For better or worse, I process new information through a filter of personal experience and the literature I have read and taught my whole adult life. I was thinking about that combination as I digested the news concerning how the Ukraine war might be pushed toward a resolution.
Three years ago, when Russia invaded Ukraine, my strongest response was personal rather than geopolitical as my mind placed that event into the context of my memory of my maternal grandparents who fled the pogroms in Czarist-controlled Ukraine at the turn of the 20th century. That recollection combined with my appreciation for “The Fixer,” by Bernard Malamud, one of my favorite writers, both for his novels and his short stories.
There is not that much more to add to my personal response concerning my grandparents fleeing Ukraine that is represented somewhat less malevolently in “The Fiddler on the Roof.” Both my personal history, my reading of Malamud’s novel, and even the Broadway show bring to my mind the historical context out of which they arose and which they reflect.
That context is rooted in the deep-seated antisemitism in Russia, seen most obviously in Catherine the Great’s establishment in 1791 of the Pale of Settlement, a large swath of territory on the western edge of what was then the Russian Empire, including Ukraine, within which Russian Jews must live, but from which they could not remove to settle in the rest of Russia.
My maternal grandparents left Ukraine in 1901. My grandfather died before I was born but my grandmother, after living alone as a widow during my growing up years, eventually joined my household toward the end of her life.
That is my personal connection to the Ukraine that is so much in the news, something I wrote about in a column after the invasion.
My literary association with Russian policy toward its Jewish population is with Malamud’s novel, which is his fictional telling of an actual event in 1911, a decade after my grandparents left — the blood libel trial of Mendel Bellis, accused of the ritual killing of a Christian child. Bellis was imprisoned for two years before a trial in which his very able defense attorneys secured a not-guilty verdict. Bellis with his family then emigrated to Israel and eventually resettled in the United States where he self-published his memoir of his ordeal.
This was the basis of Malamud’s fine novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize, although mention must be made that he was accused of plagiarizing from Bellis’ account. I have absolutely no opinion on that matter although as a writer of historical fiction involving historical characters, I am sympathetic to the novelist’s retelling of an actual event. I do have my historical figures in 17th century New England say things that I imagine — without any direct evidence beyond what is known about them in the historical record.
Malamud, in contrast, was working from a first-person narrative for his retelling of the story. It would seem almost inevitable that in so doing he would come perilously close to crossing the line separating his version from Bellis’ own account. I have not read, nor do I intend to read that account. I am content to have thoroughly enjoyed the novel.
To bring us back to where we started, this blood libel trial took place in Kiev not long after my grandparents left. I process what is going on now in Ukraine from the perspective of my family history, especially my lovely grandmother, and Malamud’s recreating, whether too close to his source or not, the time, place, and circumstances that brought her eventually to my house in Brooklyn.