Books: The Outsider

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THE FIXER by Bernard Malamud. 335 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $5.75.

Down in Melville's Great White Whale—which might stand for the tragic tradition that lives pelagically 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.

It misses by very little, however. Malamud's novel is a fictional version of the Beiliss Case in Kiev, 1911, in which a Jew was wrongly accused of the ritual murder of a Christian child and of milking his blood for the purpose of making Passover matzos. The incident, followed by an obscene wave of antiSemitism, was documented in a bleak narrative by Maurice Samuel in Blood Accusation, published this year. Malamud coincidentally worked on the same gruesome subject, but he has gone beyond journalistic intention.

Surrounded by Russia. He aims to pose the universal question of innocent man put to nothing by guilty authority. His hero is a Jew whose complaint against Gentiles is not that they are not Jews but that they are not Christians. He is called Yakov Bok (a name that suggests scapegoat), a Russian who is a stranger to Russia, who makes himself a stranger to his own Jewish tradition, and who is finally a stranger to everyone but the reader.

He is 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 an idea in the mind of man, and man perhaps an idea in the mind of God.

But history and men betray him. His cart breaks down, so he rides bareback to his fate. He cannot leave himself behind; the horse "looks like an old Jew," and as he canters, ambles, trots and staggers across the black plain, Yakov can only be seen as a Jewish Quixote. It could also be said of his dream of "good fortune and a comfortable house," in the conditions of the Ukraine of that day, that nothing could be more hopelessly quixotic. He trades his Rosinante for a ferry ride and enters the holy city of Kiev. As a final renunciation of his historic identity, Yakov gives himself a Russian name: "Yakov Ivanovitch Dologushev."