov, even the guard Kogin—who teach that truth, not demons or scapegoats, can be discovered if one examines the facts of history, that men can be changed by such an examination, and that those men can, in turn, affect history; Spinoza, whose un-Orthodox ideas about man's relation to God and society liberate Yakov's intellectual curiosity, forcing him to confront, with ambivalent results, the world beyond the Pale; Christianity, which provides an alternative archetypal framework in which Yakov's particular existence can be universalized to conform to the pattern of Jesus's life; and, most important, the gradual recovery of his own Jewish identity.

Bibikov, the Investigating Magistrate, is the first sympathetic and humane Russian whom Yakov meets. He does not believe in the accusation of ritual murder, and uses history as a lawyer might, to uncover the requisite evidence to refute so patently false a charge. Above all the believes in the law, itself a product of historical development, telling Bok: “Mercy is for God, I depend on the law. The law will protect you” [80]. If the law fails, all, Jew and Russian alike, become subject to the nightmare of history that has entombed Bok: “If the law does not protect you, it will not in the end, protect me. Therefore I dare not fail you” [176]. In his allegiance to the Law, Bibikov seems a secular counterpart to those Jews in Malamud's fiction—Morris Bober and Shmuel, Yakov's father-in-law—who have made their commitment to the Law as it is embodied in the Torah. However, because the society of Imperial Russia suffers a corruption more profound than that found in The Assistant, Bibikov's adherence to his principles does not merely imprison him, it kills him.

Bibikov is also concerned with the fixer's education, attempting to convince the fixer that Spinoza does not countenance men's withdrawal from the historical process:

Spinoza conceded a certain freedom of political choice. … He perhaps felt that the purpose of the state—the government—was the security and comparative freedom of rational man. This was to permit man to think as best he could. He also thought man was freer when he participated in the life of society than when he lived in solitude as he himself did. He thought that a free man in society had a positive interest in promoting the happiness and intellectual emancipation of his neighbors.

[78]

In addition, Bibikov is the earliest of Bok's teachers to point out that his incarceration, based as it is on a thoroughly distorted awareness of human worth, is symptomatic of Russia's profound corruption: “There's something cursed, it seems to me, about a country where men have owned men as property. The stink of that corruption never escapes the soul, and it is the stink of future evil” [172]. Once again, Malamud's literary device permits the American reader to recognize and acknowledge a legitimate but devastating value judgment assessed against one aspect of his own national history through the agency of a fictional Jew in a Russian prison.

As Yakov's father-in-law Shmuel supplies the theological premises, as Ostrovsky the political explanation, as Bok the experiential corroboration, Bibikov, not surprisingly, given his admiration for and knowledge of Spinoza, offers the philosophical substructure for Yakov's developing theories about man's obligations as a participant in history. For the Investigating Magistrate, the individual loses a portion of his humanity when he denies his responsibility to act within the confusions of history, even though he may be darkly pessimistic concerning the future of civilization:

“I respect man for what he has to go through in life, and sometimes for how he does it, but he has changed little since he began to pretend he was civilized. … That is how I feel, but having made that confession let me say … that I am somewhat of a meliorist. That is to say, I act as an optimist because I find I cannot act at all, as a pessimist. One often feels helpless in the face of the confusion of these times, such a mass of apparently uncontrollable events and experiences to live through, attempt to understand, and if at all possible, give order to; but one must not withdraw from the task if he has some small thing to offer—he does so at the risk of diminishing his humanity.”

[173]

However, in a society as obdurate and pernicious as Imperial Russia prior to the Revolution, such sensitivity can be dangerous and self-destructive. That is certainly the case with Bibikov, whose humanism, belief in the law, and commitment to the pursuit of truth leads only to jail and suicide, where his ghost haunts Yakov's growing consciousness and his awakening historical accountability.

