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DAN JACOBSON
tory in which Yakov Bok is merely one man caught up by chance, as
anyone might be, as millions of other, equally innocent Jews were to be
caught up by it later.
The problem of maintaining our sense of entrapped closeness to
Yakov and yet of giving some kind of dramatic weight and effectiveness
to all that is outside him is one that the author only occasionally man–
ages to solve. "Russia" and "history" are invoked in the novel; but
neither concept is given any imaginative reality by the various characters
who deliver lectures to Yakov on aspects of his own and the general
situation which he himself cannot know about, or-even more damag–
ingly--give him information which he must have known perfectly well
but which the author fears the reader will
be
ignorant of. Thus we have
one Jew who tells Yakov what is the meaning of the term "Pale";
and another explains to him just who the Black Hundreds are, how the
Tsarist regime uses them and how they "gnaw like rats to destroy the
independence of the courts, the liberal press, and the prestige of the
Duma." The tremendous reservoirs of Russian anti-Semitism have to be
indicated, early in the book, through the diatribe of an obligingly talka–
tive and horrible boatman whom Yakov meets on his way to Kiev; and
altogether there is a strong tendency for the lesser characters to be
reduced to their functions as representatives and explainers of the forces
at work within the society at large.
Awkwardness and thinness of this kind might matter less
if
they
were not associated with the author's heavy reliance on "charm," par–
ticularly in the early stages of the book, to do rather too much of the
work of evocation and characterization. It is the sort of charm that is
inclined to slide over easily into a modest, throwaway pretentiousness;
and one is sorry to see Malamud's wonderful turn of phrase being used
in this way. "[His tea] tasted bitter and he blamed existence." Or this,
shortly after Yakov's arrival in the city:
Kiev stood on three hills, and he remembered his first trembling
sight of the city from the Nicholas Bridge-dotted with white
houses with green roofs, churches and monasteries, their gold
and silver domes floating above the green foliage. He wasn't
without an eye for a pretty scene, though that added nothing
to his living. Still, a man was more than a workhorse, or so
they said.
In that extract we can see how the author's doubt about his capacity to
present the external scene, his anxiety to keep the novel confined within
