The novel is set in 1911 in the city of Kiev during the Tsarist Regime and events revolve around the trials and misfortunes that befall a Jewish handyman named Yakov Bok, the eponymous “fixer.” Yakov carries no official documents of his citizenship and is, in all rights and respects, is a non-resident doing odd jobs. He is arrested under suspicion of having murdered a Christian boy during the celebration of Passover. His situation moves from bad to worse as he is then incarcerated without a trial and refused visitation rights or legal guidance. In prison, Yakov is questioned and maltreated again and again, desiring to break his resolve so that he’d confess to killing the boy in a supposed twisted Jewish ceremony. His captors also question him about his political inclinations and in his defense he says that he holds none. He also asserts that he is not at all a religious man despite having been born a Jew.
While waiting out his sentence in jail Yakov muses upon the sad nature of his life and the character of humanity. A great source of his distress is the awareness that anyone who attempts to assist him either ends up arrested like himself or is exposed to some form of persecution by government officials. A guard that had taken a bribe from Yakov’s father-in-law so that his family could see him is charged with conspiracy and thrown in jail. His primary backer, the Investigating Magistrate Bibikov, is placed under solitary confinement on fabricated charges after a routine visit to Yakov in jail. Solitary breaks Bibikov and he commits suicide. Time comes when the only individual allowed to visit is his wife, who has nothing but contempt for her husband, having left him well before the novel started.
She is given visitation rights only because she has conspired with the jailers to pressure her husband to sign a confession, pleading guilty for the boy’s death--naturally Yakov refuses to sign. His wife continues to visit him, if only to torment the pitiful fixer, bringing him nothing but bad news: she reports his dear father-in-law’s death and learns that the child that he thought was his was actually born from an illicit affair with a former lover. Despite these attempts to break his spirit, Yakov manages to find the strength of character to forgive his wife’s infidelity and even agree to adopt the child so that she wouldn’t lose face within their community.
Ultimately, Yakov is finally given an actual sentence and thusly brought up on trial--after having been incarcerated for a full two years. He is now granted the right to an attorney who will represent him in court. His lawyer gives him a full report of the extent of the corruption within the government of Russia. In fact, if Yakov hadn’t been arrested, his lawyer says, another Jew from the ghetto would have been selected. An ethnic cleansing is slowly but surely taking place in the background; Yakov was a victim of the vast machinery fueled by hatred.
The novel ends with Yakov having an imaginary dialogue, or rather a scolding session, with Tsar Nicholas the 2nd, where Yakov dresses him down for heading what he calls the most degenerate administration in Russian history. His transport is attacked as he is being moved to his trial and it is in this scene where the eponymous fixer reckons that “…there is no such thing as an apolitical man, especially a Jew…” commenting on the reality that no matter what era or place, Jews will almost always, draw the ire of the majority populace.
