When Will History Begin?

When Will History Begin?

the author, Bernard Malamud

I first tackled the novels of Bernard Malamud back in prep school. They include some sex scenes; so the public school system could not put them in a library, or recommend them, even if Malamud was one of the greatest writers in American literature. Barry Levinson directed a bowdlerized film version of Malamud's The Natural in 1984, starring Robert Redford. John Frankenheimer directed Malamud's The Fixer in 1968, starring Dirk Bogarde and Alan Bates. My literature professors told me, "Don't bother with a movie." I'd say that's true for Malamud. Read the book!

His other novels The Assistant and A New Life also touched me deeply, as did The Magic Barrel, his collection of short stories. The short stories, in general, had a darker, more pessimistic tone than the novels. I never read The Tenants, God's Grace, or his other works. They just did not engage me to the same degree.

To sum up the intentionality of Malamud's work, it teaches, which jives with his name "Malamud", a corruption of the Hebrew word "Melamed", which means "tutor". In fact, in his novel The Fixer, the main character Yakov Bok has to get someone from his old village to help his estranged wife, who has an out-of-wedlock baby. He writes a letter and says "Show it to the rabbi's father, the old Melamed. He knows my handwriting, and he's a kinder man than his son." Note the difference in pronunciation—"MAL'm'd" the writer and "m'LAmed" the tutor.

The Fixer won the Pulitzer Prize for Malamud, and he deserved it. It tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish man in Russia at the beginning of the 20th-century. Geographically speaking, he was not far from Kiev in the present-day Ukraine—a mere province of the old Tsarist Empire. Bok lives in the impoverished, Jewish "Pale of Settlement", set aside for Jews, so that they would not mingle with the Gentile Ukrainians and Russians. So when Bok moves to Kiev, he does so illegally—an illegal alien, in modern terms—and takes a job managing a brick-works.

Bok discovers that the workers at the plant steal bricks on a regular basis. Before he can prosecute them, they discover that he is a Jew and frame him for the murder of a little boy. Over the following year, Bok becomes a poster-boy for institutional Russian anti-semitism and remains in custody for a total of three years.

The Tsarist authorities want very much to convict Bok, in order to justify a Pogrom, but they cannot build a convincing scenario for Bok's supposed criminality that will persuade the state-controlled grand jury to prosecute him, and they cannot persuade him to admit to the crime, even when they promise to pay him off and send him to Palestine.

One thinks of the Jews creating Israel after World War II, but nearly all of Israel's first-generation leaders came from Russia, either directly or as children of Russians—terrorized into leaving by the hostility of the Tsarist administation—and again "Russia" means Russian Empire, which included, in addition to the Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic States, Moldova, and part of Poland. Israelis took on sub-identities as "Littvak" (Lithuania), "Galizianer" (Galicia in Poland) and others.

In Chapter VII of The Fixer, a guard gives Bok a copy of the Old Testament in Hebrew. Since Bok has nothing else to do, he starts reading it carefully, even though his Hebrew is rusty. Some words, he simply no longer recognizes. Years after I first read The Fixer, I find myself returning to Bok's analysis of God in human history—as interpreted by a non-believing free-thinker. Given that Yakov has a spotty self-education, his reaction to the Old Testament impresses me more than anything else about Malamud's novel:

God talks. He has chosen, he says, the Hebrews to preserve him. He covenants, therefore
he is. He offers and Israel accepts, or when will history begin? . . . But Israel accepts the
covenant in order to break it. that's the mysterious purpose: they need the experience. So they
worship false gods, and it brings Yahweh out of his golden throne with a flaming sword in
both hands. When he talks loud, history boils. Assyria, Babylonia, Greece, Rome become
the rod of his anger that breaks the heads of the Chosen People. , , , He then forgives them
and offers a new covenant. Why not? This is his way. Everything must begin again. . . . The
purpose of the covenant, Yakov thinks, is to create human experience.

There is so much to read in these lines: History has to begin. In other words, you keep track of the sum of your experiences, in order to differentiate between what works and what doesn't. You have to start over. Everything must begin again. In other words, you have to renew your strength with a new "covenant". And finally, the purpose of the new covenant is to create human experience, but you don't "create" it, in so many words. You build a system for analyzing it, organizing it, in order to learn from it.