It is Julius Ostrovsky, Jewish member of the Kiev bar, who enlightens Yakov about the politics of his case as it is woven into the fabric of recent Russian history: the nature of Kiev, a medieval city that “has always been the heart of Russian reaction” [305]; the disastrous and unpopular Russo-Japanese War; the Revolution of 1905, erupting out of defeat and frustration; the reluctant liberalization, followed by increased repression—“In a sick country every step to health is an insult to those who live on its sickness” [308]; and the need for a scapegoat to justify the return to absolutism and tyranny—“Popular discontent they divert into anti-semitic outbreaks. It's a simple solution to their problems” [309]. But history is not inflexible, nor is it an unchanging monolithic process. The outcome of a particular set of historic circumstances is not always predictable or certain. Even within a managed autocracy, the honesty and the integrity of the people may prevail, as the democratic Ostrovsky points out:

“Freedom exists in the cracks of the state. Even in Russia a little justice can be found. … On the one hand we have the strictest autocracy; on the other we are approaching anarchy; in between, courts exist and justice is possible. The law lives in the minds of men. If a judge is honest the law is protected. If that's the case, so are you. Also a jury is a jury—human beings—they could free you in five minutes. … In our favor is that although they may be ignorant peasants and shopkeepers, simple folk, as a rule they have little love for state officials, and when it comes to facts they can smell when they stink.”

[311]

Ostrovsky, like Bibikov, also reminds Yakov that the extreme vulnerability of the Jews is an accurate measurement of the threat to the freedoms of all men subject to an oppressive and arbitrary system.

And Suslov-Smirnov, Bok's Ukranian lawyer, former anti-semite, “now … a vigorous defender of the rights of the Jews” [312], as well as the prison guard Kogin, who sacrifices his life to insure Yakov's safety, illustrate at two different levels the extent to which a man might be changed by an intellectual or personal encounter with a specific historic phenomenon. So much, then, for the Russians who influence and educate the fixer's sensibilities.

Spinoza is another perhaps more equivocal presence in Yakov's attempt to understand and deal with the historical machinery that has imprisoned him. In his philosophy and his life, Spinoza represents liberation, the escape from stultifying tradition and a fixed destiny. As Bok explains, “I read through a few pages and kept on going as though there were a whirlwind at my back. … When you're dealing with such ideas you feel as though you were taking a witch's ride. After that I wasn't the same man” [75-76]. What initially attracts Bok to the philosopher is his apparent reduction of God from a demanding, unreasonable, unforgiving Jewish patriarch to an idea, to a thought, defined in part, as man's capacity for reason. For Yakov, as a most reluctant Jew, this dimension of God's power allows, even encourages, the wished-for escape from the ineluctability of Jewish history. But this leap into freedom proves ironic, as Tony Tanner carefully explains,¹⁵ since it is precisely this curiosity for the varieties of experience and the deracination contingent upon experimentation that puts Yakov in jail. And it is in prison that Yakov not only recognizes the limits of attempting to live a philosophy but also perceives the disjunction between theories constructed in the serene isolation of one's own choosing and the accomplished reality of his cage and the actual circumstances that brought him there. Spinoza was

free in his thoughts, his understanding of Necessity, and in the construction of his philosophy. The fixer's thoughts added nothing to his freedom; it was nil. He was imprisoned in a cell, and even in memory because so much that had happened to him during a life that had perhaps, at times, seemed free, now seemed designed to lead him to this imprisonment. Necessity freed Spinoza and imprisoned Yakov. Spinoza thought himself into the universe but Yakov's poor thoughts were inclosed in a cell.

[207]

However, although there is considerable sardonic ambiguity in the use to which Spinozan concepts are put, he is not abandoned as one of Yakov's teachers for two reasons. His life—an apostate Jew persecuted by his brethren for his heresies, the determination to continue studying, writing, thinking, elaborating intellectual and ethical systems, in spite of illness and poverty—serves an exemplary purpose, a lesson in survival. And his political beliefs, as explained by Bibikov and perceived by Bok, provide the philosophic justification for Yakov's final, impassioned re-entry into history: “What is it Spinoza says? If the state acts in ways that are abhorrent to human nature it's the lesser evil to destroy it. Death to the anti-Semites! Long live revolution! Long live liberty!” [335].

