The Fixer

5 Pages 1290 Words

The main character of The Fixer is Yakov Bok, whose name, appropriately, means "goat" in Yiddish. He is an impoverished, unfortunate and unhappy fix-it man from a small Jewish shtetl in the Russian countryside near Kiev. In six years of marriage, his wife bore him no children, so he stopped sleeping with her. She soon ran off with a goy she met in the local tavern. As the novel opens, the fixer gives voice to his disgust with his life as he explains to his father-in-law why he is leaving the shtetl to try his luck in the big city of Kiev:

“ I've had to dig with my fingernails for a living. What can anybody do without capital? What they can do I can do, but it's not much. I fix what's broken -- except in the heart. In this shtetl everything is falling apart...And who can pay to have it fixed let's say he wants it, which he doesn't. If he does, half the time I work for nothing. If I'm lucky, a dish of noodles. Opportunity here is born dead... I don't want people pitying me or wondering what I did to be so cursed. I did nothing. It was a gift.”

This passage sums up much of Bok's self-understanding at the beginning of the novel. He is a poor man who has had bad luck all of his life, and who has done nothing to deserve either his poverty or his misfortune. Disgusted with the sorry state of the "chosen people," he has given up his belief in the God of his forefathers. Bored, and frustrated by the poverty of the shtetl, he has decided to try to change his luck by leaving in search of "a new life." Bok plans to shed his past in order to start anew. Before leaving the shtetl, he shaves his beard to change his appearance. His father-in-law, Shmuel, gives him a package with a prayer-shawl and tefillin, but Bok drops the package into the Dnieper on the way to Kiev, symbolically rejecting his own Jewishness. In order to take a job offered him by an anti-Semite, he assumes a false name. In these and other ways, Bok hopes to lea...