I’m not sure what to think –  it’s a powerful book,  based on a historical event but not something which would be written this way today.

Set in the final years of the Romanov Dynasty, 1905 – 1913,  Malamud has presented a fictionalized version of the  historical case of Menahem Beilis –  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendel Beiles 

*******
The Fixer
by Bernard Malamud
1966 / 301 pages
rating:   8
*******

With quite a lot of very real troubles,  Revolution,  war with Japan,  agriculture,  the  Russian people and the regime of  Tsar Nicholas II turned against the Jews.

Yakov Bok, a general handyman (a “fixer”) is arrested and jailed for the Passover murder of a teenage boy – it’s about Blood Libel  –  Over the course of the book he is tortured, beaten, starved, sleep deprived etc. in order to make him confess.  (And that’s as far as that goes without spoilers.)

The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 but I don’t know if I’m all that taken with it – and I don’t quite see how it fits the Americana idea behind the Pulitzers (but that’s changed and there are lots of Jewish people in the US).

The one thing it has going for it is the history behind the fiction,  but still – considering how much Malamud changed from the Beilis memoir re the family,   who knows how much he might have changed re the imprisonment.   Beilis’ family took Malmud to task for both plagiarism and defamation (I suppose you might call it).

“As the historian Albert Lindemann lamented, ‘By the late twentieth century, memory of the Beilis case came to be inextricably fused (and confused) with… The Fixer.’”[17]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menahem_Mendel_Beilis#Controversy_over_depiction_in_The_Fixer

Bingo!!

Still,  Malamud is a great author – I’ve read The Assistant and probably something else – he keeps the tension up and the ideas flowing.   Adding Spinoza and the New Testament were rather original and the way Bok ended up with the kind of seriously  delusional thinking one might expect after a couple years in that kind of imprisonment and torture was well done.   A couple of good plot twists, too.