Christianity, especially in its archetypal connections with the myth of the suffering and dying god whose sacrifice redeems the world, the scapegoat who shoulders the sins of men that they may experience salvation, furnishes Yakov with another sanctioned version of history into which he can fit the seemingly inexplicable occurrences of his life. That Bok, whose name in German means “goat,” is such a figure needs no further explanation. We have already noted the ways in which he, or the mythic Jew into which he has been transformed, has absorbed precisely those doubts and inadequacies that most trouble each character, the most significant in this context being the guilt that may inhere in the rite of Communion where the body and blood of Jesus is ritually eaten. That Bok's existence is drawn to resemble Christ's is equally obvious: a fixer, a carpenter who abandons the traditional community in his thirtieth year, in order to begin a new ministry among the godless; arrested in April during the Passover season; imprisoned with thieves and murderers; figuratively lost to the world; and even resurrected.¹⁶ However, what is read and remembered from the New Testament, given to Yakov by Zhitnyak's wife, are only those incidents that conform to and reinforce the peculiarly Jewish pattern of historical suffering:

Yet the story of Jesus fascinated him and he read it in the four gospels. He was a strange Jew, humorless and fanatic, but the fixer liked the teachings. … He was deeply moved when he read how they spat on him and beat him with sticks; and how he hung on the cross at night. Jesus cried out help to God but God gave no help. There was a man crying out in anguish in the dark, but God was on the other side of the mountain. … Christ died and they took him down. The fixer wiped his eyes. Afterwards he thought if that's how it happened and it's part of the Christian religion, and they believe it, how can they keep me in prison, knowing I am innocent?

[232]

But the Christian strategy has qualified usefulness as a comfort for the confined Jew. Bok recognized immediately the discrepancy between the Word and the behavior he has witnessed and has been subjected to. Unlike the Old Testament which chronicles the continuing encounter between man and Yahweh in historical time, the New Testament delineates what appears to be a single powerful hierophany. The words of Jesus that haunt Bok because they function as a moral commentary on his travails carry little ethical authority in the Christian world as he has known it. The injunctions he memorizes

“Which of you convicts me of sin? … If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me?”

“But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away, than for one dot of the law to become void.”

“Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged and the measure you give will be the measure you get.”

[234]

make no impact on Christian action. To Kogin they seem unfamiliar and strange, “When you say the words they sound different than I remember them” [234]. Yet, as with Spinoza, some of the wisdom remains:

“What about the sayings you used to say by memory? Why don't you say any of them any more?”

“I've forgotten them.”

“This is one I remember,” says the guard. “‘But he who endures to the end will be saved.’ It's either from Matthew or Luke. …”

Yakov is moved so deeply he laughs.

[272]

The most critical determinant of Yakov's changing responses to the historical process is his re-emergent sense of his Jewish identity and how that consciousness of self affects his awareness and interpretation of the events he experiences. His initial rejection of Jewishness, symbolized by a multitude of specific gestures such as the absence of a beard, the deliberate loss of his prayer shawl and phylacteries as an answer to the ferryman's anti-semitic diatribe, the taking of an obviously non-Jewish name, the abandonment of Kiev's Jewish quarter, is linked to a heightened feeling of emancipation and material opportunity. This denial is also coupled with, and perhaps accounts for, Yakov's antagonism toward history and toward politics, through which the individual can to a greater or lesser degree, control, alter, or manipulate the forces unleashed by history. He repeats often to Schmuel, to Lebedev, to Bibikov, to Grubeshov that he is not a political man. After all, if one no longer is a Jew, one ceases to be obsessed by history's exactions and demands. But it is not so easy to lose so major a component of one's personality. Indeed, it is the residual legacy of that unwanted Judaism as it unconsciously appears in his behavior that ultimately makes him suspect: his acts of charity toward Lebedev and the Hasid whom he shelters (ironically it is precisely that charitable impulse that Shmuel claims his son-in-law is without); his tense, watchful honesty; his reaction to Zina Lebedev's seduction while she is menstruating.

In prison, Yakov can neither evade nor escape his essential Jewishness. He must confront it directly, continuously, even compulsively, since it is the single cause of his torment and suffering that is accessible to him. And should he desire a respite from the enforced contemplation of the problem, his jailors make that impossible not only through agonizing physical torture, but by attempting, in very concrete ways, to shape Bok into their fantasy of the conspiratorial, threatening, demonic Jew, imposing the outward signs of a religion and a heritage he has surrendered. As the encounter unfolds and Yakov comes to terms with the self he has disdained, his attitudes toward authority, toward history, toward the nature of his political responsibilities given history's madness, undergo a radical but not particularly surprising metamorphosis.

