The literary antecedents of Malamud's The Fixer

Bernard Malamud's The Fixer, which I'm reading in the Library of America Novels and Stories from the 1960s edition, owes obvious literary debts: to Dostoyevsky, and to Kafka. It's shaping up as a story of a Jewish man, the fixer of the title, a stranger in town (Kiev), who's unjustly accused of killing a Russian boy - part of the terrible anti-Semitic hate stories of Jews killing Gentiles to drain their blood for use in making matzohs. Sounds so grotesque and horrific, but these horrible stories have circulated throughout Europe for a thousand years or more and thousands of Jews have been accused and killed as a result. This story is an early 20th-century take on the theme, which, as Malamud notes in his epigraph, has been treated before in literature, though generally without skepticism or irony - see Chaucer's Prioress's Tale, for one. The Fixer treats the theme from the point of view largely of the accused, and draws on the style of popular legal thrillers - we see the evidence mount against Yakov and watch his defenses and his personality crumble, even though we know of course he's innocent and that he doesn't have a chance in the face of the Russian courts and the vitriolic hatred of Jews fomented by those in power - keep the people hating some alien group and they'll forget about the misery of their own lives and who's responsible for that. The slow and subtle and disarming interrogation in the prison of course calls to mind Crime and Punishment - with major difference that here the interrogation is serving to obscure the truth, whereas in C&P the interrogation gradually elucidates the truth, difference between a guilty protagonist and an innocent. Also calls to mind The Trial, in that the interrogation and imprisonment and the Byzantine Russian justice system seems as hopeless and surreal as the court system that Kafka imagined - Yakov is much like Kafka's protagonist (was it K?), hopelessly enmeshed and unsure exactly what he's charged with doing, or why - although the facts of the case and the shreds of evidence that point toward his guilt slowly become apparent to Yakov, and he realizes - as in a nightmare - that he has nowhere to turn, no one to speak for him.