The Spiritual Salvation

Malamud is a famous American Jewish writer, who has created eight novels and four collections of short stories. The Fixer (1966) is the one of his representative works that wins the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. In this novel, Malamud links the personal sufferings with the whole Jewry’s fate to express his salvation idea.This thesis studies the Jewish awareness in The Fixer to explore the profound significance of Malamud’s salvation idea. The body part includes three parts. The first part analyzes the awakening of Yakov’s Jewish awareness. It intends to consider the Jewish awareness in terms of identity awareness, moral awareness, suffering awareness and revolting awareness. Firstly, with his suffering experience, Yakov realizes the importance of his Jewish identity gradually. Secondly, under the anti-Semites’cruel persecution, Yakov changes himself from thinking about himself to caring about others’ safety even the whole nation’s safety. Thirdly, the awakening of Yakov’s suffering awareness also has a long process from his unwillingness of suffering to enduring many unbearable sufferings for others willingly. Finally, with the unbearable physical and mental torture, the revolted awareness gradually comes into Yakov’s mind and he links the Jew’s fate with revolution and freedom. The second part elaborates the origin of the Jewish awareness that Malamud’s writing ideas can not be separate from his own early suffering experiences, the ethic moral idea of Judaism and the Jewish suffering history. The third part explores the significance of the Jewish awareness, including salvation significance for Jews and universal significance for all humans. Yakov’s awakening of the Jewish awareness helps him achieve the spiritual salvation and the process from the awakening of Yakov’s Jewish awareness to achieving the salvation enlightens people to think about the value of sufferings in life.Malamud not only shows the hard lives of Jews in his novel, but also reflects his thought and concern to the difficult living condition of human. His salvation idea has a function of education and guidance for Jews even for the whole humans.