A great opening sequence in Malamud's The Fixer

The Fixer represented yet another new direction for Bernard Malamud, and more power to him - though I'm not generally a fan of "historical fiction," which I suppose is where you'd classify The Fixer, as it takes place in the early 20th century (in Ukraine, interestingly enough - so much in the headlines today and a scene of incredible anti-Semitic riots and pogroms for centuries, a place my grandfather left in the late 19th century), but I admire writers who stretch their talent and take on new challenges. Malamud definitely did that - having finished A New Life, a fairly conventional novel of academic politics and domestic distress - he embarked on a new (for him) path, with great success - The Fixer is widely considered as his best novel. And yet: there are obvious Malamudisms throughout, at least the first section - hilarious dialogue about the profound and the mundane, a frustrated, feckless protagonist who sets off to find his fortune or at the least to avoid his fate, a world of Judaism within a much wider cultural context that portends danger. Most of all, the terrific opening sequence in which the protagonist, Yakov, heads from his shtetl toward Kiev, carried on a broken down wagon by a broken down old horse, is very much reminiscent of the great section in A New Life when the protagonist, Levin, drives his newly purchased used car to the Pacific Coast: fraught with peril and breakdowns, punctuated by strange encounters, a journey that seems impossible, like one of those anxiety dreams of obstacles that keep us from a goal, and then, miraculously, arrival. In The Fixer, Yakov awakens from a sleep or reverie and suddenly Kiev looms before him - his "new life," but from what we've seen of Yakov to date, we know his life will be full of frustration and disappointment - humor, too, we hope. On the margin of his life: his wife, Raisle, who has abandoned him and run off with another man; his father-in-law, whom he's quarreled with and left behind in the shtetl, the anti-Semitic forces who are apparently investigating the stabbing death of a young man and of course blaming the Jews, and maybe even old nag, which may turn out to be his Rocinante.