At first Yakov is overpowered by his own impotence, his powerlessness in the face of inevitable destiny. He did nothing to warrant such punishment, to endure such a personal catastrophe. The reason is external, its source in an identity he has chosen to will away in order to obtain possibility:

During Yakov's first days in the courthouse jail the accusation had seemed to him almost an irrelevancy, nothing much to do with his life or deeds. But after the visit to the cave he had stopped thinking of relevancy, truth, or even proof. There was no “reason,” there was only their plot against a Jew, any Jew; he was the accidental choice for the sacrifice. He would be tried because the accusation had been made, there didn't have to be another reason. Being born a Jew meant being vulnerable to history, including its worst errors. Accident and history had involved Yakov Bok as he had never dreamed he could be involved. The involvement was, in a way of speaking, impersonal, but the effect, his misery and suffering, were not.

[155]

Because he has impersonalized his Jewishness, placing it outside the psyche, contingent upon his persecutors' definition, Yakov is simply a victim. There is no anger or true understanding; there is only an uncomprehending, albeit painful, endurance. Yakov's awe of authority, at this early point in the novel's development, is concomitant to this sense of helplessness. Since he is not yet capable of sustaining an independent self, perhaps those in power can assist, if he pleases them.

After Bibikov's death and Yakov's further isolation in solitary confinement, after an attempted poisoning and Grubeshov's fanatic irrationality, anger begins, and there is hostility directed at an unpitying God's history: “They say God appeared in history and used it for his purposes, but if that was so he had no pity for men. God cried mercy and smote his chest, but there was no mercy because there was no pity. Pity in lightning? You could not pity anything if you weren't a man; pity was a surprise to God. It was not his invention” [207]. After an exposure to Grubeshov's governmentally sanctioned, politicized hatred, this generalized rage against a pitiless God removed from the cares of men is soon particularized and focused as it is turned against his Jewish fate: “His fate nauseated him. Escaping from the Pale he had at once been entrapped in prison. From birth a black horse had followed him, a Jewish nightmare. What was being a Jew but an everlasting curse? He was sick of their history, destiny, blood guilt” [227]. The process of introjecting not simply an externalized identity, but a mode of perception, an explanation of the historical why, has started.

Discovering the New Testament, given him after he had broken the phylacteries to read of the rewards for loving and serving God and the punishments for denial, Bok recognizes the divergence between the actual words and experience of Jesus Christ and the deeds committed by believing Christians in his name. This awareness leads to his first assertion of participation in and identification with Jewish destiny. When a priest is permitted to enter Bok's cell in order to convert and absolve the Hebrew of his sins, he states, “I forgive no one” [236]. And, in a major gesture of defiance, Yakov dons prayer shawl and phylactery. The fixer's wrath has at last found the appropriate objects to use in order to express his rage against those representatives of imperial Russian orthodoxy and oppression that have imprisoned him. No longer is that fury directed at himself and/or the Jews.

The next step in the fixer's transformation into a political man, inhabiting rather than avoiding history, is a reconsideration of the facts of Jewish sacred experience. Bok learns that it is based on an actively sought personal as well as tribal covenant, noting with a new appreciation that the deity is not distant or remote but immediately present, interfering, overbearing, a God who appears to need the Jews as much as the Jews need Him, a God in search of man:¹⁷

He read longer and faster, gripped by the narrative of the joyous and frenzied Hebrews … whatever they were doing always engaged in talk with the huffing-puffing God who tried to sound, maybe out of envy, like a human being.

God talks. He has chosen, he says, the Hebrews to preserve him. He covenants, therefore he is. He offers and Israel accepts, or when will history begin? Abraham, Moses, Noah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Ezra, even Job, make their personal covenant with the talking God. But Israel accepts the covenant in order to break it. That's the mysterious purpose: they need the experience. So they worship false Gods; and this brings Yahweh up out of his golden throne with a flaming sword in both hands. When he talks loud history boils. … Having betrayed the covenant with God they have to pay: war, destruction, death, exile—and they take what goes with it. Suffering, they say, awakens repentance, at least in those who can repent. Thus the people of the covenant wear out their sins against the Lord. He then forgives them and offers a new covenant. Why not? This is his nature, everything must begin again, don't ask him why. Israel, changed yet unchanged, accepts the new covenant in order to break it by worshipping false gods so that they will ultimately suffer and repent, which they do endlessly.

