can someone please give me a short, but somewhat detailed summary of 'The Fixer' by bernard malamud?

Question

i mostly just want plot, but some interesting things would be nice

Answer 1

Here you are George hope you enjoy this:

The Fixer by Bernard Malamud 1966

http://litsum.com/fixer/contents.php


The Fixer (1966)

Pulitzer Prize (Fiction)
Author Info:
Bernard Malamud
1914-1986

In chains all that was left of freedom was life, just existence; but to exist without choice was the
same as death.

-Bernard Malamud, The Fixer

In this National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, Bernard Malamud presents a fictionalized account of a notorious anti-Semitic incident, the arrest and eventual trial, following a great outcry in the West, of Mendel Beilis in pre-Revolutionary Kiev. Beilis was accused of murdering a Christian boy, despite evidence pointing toward the boy's own mother. After being held from 1911 to 1913, he was finally brought to trial, where he was exonerated.

In this novel the protagonist is Yakov Bok, a nominally Jewish handyman ("fixer")--nominally because he has abandoned his Jewish beliefs for a Spinoza influenced kind of "free thinking"--leaves his village after being cuckolded by his wife. Eventually ending up in Kiev, he one day comes upon a man collapsed in the street and decides to help him, despite noticing that he is wearing a Black Hundreds pin (symbol of a vicious anti-Semitic organization). The man, who turns out to be a local merchant who was merely drunk, offers Yakov a job managing his brickyard, not realizing that he is Jewish. Yakov accepts, despite much trepidation, goes to work under an assumed name, Yakov Ivanovitch Dologushev, and moves into an apartment in an area forbidden to Jews.

Once on the job he runs afoul of : the merchant's daughter, whose sexual advances he deflects; local boys, who he he chases out of the factory yard; and the employees, who he warns about stealing bricks. These seemingly petty disagreements prove to have disastrous results when a local boy is found murdered, stabbed repeatedly and drained of blood. Yakov, who the authorities have discovered is Jewish, is accused of committing the murder as a form of ritual killing to harvest Christian blood for use in some imagined rites for Passover celebration : The ritual murder is meant to re-enact the crucifixion of our dear Lord. The murder of Christian children and the distribution of their blood among Jews are a token of their eternal enmity against Christendom, for in murdering the innocent Christian child, they repeat the martyrdom of Christ.

The victim is one of the boys that Yakov had chased, and both daughter and fellow employees are only too willing to give false testimony against him. The initial prosecutor assigned to the case is relatively friendly, and obviously skeptical about this theory of the case, but he does not last long.

His rivals and replacements try with great brutality to wring a confession from Yakov. In part, they are motivated by an understanding that the evidence they have against him is terribly inadequate : they are determined to keep the case from going to trial. Yakov, on the other hand, recognizes that he if he can just get to a courtroom he has a chance to clear himself, and Jews generally, of this blood libel. There follows a harrowing, years-long, battle of wills, in which Yakov takes on truly heroic dimensions : a simple, non-political, nonbeliever, is transformed before our eyes into a powerful symbol of resistance to anti-Semitism, injustice, tyranny and hatred. By the end of the story he resembles nothing so much as one of the Titans--an Atlas holding the weight of the world on his own shoulders; a Prometheus, having his innards picked out by carrion birds every day; or a Sisyphus, futilely pushing a boulder up a hill every day, only to have it roll back down every night. Yakov too seems sentenced by God to bear a punishment for all mankind, and he too bears up under it with superhuman strength and transcendent nobility. Superficially then it seems to resemble an existentialist novel, but Yakov derives his strength, and the story derives its universality and its power, from his determination to prove his innocence, a determination which would not matter to an existentialist.

Through the culture-consuming hegemony of the movies, Malamud is today best remembered for The Natural, but The Fixer is the book upon which his reputation should rest. It is a great novel; one that deserves a place on the shelf with the works of George Orwell, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Arthur Koestler, and the other great novelists of the Twentieth Century whose theme was the struggle of the individual against the machinations of the State and against the soul-destroying ideological pathologies which undergird totalitarian states.

http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/1069/Fixer.htm%20target=

Answer 2

The Fixer Bernard Malamud Summary

Answer 3

The best way to write a short summary of something is this: Pretend that someone has asked you, "Hey, what's that book about?"

Then answer that question in two to four sentences. Give enough information about the plot to make it sound worth reading, but not enough to spoil the ending for the potential reader.

So, on your paper, write, "This book is about..."
What?
A person who....
Two people who....

Include: main characters, setting (time and place), primary conflict.

