Blood Libel: The Life and Memory of Mendel Beilis ed. by Jay Beilis, Jeremy Simcha Garber, and Mark S. Stein (review)

More than ten years ago, Jay Beilis, the grandson of the famous Mendel Beilis, known for being the scapegoated victim of a blood libel case in Czar-ist Russia a few years before the outbreak of World War I, came to New Zealand for one of our Waikato Jewish Studies Seminars. It was not only a great honor to have this man at our sessions, thus giving us living connection to one of the most important events in modern Jewish history, but a pleasure to meet Jay Beilis himself. Though not a professional scholar, Jay was an excellent informal speaker, and what he told us about his grandfather excited a great number of people on the long weekend of the seminar. Most of us had heard of the libel case through our reading of Bernard Malamud’s novel The Fixer, and thus thought we knew a fair bit about what happened in Kiev and why the false accusation of ritual murder caused such a stir in the world. Jay disabused us of many misunderstandings and took a rather strong stand against Malamud for misusing Mendel’s own Yiddish account of his ordeal. He handed out to the attendees a copy of the memoir, The Story of My Sufferings. It was a book I had vaguely heard about but not read. When I did read it, the next time I taught The Fixer to undergraduates, I had the students study this personal story and compare it to the novel.

This new edition of Mendel’s memoir is partly retranslated from Yiddish and has sections previously edited out returned to the text, as well as explanatory notes appended. The anthology also adds several very valuable extra documents: a short history of the affair, a letter from 1930 written by Chief Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook from what was then Mandatory Palestine to the American readers of The Story of My Life and Suffering, and an expanded essay by Jay Beilis, Jeremy Simcha Garber, and Mark S. Stein first published in De-Novo, Cardozo Law Review called “Pulitzer Plagiarism: The Malamud-Beilis Connection.” Finally an afterword by Jay Beilis, along with several appendices containing additional documents and discussions of the various versions of Mendel’s Life and many photographs pertinent to the study of the Beilis case. If anyone is to study The Fixer from now on this collection is an absolutely necessary casebook to go with the novel.

But though there is clearly a legal question of intellectual property to be worked out over Bernard Malamud’s failure to explain adequately his use of Beilis’s memoir, that is something that probably would never have arisen in previous times when it was understood that artists work within traditions, absorbing and transforming one another’s works, and that the rhetoric of fiction adheres to its own integrity. This raises several distinct questions: was Malamud the historical man and author deliberately stealing from My Life of Suffering? The contemporary plagiarism problem, however, is complicated not just by the entry of film and video versions of history (more than just extensions of the older genres of historical fiction), but by the emergence of a new kind of literate and educated public who have been cut off from these traditional notions of genre and divorced from the most elementary notions of history and historiography.

Thus the second question pertinent to the matter is, does The Fixer as novel, and then as film, stand in for the history of Mendel Beilis, the popularity (once at least) of the book and cinema replacing facts themselves? We need to ask whether a literary author is responsible for the misuse or misunderstanding of his work of art. Malamud himself in his private letters and published interviews emerges as disingenuous in his response to the complaints raised by David, Mendel’s son, on behalf of the family...