Blood in the matzos BOOKS
ANTHONY BURGESS
In matters of art the categorising urge is a dangerous one, but it is born into us, like Original Sin. Talk of Bernard Malamud leads to talk of Saul Bellow and Isaac Bashevis Singer; comparison follows, and it is rarely to Malamud's advantage. This is only because he has, unlike Bellow, failed to turn the American Jew wholly into an American, and, unlike Singer, failed to stay uncompromisingly in the East European ghettoes. Though he writes an English very nearly as fine as Bellow's, his spirit is closer to Singer's. This is as much as to say that he is not primarily a secular writer: he is interested in sainthood, while Bellow is interested in success. He doesn't go as far as Singer, who unashamedly makes the next world trade with this, but his occasional surrealism looks like a compromise with the supernatural, and his two best novels resolve, if you strip them down, into studies of miraculous con- version.
The Assistant is set in a New York slum full of very poor Jews, one of whom, a grocer called Morris Bober, is beaten up by a goy hoodlum. Actuated by a mysterious remorse, the hoodlum returns to the shop to run it while Bober is recovering from his injuries. The remorse doesn't lead directly to a desire to be good: the wretch remains himself, kicking against the pricks. But imperceptibly the yeast of grace starts to work, and the goy ends up as an orthodox Jew, complete with circum- cision. It is a new life. A New Life is the title of what is perhaps Malamud's best book, in which a comic, foolish, accident-prone college lecturer becomes a saint not through the denial of the flesh (eventually the way of the goy penitent in The Assistant) but through the asser- tion of its rights. Levin, the lecturer, commits adultery. Adultery is a sin, but it is a sin that leads to love. At length it leads beyond love to the disinterested responsibility of true sanc- tity. Such themes sound sentimental, sweetly pious tract-stuff, but Malamud's approach is through irony and a kind of bitter naturalism.
His new novel, The Fixer (Eyre and Spottis- woode, 30s), has a Jew for its hero, but the American setting has been changed for a Singerian one—a place of snow and pogroms. The time is Singerian, too—the period of the western migrations of the oppressed Ash- kenazim. Yakov Shepsovitchy Bok, a fixer or handyman, sickened by lack of opportunity in his village and by the defection of a barren wife, goes to Kiev, 'the Jerusalem of Russia.' The sobriquet is ironic, since the Jew-hating Black Hundreds, with their two-headed-eagle badge, are very active here. Ironic, too, is the fact that Yakov finds opportunity for better- ing himself (changing his name and dissembling his race) by helping a drunken Black Hundred snoring in the snow. Set up as supervisor of a brickyard, reading Spinoza in his spare time, he knows, with Jewish fatalism, that all this cannot last long. And, indeed, the blow falls.
The body of a murdered Russian boy is found in a damp cave near the brickworks. It has been bled white and is covered with stab- wounds. At once the Jews are accused; the double-headed-eagle pamphlets rain down. It is put about that the killing was ritualistic and that the blood is being used for the making of Passover matzos. The usual concatenation leads to Yakov's arrest—he chased the boy off when he trespassed into the brickyard, his sub- ordinates dislike his just dealing and anti-graft watchfulness, he gave shelter to a rabbi who was being persecuted by hooligans, the rabbi ate part of a matzo and left it behind, Yakov had a jar of strawberry jam on the table which peerers-in took for Gentile blood. It all adds up. But the important thing is that Yakov con- fess to his prosecutors that he is a mere tool of a great Jewish conspiracy. This he refuses to do.
The book is mostly an account, masochisti- cally detailed, of Yakov's long season in prison as he awaits trial. Few books, not even Dark- ness at Noon, have dwelt so fully on incar- cerative miseries. This is Imperial Russia, and the refinements of the NicvD are still unknown. The concentration is not on coldly administered torture but the wretchedness of cold, solitude, near-starvation, brutal anti-Semitic insults. Yakov has a humane-seeming counsel, but he is eventually discredited and commits suicide. The periodic interrogations are conducted by men who will believe anything of the Jews— that all the males menstruate, that blood-eating is ordained by the Talmud, that the systematic slaughter of all Gentiles has been long planned. Here is Father Anastasy talking: 'It is said that the murder of the gentile— any gentile—hastens the coming of their long- awaited Messiah, Elijah, for whom they eter- nally leave the doors open but who has never, during all the ages since his first coming, bothered to accept the invitation to enter and sit in the empty chair. Since the destruction of their Temple in Jerusalem by the Legions of Titus there has been no sacrificial altar for animals in their synagogues, and it has come about, therefore, that the killing of gentiles, in particular innocent children, is accepted as a fitting substitute. Even their philosopher Maimonides, whose writings were suppressed in our country in 1844, orders Jews to murder Christian children. Did I not tell you they think of us as animals?'
