The Fixer

I read Bernhard Malmud's Pulitzer Prize winning fictionalization of the Beilis Case simply because it was quoted in the initial lines of Spinoza: Practical Philosophy.

       "Let me ask you what brought you to Spinoza? Is it that he was a Jew?"
       "No, your honor. I didn't know who or what he was when I first came across the book-they don't exactly love him in the synagogue, if you've read the story of his life. I found it in a junkyard in a nearby town, paid a kopek and left cursing myself for wasting money hard to come by. Later I read through a few pages and kept on going as though there were a whirlwind at my back. As I say, I didn't understand every word but 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 ..."
        "Would you mind explaining what you think Spinoza's work means? In other words if it's a philosophy what does it state?"
        "That's not so easy to say ... The book means different things according to the subject of the chapters, though it's all united underneath. But what I think it means is that he was out to make a free man of himself-as much as one can according to his philosophy, if you understand my meaning-by thinking things through and connecting everything up, if you'll go along with that, your honor."
        "That isn't a bad approach, through the man rather than the work. But ..."

The novel is the well written, if almost unremittingly bleak, story of the unjust imprisonment of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman in 1913 Russia.  Because the Czar is busy scapegoating folks of his ethnicity, he gets falsely charged with the ritual religious murder of a Kiev youth, and is jailed without trial for several years.   Potential readers are warned that the constant anxiety Bok feels before his arrest, the ludicrous charges leveled against him, and the brutal conditions of his imprisonment are all related in more than enough detail to keep you constantly alternating between despair, rage, and nausea.  It's almost as bad as reading the New York Times these days!  Truly, this is back when Jewish lives did not matter.  I hope we see more progress in the next 107 years.

From a literary perspective I felt like the writing was well crafted, but not really blow-you-away great.  In this respect, the most interesting parts were the way he handled the mixing of memory, hallucination, and real life as Bok spent more and more time in solitary confinement.  Also, PS. Spinoza appears as a name nothing more.  No attempt is made, by either Bok or Malmud, to grasp his philosophy beyond some vague stuff about atheism and freedom.