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COPYRIGHT 2002 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
The body of the Russian boy was discovered in a cave near the Jewish-operated brick factory during the Passover of 1911, almost completely drained of blood. On these "basic facts" all sides agreed. They even concurred that the corpse's forty-seven puncture wounds at least appeared to have been inflicted in the manner of a legendary ritual from medieval folklore where Jews were said to drain Christian blood for their Passover matzos. Little else in the ensuing case could be agreed upon. The foreman of the brick factory, a Jewish man living illegally outside the Jewish district, was subsequently arrested, and for the next two-and-a-half years, while he himself disappeared in a Russian prison, various newspapers and political journals characterized him in a multitude of personae--from a caftan-wearing, matzo-eating blood drinker in league with revolutionary organizations to a simple, innocent man thrust into the role of the dauntless martyr by the incriminating history to which he was born. Was this murder the work of fanatical Jews or someone trying to libel the Jewish people? Was it an isolated incident or something to be feared throughout a revolt-ridden empire? Would the truth "behind" the web of storytelling ever be known?
While this incident is a "true story," it is perhaps most recognizable in its fictional form, as the setting of Bernard Malamud's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Fixer. The book was published in 1966, the same year that a history of the case by Maurice Samuel was published: Blood Accusation: The Strange History of the Beiliss Case. Typical of the poststructuralist fervor of the midsixties, both works call the boundary between history and fiction into question. While Malamud draws upon specific historic details (as well as our general experience of the world) to provide his novel with a greater sense of actuality, Samuel has imaginatively selected and arranged his historic details into a coherent and dramatic plot, without which many truths of his story would have been lost. As irony would have it, truth is so much "stranger than fiction" that it must be fictionalized all the more in order to seem true.
In addition to such publications as Malamud's novel and Samuel's history, the year 1966 also witnessed an explosion of groundbreaking works that redefined historical truth, from Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality to Hayden White's "The Burden of History," an essay that launched the historian's campaign to seek liberation from the confines of previously constructed histories. Perhaps the most revolutionary of these works was the landmark speech by Jacques Derrida in which he introduced deconstruction to American intellectuals at The Johns Hopkins University. It was in this lecture, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," that the philosopher detonates the first blast within the structures of philosophy and science and challenges the structural integrity of "structure" itself. This seemed to be the culmination of the rupture in Western thought after which any center, or transcendent truth, to which a system of thought ultimately refers could be dislodged by collapsing all the distinctions of binary opposites (between culture and nature, or universal and particular) within that system. (1) The binary opposition between history and fiction has been in question ever since.
Many historians, on the other hand, are still committed to the notion that the division between history and fiction is far beyond a matter of arbitrary convention. "The study of history is essentially a search for the truth," as Keith Windschuttle claims, without which "writing history would be indistinguishable in principle from writing a novel about the past." (2) History and fiction are undoubtedly two distinct disciplines; however, as a comparison of Malamud's novel and Samuel's history illustrates, it is precisely this obsession with truth that obscures the boundary rather than elucidating it. This is especially so with such convoluted facts as those of the Beiliss case, where truth is caught in a struggle between several incongruent histories and ways of viewing history. With truth confounding the history-fiction distinction rather than clarifying it, one may conclude that, especially since the midsixties, a new, more self-conscious, way of thinking about history has emerged to challenge the all-too-common ontological division of fact versus fiction.
Although the margin between historians and fiction writers had widened since the nineteenth-century romantic and realist movements, a degree of skepticism that culminated in the 1960s produced new literary genres such as historiographic metafiction and the so-called non-fiction novel, spurring many writers to investigate the plurality of interpretations and the undocumented psyche of the past. Still, many historians were held captive by the longstanding notion that history should be kept quarantined from fictional "distortions" of the truth of the past. Samuel's Blood Accusation is indicative of how writers--even armchair historians such as Samuel--were sometimes caught between these different notions of historical truth, on the one hand wanting to fulfill the obligation to remain faithful to the facts and tell it like it happened, and on the other hand wanting to have the freedom to explore the sort of truths that are inaccessible via the avenues of traditional scholarship and documentation.
In the preface to Blood Accusation, Samuel begins by paying tribute to "the Russian experts" and their "faithful advice," acknowledging that he has "differed with them at various points on the interpretation of events," excuses them from "the errors that may have crept into [his own] narrative," and hopes that such errors "do not affect the basic accuracy of the account." (3) He goes on to claim, "I should further like it understood that in presenting the history of the case I have used no fictional devices and invented no conversations; and I have tried to make clear where the interpretation of events is mine and where it is that of others" (viii). In this boiler-plate introduction, it is unclear exactly what sort of errors Samuel fears might have affected the "basic accuracy of the account," but speaking of differences in interpretation hardly ensures that there can be a Platonic, ideal account of the past transcendent of all others. Different interpretations will always yield different accounts, even, as William Cronon has pointed out, when many of the facts of the case are agreed upon. (4)
Denying his use of fictional devices is perhaps Samuel's most ironic claim of all, especially considering that he weaves together an intriguing tale that describes the Beiliss case itself as being so full of fictions, where events and evidence were flagrantly overlooked, suppressed, and fabricated to fit entirely different accounts of what happened to the Russian boy during the Passover of 1911. It is a case so "strange" (especially because Samuel characterizes it that way) that the fictional devices the author denies having used are all the more necessary for him to make it seem true. After all, a historical reconstruction of the incident fifty years later cannot be expected to have any more accuracy than the (re)constructions of the incident by those present at the Beiliss trial, unless, of course, new evidence had been produced since then, which would simply add credibility one way or another.
Just as the investigators and attorneys of the case had done, Samuel must (re)construct the events in his own account according to his own interpretation--a process that requires sifting, selecting, omitting or overlooking, and weaving it all together in a coherent narrative. He must...
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