The Fixer
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:
? Ive had to dig with my fingernails for a living. What can anybody do without capital What they can do I can do, but its not much. I fix whats broken — except in the heart. In this shtetl everything is falling apart…And who can pay to have it fixed lets say he wants it, which he doesnt. If he does, half the time I work for nothing. If Im lucky, a dish of noodles. Opportunity here is born dead… I dont want people pitying me or wondering what I did to
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