[239-240]

What is crucial in this mytho-historical analysis is the meaning Yakov assigns to the covenant: “The purpose of the covenant … is to create human experience, although human experience baffles God” [240]. To reject the contract is to deny not only one's Jewishness but one's humanity as well.

Bok's metamorphosis is complete when he recognizes that self-knowledge and historical consciousness are insufficient unless the wisdom they offer is accompanied by the willingness to step outside the limitations of a necessarily ego-centered life to identify personal suffering with the community's historical pain and anguish. Indeed, it is precisely this awareness of the individual's relation to the community of others and the actions taken in the name of such a vital connection that define Malamud's concept of the political person, according to Terrence Des Pres.¹⁸ For Bok, it is imperative that he acknowledge debts owed: first to Shmuel, his father-in-law, the rejected model of the righteous man whose existence revealed the spirit of the Law; and second to the Jewish people, of whom he is the visible and tortured embodiment:

To the goyim what one Jew is is what they all are. If the fixer stands accused of murdering one of their children, so does the rest of the tribe. Since the crucifixion the crime of the Christ-killer is the crime of all Jews. …

He pities their fate in history. After a short time of sunlight you awake in a black and bloody world. Overnight a madman is born who thinks Jewish blood is water. Overnight life becomes worthless. The innocent are born without innocence. The human body is worth less than its substance. … All he can do is not make things worse. He's half a Jew himself, yet enough of one to protect them. After all, he knows the people; and he believes in their right to be Jews and live in the world like men. He is against those who are against them. He will protect them to the extent that he can. This is his covenant with himself. If God's not a man he has to be. Therefore he must endure to the trial. And let them confirm his innocence by their lies.

[273-274]

With this covenant, Yakov Bok deliberately and actively chooses to enter the events that shape human society. It is important to mention here another symbolic device that Malamud uses to emphasize man's responsibilities in meeting the pressing demands of the world of deeds and circumstances: the conflation of Yakov Bok's individual history with that of the Jews in a generalized pattern that Malamud perceives to be “First the Prophets' ‘way of gentleness’; the sins of the people, Punishment, Exile and return.”¹⁹ Indeed, Yakov Bok does not merely find a self; or having found that self, possess the capacity to redefine his relationship to history. Bok's life is the life of the Jewish people. It is neither allegory nor analogue but equivalency, a profound illustration of Will Herberg's contention that “Jewish faith is the affirmation of the sacred history as one's own particular history or as one's own ‘true past.’”²⁰

But in order to join the community of men as he has become part of the community of Jews, Bok must extend his vision:

All night the cell was crowded with prisoners who had lived and died there. They were broken-faced, greenish-gray men, with haunted eyes, scarred shaved heads and ragged bodies crowding the cell. Many stared wordlessly at the fixer and he at them, their eyes lit with longing for life. If one disappeared two appeared in his place. So many prisoners, thought the prisoner, it's a country of prisoners. They've freed the serfs … but not the innocent prisoners. He beheld long lines of them, gaunt-eyed men with starved mouths, lines stretching through the thick walls to impoverished cities, the vast empty steppe, great snowy virgin forests, to the shabby wooden work camps in Siberia.

[317]

The persecution of the Jews, the most visible, available, and acceptable victims in Western culture, is an indication of deep corruption and far-reaching decay. No man is free, least of all the persecutors, when the innocent are, as a matter of course, of politics, of history, destroyed. This is the final lesson learned in Yakov's hallucinatory encounter with the Tsar, when Bok in the ultimate act of rebellion assassinates the Little Father, in spite of Bibikov's humane protestations: “What the Tsar deserves is a bullet in the gut. Better him than us. … One thing I've learned, he thought, there's no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew. … You can't sit still and see yourself destroyed. Afterwards he thought, Where there's no fight for it there's no freedom” [334-335]. History is not irreversible, and the principled individual might be able to alter the future. It is only the unpolitical man who is at Clio's mercy. There is, however, the usual ambivalence in Malamud's ending. Granted that Yakov has changed both as a man and as a Jew; granted also that his new knowledge has brought him into history. Nevertheless, the force of Yakov's apparently liberating violence is contained, diminished, and perhaps even negated because it has occurred in a fantasy. There is only imagined regicide, not actual revolution. Yet once again the ambiguities created by real events are present. For when the actual revolution did occur, how improved was the state of human freedom? Yakov's final imagined gesture of rebellion, however, is unlike the process by which the accumulating hostilities and racial fantasies of The Tenants take over, then explode that novel's form.²¹

