Author | Bernard Malamud |
---|---|
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Publisher | Farrar, Straus & Giroux |
Publication date | 1966 |
Media type | |
Preceded by | Idiots First (1963) |
Followed by | Pictures of Fidelman (1969) |
The Fixer is a novel by Bernard Malamud published in 1966 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. [1] It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction (his second) [2] and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. [3]
The Fixer provides a fictionalized version of the Beilis case. Menahem Mendel Beilis was a Jew unjustly imprisoned in Tsarist Russia. The "Beilis trial" of 1913 caused an international uproar and Beilis was acquitted by a jury.
The book was adapted into a 1968 film of the same name starring Alan Bates (Yakov Bok) who received an Oscar nomination.
Descendants of Mendel Beilis have long argued that in writing The Fixer, Malamud plagiarized from the 1926 English edition of Beilis's memoir, The Story of My Sufferings. One of Beilis's sons made such claims in correspondence to Malamud when The Fixer was first published. A 2011 edition of Beilis's memoir, co-edited by one of his grandsons, claims to identify 35 instances of plagiarism by Malamud. [4]
Responding to the allegations of plagiarism made by Beilis's descendants, Malamud's biographer Philip Davis acknowledged "some close verbal parallels" between Beilis's memoir and Malamud's novel. Davis argued, however, "When it mattered most, [Malamud's] sentences offered a different dimension and a deeper emotion." [5]
Jewish Studies scholar Michael Tritt has characterized the relationship between Malamud's The Fixer and Beilis's The Story of My Sufferings as one of "indebtedness and innovation". [6]
The book was one of several removed from school libraries by the board of education of the Island Trees Union Free School District in New York, which was the subject of a U.S. Supreme Court case in 1982. [7]
In 2022, a school district in South Carolina removed the book from its library because of a parental complaint lodged against dozens of books. In 2023, after a review, the book was returned to the library. [8] The book is still listed on a conservative site as a book that should be of concern to parents with a rating of "minor restricted." [9]
In episode 7 of Mad Men Season 5, the character Don Draper is seen reading the novel in bed and recommending it to his wife Megan.
Saul Bellow was a Canadian–American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times, and he received the National Book Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990.
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Bernard Malamud was an American novelist and short story writer. Along with Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, he was one of the best known American Jewish authors of the 20th century. His baseball novel, The Natural, was adapted into a 1984 film starring Robert Redford. His 1966 novel The Fixer, about antisemitism in the Russian Empire, won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
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Menahem Mendel Beilis was a Russian Jew accused of ritual murder in Kiev in the Russian Empire in a notorious 1913 trial, known as the "Beilis trial" or the "Beilis affair". Although Beilis was eventually acquitted after a lengthy process, the legal process sparked international criticism of antisemitism in the Russian Empire.
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Janna Malamud Smith is an American non-fiction writer. She was born in Corvallis, Oregon in 1952, the second of two children born to Ann DeChiara Malamud and the writer Bernard Malamud. She grew up in Oregon, then in Bennington, Vermont, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. She received her A.B. from Harvard University in 1973, majoring in American history and literature, and an M.S.W. in 1979 from Smith College. She practices and teaches psychotherapy in the Boston area. She is married to David Smith, and is the mother of two children.
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