As for me and this covid-19 lockdown, I continue reading Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer (1966) with great interest. Why is it that the books I’ve put off reading turn out to be the most interesting? I have added to my ‘No Clean Slates.” I fear this section - what I’m calling “A Reasonable Facsimile of a Family'' - is malnourished and thin - about half the length (as I recollect it) of “Love Stinks.” maybe a few more pages today. I’m taking a break from my fiction but from over-straining my arm! No mail from Melissa or KA or MW or Sheila or Tim T. I need to shower since I skipped yesterday. Maybe I will play Charlie a game (or a few) of chess. That will depend on the writing.
I’m going to take the time to make a few comments on The Fixer. Use up the remaining pages of this composition book. First, it is a book written by an American about a Russian jew in pre-WWI Kiev accused of ritually slaughtering a Christian child. The accused is Yakov Blok who comes across as a far more unlucky Tevye, more of a Kafka character.
Malamaud puts these words into a Russiina, an investigating magistrate, and they are said to Bok:
“...There’s something cursed, it seems to me, about a country where men have owned men as property. The stink of that corruption never escapes the soul, and it is the stink of future evil….”
The Fixer (1966; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004); Chapter V; 5; p. 172
Surely that resonated in 1966 as it does for me in 2020. Maybe it signified how Russian serfdom corresponded to American slavery; maybe it pointed out our own vileness. Being in this prison, a white man incarcerated, the passage sure resonated with me as of the New Jim Crow.
I continue reading Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer (1966) with great interest. Why is it for me, that the books I’ve put off reading turn out to be the most interesting? I have added to my ‘No Clean Slates.” I fear this section - what I’m calling “A Reasonable Facsimile of a Family” - is malnourished and thin - about half the length (as I recollect it) of “Love Stinks.” maybe a few more pages today. I’m taking a break from my fiction but from over-straining my arm! No mail from Melissa or KA or MW or Sheila or Tim T. I need to shower since I skipped yesterday. Maybe I will play Charlie a game (or a few) of chess. That will depend on the writing.
I’m going to take the time to make a few comments on The Fixer. Use up the remaining pages of this composition book. First, it is a book written by an American about a Russian jew in pre-WWI Kiev accused of ritually slaughtering a Christian child. The accused is Yakov Blok who comes across as a far more unlucky Tevye, more of a Kafka character.
Malamud puts these words into a Russian, an investigating magistrate, and they are said to Bok:
“...There’s something cursed, it seems to me, about a country where men have owned men as property. The stink of that corruption never escapes the soul, and it is the stink of future evil….”
The Fixer (1966; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004); Chapter V; 5; p. 172
Surely that resonated in 1966 as it does for me in 2020. Maybe it signified how Russian serfdom corresponded to American slavery; maybe it pointed out our own vileness. Being in this prison, a white man incarcerated, the passage sure resonated with me as of the New Jim Crow.
Again from the same speaker to the same listener:
...Keep in mind, Yakov Shepsovitch, that if your life is without value, so is mine. If the law does not protect you, it will not in the end, protect me.
P. 176
What white American character would say that to a Black character circa 1966? In 2020? Yet, that is what I have thought most of my life without now being able to recall where I learned this lesson - church or law school or reading philosophy? How many whites realize by using the law against minorities the law can then be used against them? Equite requires the one seeking equity to have clean hands. Such is justice. Such is the root of a clean conscience.
Sch
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