There is still another way to manipulate history, to control its force and direct its energy, that ought to be noted, however briefly, in connection with The Fixer, and that is through art. The artist is able to rearrange, distort, and omit the actual facts of a real situation, in this instance the Beiliss case,²² in order to make events intelligible or arrive at an emotional verisimilitude impossible to achieve using historical data. It seems either absurd or self-evident to say that the writer or painter is not a liar, at least in the common use of the term. But given the commentary that inevitably appears upon the publication of such a book as Ragtime or the attempts to prove that Picasso was less than honest when he painted the monumental “Guernica,” it is worth repeating that the artist is revealing, perhaps, another side of truth, that imagination needs to be faithful only to its own vision, that the artist's arrangement of information is his attempt to order a universe. The artist as historian is a valid concept so long as we do not equate honesty with fictive reality.

The Tenants, as we have noted, is eschatology, a book concerned with despair, violence, and the fall of civilization in these worst of times, an echo of the Biblical days of wrath in the time before the end of time. It is apocalyptic fiction, as defined and explained by Robert Alter:

Apocalyptic writers, ancient and modern, are not really interested in the facts of history or human nature because they scarcely believe anymore in either—or, to put it another way, because what they assume to be essential facts of human existence are wholly known. … Apocalypse which means “uncovering” in Greek is a perfectly appropriate name for this kind of literature because there are no genuine, human surprises in it, only a breaking open of seals, tearing away of masks, lifting of veils—nothing but “revelation” of what is already known.²³

In The Tenants, history rides man because it has deprived men of the opportunity to develop an autonomous sense of self, a possibility lost in the welter of historically conditioned misperceptions, roles played, masks worn, and identities assumed. Harry and Willie respond not to each other directly but to the multiplicity of projected images that builds walls and insures frustration, anger, and hate. In a society that encourages transience, geographically and emotionally, and destroys with relative ease the sources of stability, security, and continuity, it is difficult to confront and master the complexities of history because all value systems seem to be constructed of quicksand. Where ethics, morality, and conscience can no longer operate, there can be no inner strength—Willie and Harry are isolates whose connections with others are exploitative rather than caring. Without that inner strength, all behavior becomes reactive, determined by others. There is safety only in prisons, such as Harry Lesser's apartment barricaded against the barbarians at the gate. And surcease, if it can be called that, is to be found either in Lesser's fantasies of an island Eden, eventually invaded by the black destroyers, or in the hallucinatory violence of Willie Spearmint's fiction. The Tenants ends in despair, in a cry for mercy that will go unanswered, because history is neither the dispenser of mercy nor the guarantor of certainty.

By examining the social forces that condition Malamud's world, we have attempted to show in this study that affirmation is ambiguous and hope equivocal. The American dream is corrosive, prizing just those skills that guarantee moral failure, while honesty, duty, responsibility, and integrity assure material ruin and circumscribe experience. Eden, if it is to be possessed at all, is bought at the price of complexity and feeling, and those who are exiled from such a simplistic environment are trapped by the obligations of being human. Race, sex, and art offer warfare, rather than brotherhood, love, or beauty. History imprisons at best, destroys at worst with violence as the mediator. Perhaps it is Malamud's recognition of the ways in which paradox shapes our lives—to be truly free is to be imprisoned in obligation and accountability—that is the source of his moral as well as artistic strength. After all, growing up is a matter of compromise and accommodation; and maturity is a matter of discovering acceptable limits. When man exceeds those critical determinants that shape his humanity in an effort to pursue a quixotic ideal, he fails and loses what he is. Malamud wants the individual to inhabit the world and to function in society; no matter that the world and society, as portrayed in the fiction, fight the desire for integration every step of the way. It is precisely in such confrontations that man defines his humanity.

Notes

1. The Trial of Judaism in Contemporary Jewish Writing; see also Chapter One, pp. 19-20, of this study.

2. Robert Alter, in “Malamud: Jewishness as Metaphor,” in After the Tradition, pp. 121-122, has examined the images of imprisonment that mark Malamud's work, culminating in the actual Russian prison of The Fixer. This is also a concern of Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence, Chapter Six, “The Qualified Encounter,” pp. 169-179.