Answer 4

It means that without freedom life is as good as being dead. Without the freedom in life all you can do is just live without any passion to do anything. You can't have that million dollar house that you wanted, instead you live in a cardboard box in Downtown.

Answer 5

Jewish handyman in 19th century anti-semitic Russia is accused of ritual murder a la The Protocols of Zion.

Answer 6

If you have to do a school book report, you should do your own reading...

Answer 7

Here is a summery:

The Fixer Summary | Chapter 1, Part 1 Summary

The novel opens with Yakov Bok watching from his bedroom window, as his townspeople flee. Concerned, he hides his money stash and goes outside to investigate. The people are all running toward a cave, where the murdered body of a young boy was found. As rumors circulate about the murder, a local group, called the Black Hundreds, accuses the Jews of killing the child.

Yakov grows very uneasy reading the propaganda against the Jews. A Jewish man himself, he is living in secret and working in an area where Jews are forbidden. He thinks back to his own encounters with Anti-Semitism and remembers how his father was murdered just for being a Jew. He remembers a horrible scene from his childhood where a Jewish man was murdered and left in the street, pork sausage stuffed into his mouth, while pigs ate his flesh.

The Fixer Summary | Chapter 1, Part 2 Summary
The story flashes back five months to Yakov drinking tea with his father-in-law, Shmuel. Shmuel offered himself as dowry, when Yakov married Raisl and the men share an uncomfortable afternoon discussing Raisl's unfaithfulness. She had run away and left Yakov. Over the course of the argument, Yakov reveals bits of his past. He grew up starving in an orphanage after his father was killed. His wife was unable to bear children. He educated himself and knows several languages. After Raisl ran off with another man, Yakov sold everything and planned to move to Kiev to start a new life. He refers to himself as a fixer, a man who always needs to keep busy.

As Yakov prepares to leave his shtetl, Shmuel asks him not to go. Shmuel insists that Raisl might come back to him if he were more patient, more forgiving of her barren sorrow. Shmuel warns Yakov of the Black Hundreds and how life is for Jews in Kiev. Shmuel asks Yakov to go to Palestine if he must run off, to be among his own people at least. Shmuel and other beggars ask Yakov for money, as he rides off. Yakov is bitter over his poverty and has nothing to share.

It is Friday afternoon, as he Yakov sets off, and he muses on his life so far, as he watches people prepare for the Sabbath. Yakov is angry about his situation in life, angry even at God, which makes Shmuel very upset. Yakov is so frustrated that he draws blood from the horse beating it to go faster. Yakov feels badly staring at the bloody wound, as he they journey toward Kiev. He dwells on his sorry life and thinks how he can never catch a break.

Yakov offers a ride to an old woman walking, but a wheel on the wagon soon breaks. He tries carrying on with only three wheels, but soon, the other wheel collapses and he is in the middle of nowhere with a broken wagon, again cursing his rotten luck. As the old woman prays to Jesus, Yakov grumbles and loads his possessions on the horse's back. He climbs atop the pile and rides the nag, who still will not go very fast for Yakov. In the middle of the night, when Yakov is about to give up hope, they come to a river.

The Fixer Summary | Chapter 1, Part 3 Summary
There is no ferry to cross the river, but the boatman offers to row Yakov across for a ruble. Yakov is upset at this sum. He had hoped to cross the river and stay in an inn. He is also upset that he must part with his horse. The boatman informs Yakov that it is many miles out of the way to a bridge and that the horse is worthless and about to die anyway. He convinces Yakov that he is getting a bargain by having the boatman take the stubborn nag off his hands at the riverbank.

As the fixer looks back sadly at the farting, stubborn horse, the boatman says he does not recognize Yakov's accent. Yakov has stopped speaking Yiddish and is using only Russian outside his shtetl and pretends to have lived all over the place. He is not ready to reveal that he is Jewish. Yakov pretends to be Latvian and the boatman is relieved, spitting out racial and ethnic slurs about Germans and Jews and Polish people. The whole way across the river, the boatman talks about how the solution to all Russia's problems would be to find all the Jews and murder them and burn their corpses. Yakov drops his prayer bag into the river and shivers with fear.

The Fixer Summary | Chapter 2, Part 1 Summary
Yakov is awed by Kiev. It is much grander and vibrant than his old shtetl. When he first arrives, he hides in the Jewish quarter and wanders the streets marveling at the colors and sights. Yakov is proud of his artistic appreciation of beauty, even though it adds nothing to his financial situation. Yakov is homesick, but will not return to his village. Desperately afraid of being discovered as a Jew, he speaks only in Russian and attends church, learning the customs of the people of Kiev.