The Fixer Literary Elements

Jewish fiction/historical fiction/existential folk tale

Kiev, Russia between 1911 and 1913

For the most part, third person perspective with perspective limited to Yakov’s point of view

The overall tone of the narrative is that follows the foundational aspects of the folk tale in which the characters are more flat than rounded and broadened into archetypes to fulfill the pattern of heading off into the dark woods to confront an evil. The mood of the story takes a sharp turn toward an existential ambiguity rather than the moral certainty inherent in such tales with its open ending.

Protagonist: Yakov Bok. Antagonist: Deputy Warden

The major conflict is between Jewish people and the history of anti-Semitism. The conflict is distilled down to the story of Yakov Bok leaving his village to take a job in the city of Kiev. His arrival coincides with the murder of a young boy for which he is accused exclusively on the basis of assumptions associated with his being Jewish.

The climax is actually an ambiguous anti-climax. The story closes on the image of Yakov in police carriage being deliver to the court to start his trial amidst virulent anti-Semitic protests and the detonation of a bomb. The book ends with the verdict still unknown.

Though set several decades before the rise of Hitler, imagery and events clearly foreshadow the Holocaust. The most explicit example of this occurs during a passage examining the history anti-Semitism which declares all Jewish people guilty for the act of one and vice versa and which will inevitably inspire evil: “Overnight a madman is born who thinks Jewish blood is water. Overnight life becomes worthless.”

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The entire story alludes to an actual historical incident in which Menahem Beilis was imprisoned for a similar crime during the final years of Tsarist rule in Russia. The trial became an international sensation and he was ultimately acquitted.

Although prevalent throughout, one particular passage of imagery is striking for the way it foreshadows Nazi concentration camps and alludes to the horrors of the Holocaust: “as they passed the brick wall of a factory, its chimneys pouring out coal smoke whipped by the wind into the sky, he caught a reflected glimpse of a faded shrunken Jew in the circle of the window and hid from him”

At one point Yakov expresses a nostalgia for imprisonment with the suggestion that once all freedom has been removed, the only choices that remain are all about securing survival. Real freedom thus becomes the paradox of freedom from the consequences of any choice except to remain alive.

Parallels are drawn throughout the book that compare Yakov’s situation once he arrives in Kiev with that the Jewish population in Europe during the fascist occupations of foreign lands and the Nazi government in Germany. The collective persecution and attempt to annihilate one Jewish person from the face of the earth as punishment for a crime he did not commit is placed in parallel juxtaposition to the persecution of the entire Jewish population and the attempt to wipe the memory of existence from the archives of history.

"Day after day they crap up the Motherland,” says one particularly loathsome anti-Semitic character about the effects of Jewish people in the country. In this case, “the Motherland” is a term implied to cover the entirety of the so-called purity of nationalist culture.

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