He goes on to enumerate the various Jewish uses of Gentile blood—sorcery, love potions, well-poisoning, as an ingredient in 'fabricating a deadly venom that spreads the plague from one country to another,' a panacea which will 'heal their women in childbirth, stop haemor- rhages, cure the blindness of infants, and to alleviate the wounds of circumcision.' It is an incredible performance (and let us admit it, it must have been great fun to write).
In his extremity of pain, years after his com- mittal, Yakov learns that he is at last to be brought to trial. The book ends with his delirious ride over the cobbles towards the Court of Justice, the crowds shouting, some weeping, some calling his name. In a typical Malamud near-surrealist sequence, Yakov con- fronts a naked Csar, 'his phallus meagre, coughing still,' and shoots him in the name of all the Russian oppressed. 'Nicholas, in the act of crossing himself, overturned his chair, and fell, to his surprise, to the floor, the stain spreading on his breast.' Yakov has learned that there's no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew. 'You can't be one without the other, that's clear enough. You can't sit still and see yourself destroyed . . . Where there's no fight for it there's no freedom. What is it Spinoza says? If the state acts in ways that are abhorrent to human nature it's the lesser evil to destroy it.' We don't need the mock-trial; a few more years will bring the Revolution.
That this is a moving and harrowing book need not be further demonstrated. We respond instinctively to the theme of Jewish oppression, and sometimes one must feel that much of the slow -unwinding of tribulation is otiose: men- tion the one word 'pogrom' and we react as to a bulky thesis. But this historical area of anti- Semitism has, admittedly, not been so well explored fictionally as the later German one. Schwarz-Bart, in The Last of,the Just, set him- self to cover the entire phenomenon, from the Hugh of Lincoln affair (evoked painfully in Malamud's epigraph from Chaucer) to the gas chambers, but he homed to Nazi Germany after a few introductory chapters. Malamud here gives us the finest fictional summation yet of Slav Jew-hatred, in firm objective prose which will admit no self-pity, sentimentality, or even gratuitous horrors. But still one has reserva- tions about the whole project, and these reservations are somewhat complicated.
It is, of course, stupid to be disappointed that Malamud has not given us again what he has already given us so well—the working of the spirit in an exactly rendered contemporary Jewish-American scene. Novelists must try new things. What worries me about The Fixer is a suspicion that Malamud is indulging in an exercise rather than exploring a fresh zone of human experience. His book, despite the modern Americanisms and the revelations proper to a permissive age, reads like an imi- tation translation from the Yiddish (Singer again). The conjuration of a dead era and city is brilliant, but it is the brilliance of the cold and deliberate technician that is displayed. The Fixer, one feels, is a pastiche of a writer who never existed but, in order to fill a his- torical gap, ought to have existed.
Some of the dialogue, especially the honest opinings and self-exculpations of Yakov. reads like essays in colloquial translation, though there was never anything to translate. To move Malamud from the Yiddish stream to one less' sectarian, one has the impression that he is turning himself into a Russian novelist, without the bore of having to write in Russian: there are Gogolian elements in the early part, and a sufficiency of Dostoievskian in the main body of the book. This is not necessarily to be con- demned. Sometimes the only way in which to: write a novel about a particular theme, time and place is to project oneself into an alien body or hand over to a sort of mediumis:ic 'control. Gabriel Fielding had to do this in The Birthday King, which reads like a brilliant translation from an unknown liberal survivor of the Nazi regime. But there remains with Mala- mud's book a suspicion of the deliberate exer- cise, the self-indulgent craftsman showing on certain magical tricks of evocation.
The earlier novels are small glories of Ameri- can literature, and the later ones will be too.. This present novel disowns America (except as a vague promised land) and is suspended nowhere except in the historical consciousness of the Jewish race and a country made out of books, old newspapers and the creative imagination. The result is superb, needless to say. But it should have been an agonising book to write, and I'm pretty sure that it was not. The elation of contriving a trick piece of Jewish-European literature must have cathar- tised in advance the anguish of the subject- matter. The pity and terror, totally unpurged, are left to us.
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