3. It is odd that one of the few factors not usually ascribed to Malamud's Jewishness is this interest in history.

4. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, pp. 104-107. I have also depended upon several others, besides Eliade, who have attempted to explore the interaction between the historical process and the Jews: Martin Buber, The Prophetic Faith; Arthur A. Cohen, The Natural and the Supernatural Jew: An Historical and Theological Introduction (London: Valentine, Mitchell, 1967); Isidore Epstein, Judaism: A Historical Representation (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1968); Will Herberg, Judaism and Modern Man (New York: Atheneum, 1970); Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966); and Theodore Reik, Jewish Wit.

5. Eliade, pp. 102-103.

6. Judaism and Modern Man, p. 287.

7. Israel Knox, in “The Traditional Roots of Jewish Humor,” Judaism, 12 (Summer, 1963), 327-337, has produced much the best analysis of the philosophical significance of Jewish humor, followed closely by Theodore Reik, Jewish Wit, who establishes the historical and psychological context of Jewish humor.

8. American Nationalism: An Interpretive Essay (New York: Collier Books, 1961); Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); The American Image of the Old World (New York: Harper and Row, 1963).

9. “Getting Religion,” The New York Review of Books, 23:17(28 October 1976), 20.

10. The Magic Barrel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1958), pp. 105-133.

11. “The Apocalyptic Temper,” in After the Tradition, p. 50.

12. Bernard Malamud, The Fixer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), p. 297. All citations are from this edition, and further page references will appear in brackets in the text.

13. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961), pp. 71-73. One of the issues this seminal work attempts to deal with is the socio-cultural roots of anti-semitism within the changing environments of the Middle Ages, conditions not unlike those of the pre-Revolutionary Russia that is the setting of The Fixer.

14. Cohn, pp. 62-63.

15. City of Words, pp. 334-336.

16. James Mellard, “Malamud's Novels: Four Versions of the Pastoral,” Critique, 9(1967), 9-10, traces the Christian design in The Fixer as well as the mythic patterns that seem to underlie the novel's structure.

17. It is this notion of God that seems to dominate the theology presented in both Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man and Will Herberg, Judaism and Modern Man.

18. The Survivor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 13.

19. This particular model of the Jewish experience is observed by Malamud in an interview with Joseph Wershba, “Not in Horror but Sadness,” New York Post, 14 September 1958, M2.

20. Judaism and Modern Man, p. 287.

21. It is important to emphasize here a peculiar fact concerning the quality of Malamud's endings. While it is true that affirmation appears to be the controlling direction taken by his fiction, it is worth noting how often that optimism occurs in the equivocal context of fantasy. It is as if the actuality presented in the novels and short stories cannot quite justify that sense of hopefulness. Only when a work's ending confronts a disillusioning experience directly do we get a conclusion that is anchored in a version of reality. The exception, of course, is The Tenants where pessimism dominates the tone and narrative from the outset. It does not simply appear in the concluding apocalyptic visions. Lesser's imprisonment has been deliberately chosen in order to evade the demands of life. Friendship is limited by racial hostility. There are no counterparts in The Tenants to Bibikov, or Shmuel, of even Kogin. Irene Bell, who embodies the possibility of redemption through love, abandons both Willie and Harry for a more fruitful environment. And Lesser's island fantasies grow increasingly bleak. It is the hymeneal dream of brotherhood that seems anomalous, while the final images of violence seem a more accurate reflection of the novel's mood.

22. By a fortuitous set of circumstances, Maurice Samuel's account of the Beiliss case, Blood Accusation (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1966), was published at about the same time as Malamud's novel, permitting a comparison between the real and fictive histories. What Malamud has chosen to do is to isolate Yakov Bok far more than Mendel Beiliss ever was, creating a primal conflict between a solitary man and his religion, his society, and his history. Malamud has stripped Yakov down to his essence as a human being, without the mitigating factors of friends, family, and permission to live in a non-Jewish quarter of Kiev. In the end, however, those mitigating factors did not prevent Beiliss from undergoing the accusation, imprisonment, and trial. A Jew, after all, will always be a Jew, and therefore, vulnerable to history's claims—which is precisely Malamud's point.

23. “The Apocalyptic Temper,” in After the Tradition, p. 50.