The 1967 Pulitzer-winning novel The Fixer is set mainly in Kiev.
Bernard Malamud's novel follows Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman in Imperial Russia. After leaving his village, Yakov travels to Kiev, where he finds work and becomes trapped in a notorious antisemitic blood-libel case.
The historical setting is the Russian Empire in the years before the Russian Revolution. The novel draws on the 1911 Beilis affair, in which Mendel Beilis was falsely accused of murdering a Christian boy in Kiev. Malamud transformed that history into a fictional account of imprisonment and endurance.
The Fixer won the National Book Award for Fiction as well as the Pulitzer Prize. Its title refers to Yakov's practical repair work, but it also evokes the political and legal forces attempting to manipulate the case against him.