Friday, March 18, 2011

Quote of the Day (Bernard Malamud, on Injustice vs. Optimism)


“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, and the same thing may be said about our society. That is how I feel, but having made that confession let me say, as you may have guessed, 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.”—Investigative Magistrate B.I. Bibikov to prisoner Yakov Bok, in Bernard Malamud, The Fixer (1966)

Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer influenced me as much as any novel I read in high school—both for its unobtrusive but effective style and its message about the indomitable spirit of the individual, even in the face of crushing injustice and circumstance. Many times, when I feel things are hopeless, I especially recall the above quote. It has, in a way, became a kind of personal credo, like the W.E. Henley poem "Invictus."

Malamud passed away writing at his desk 25 years ago on this date, only a day after telling editor and friend Robert Giroux that he expected to finish the last four chapters of his latest novel, The People, by the fall. It was an unjust twist of fate that he wasn’t able to complete it, but nothing like what befall his hero Yakov Bok in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

The most unlikely of heroes, Bok leaves his village for Kiev in 1911 to make a better life for himself as a handyman. Instead, he finds that, even though he is a nonobservant Jew, he is accused of the ritual murder of a Christian child, in a Czarist Russia rocked by periodic pogroms over the age-old "blood libel" canard.

(Several weeks ago, Sarah Palin plunged into controversy by using the term “blood libel” to describe how liberals had tarred her with the extremism associated with the shooting of Rep.Gabrielle Giffords. Before she appears again on Fox News, she might want to read The Fixer before asking herself if her case even remotely compares to the one in this book—a situation based on an all-too-common reality of early 20th-century Europe, such as the real-life case of Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Ukranian Jew whose sensational trial inspired Malamud's treatment here.)

In the scene from which the above quote is taken, a window of hope is opened for Bok, only to be cruelly closed again. He’s finally found, in Bibikov, the closest thing to decency among those examining his case—true, a man who’ll urge Bok’s prosecution for the “crime” of living in an area forbidden to Jews, but at least determined to drop the far more serious murder charge. "If the law does not protect you, it will not, in the end, protect me," Bibikov notes.

Almost immediately, that remark becomes unexpectedly true, as Bibikov is murdered. His death only adds to a string of troubles that make Bok a modern-day Job.

But, against all odds, the “fixer”—a proverbial “little man” standing against a giant, monstrous legal system—endures. By at least surviving until his trial, he stands a chance of disproving the murderous falsehood that would doom not only himself but all Jews.

What helps him go on? Who is to say that it isn’t the words of the proto-existentialist Bibikov, urging, decades before Camus, the necessity of action even when all seems hopeless?

For all their differences in station and outlook, Bibikov and Bok end up sharing something: an ability to transcend former beliefs and circumstances by committing, come what may, to doing the right thing. Bibikov, a bureaucrat in the service of an absolutist ruler, realizes that twisting the law will destroy his country as surely as any prisoner. And Bok, early on a self-described nonreligious, nonpolitical Jew, is fortified on the last page by this hard-earned understanding: “One thing I've learned, ...there's no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew.”

How did I, a parochial school student, come to empathize so powerfully with a victim of anti-Semitism? It might derive from a statement Malamud made late in life: “All men are Jews, except that they don’t know it.” At one and the same time, Malamud depicts both the particular details of the lives that made Jews the scapegoats of the 20th century and the universal instincts that made them irrevocably a part of humanity.

In his first published novel, The Natural (1952), Malamud invoked the mythic overtones associated with baseball, only, in the end, to debunk them. But in The Fixer, he endowed a common man with an almost mythic heroism.

At the height of his career, Malamud ranked with his contemporary Saul Bellow and younger colleague Philip Roth in a kind of triumvirate of great Jewish-American writers. In the quarter-century after his death, while their reputation stands high or has even risen, his stock has mysteriously declined. The Fixer demonstrates why a long-overdue reassessment to restore him to his rightful honored place in American letters is in order.

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