The Fixer (FSG Classics)

I'd never heard of this book and not sure I would've ever chosen to read it on my own but it was the March pick for our Pulitzer Prize book club. Amazingly, it is based on a true story, set in the Ukraine in the early 1900s. Yakov Bok, a carpenter, or "fixer," leaves his shtetl in search of a better life after his wife runs off with another man. He is Jewish by origin but has never been a religious man. He's chosen to stay away from religion and politics and has mostly kept to himself his whole life. He's basically been trying to live his life and keep a low profile and stay out of trouble.
He arrives in Kiev and befriends a man and his daughter. The man (not knowing of his Jewish origin), seeing his skill & his natural abilities, sets him up with a job and a place to live. Unfortunately, the place he is living is forbidden territory for Jews. When the authorities discover him there, as a Jew "without papers," he is taken into custody.
At around this time, a young boy has been found brutally tortured & murdered. The authorities decide this must be the work of "an evil Jew," a ritualistic murder, and Yakov is fingered for the murder and thrown into prison and into a Kafka-esque nightmare. For the months and years he remains in prison, awaiting just an INDICTMENT, let alone a trial, we see a transformation of Yakov take place.
So many analogies can be made to what still goes on in the world today, with religious/racial prejudices, racism, torture of prisoners, innocent people trapped in a legal system with no hope of ever being heard.
Pretty dismal & bleak, but I'm really glad I read the book. Powerful story.

What a difficult book to read, and, I can only imagine, to write. We start with the injustice of poverty and lack of opportunity in the shtetl and move almost directly into a variety of unjust accusations leveled against Yakov Bok, who has become a scapegoat for all the imagined evil deeds of all the Jews in Russia.

Bok leaves the shtetl with hopes of a better life in Kiev. At first, things look up for him. Serendipity finds him a good job, and he is able to afford some books, and even put away some money. The catch is that he has to live in a district from which Jews are forbidden from living. All goes well, although Bok is not a popular figure, until a young boy is found murdered in a cave nearby.

The police show up at his door, arrest him, and summarily throw him in prison. Things go from bad to worse as he is forced to submit to increasingly cruel and dehumanizing treatment, not least of which is having to repeatedly listen to the many crimes he is supposed to have committed. But he steadfastly declares his innocence, and it is this that is supposed to make him one literature's greatest heroes. I'm not so sure about this, but certainly he is a strong character.

His strength almost makes this book harder to read, though. I found myself almost wishing he would confess, even though I knew he was innocent, just so the horribleness would end. But he and I both knew that confessing to a crime that he didn't commit wouldn't help at all, either his own dignity, or the plight of the Jews in Russia. So we endured together until the trial, to which Bok is on his way at the end of the book. At first I was disappointed that we don't find out what happens at the trial, but then I realized that the result of the trial isn't the point of the book. It's the persecution and the strength that it reveals that really matter.

An amazing and heartbreaking work of art.

Riveting