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From Stephen Elliott
A couple of years ago I went totally bananas over The Fixer by Bernard Malamud. The story: Yakov, a Jewish man living in Russia in the early 1900s, is falsely accused of killing a Christian child. The book centers on Yakov’s time in prison and quickly becomes one of the most beautiful meditations on suffering that I have ever read.
I was nineteen. Prison seemed sexy and foreign—as did most forbidden things.
I was nineteen. Prison seemed sexy and foreign—as did most forbidden things. Maybe I wanted to seem tough. Maybe I needed something to differentiate me from all the other over-achieving, world-traveled students at the university I attended. Maybe I felt I had something to give.