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Won the Pulitzer for fiction AND the National Book Award for Fiction in 1967. Were there no other books written in that year? Malamud is a competent writer. He uses detail to pull us into another world, the starving, pestilence-ridden world of peasants under the Tsar in about 1910. The hero Yakov is a non-practicing Jew (is that a real thing? are you 'of a religion' if you don't go to meetings?) Every non-Jew in Russia is either engaged in a pogrom to murder Jews, or building the outrage for the next one (they drink the blood of children, rape maidens, poison crops, etc.) It's a vivid portrayal of superstitious ignorance, and Yakov is sent to jail awaiting trial for murdering a boy. The prosecutor's evidence grows with each month that passes--a barn burned down, so it must have been Jewish criminals who were abusing children who burned it down to hide the evidence. The prison is torture: cold, wet, starvation, torture, isolation. This is all a great premise and a great setting for a story. Two hundred pages later, the book stops. Two hundred pages of Yakov putting up with physical and emotional torture, hoping something good will happen, being betrayed by people who hinted they could help him. Imagine 'Papillion' without the escapes, or drama. Okay, I can imagine all sorts of deep meanings from this tiresome, static book: fear and stupidity lead to persecution, anti-Semitism grows where ignorance flourishes, and so on. But if I have to invent the meaning, shouldn't I get the Pulitzer? I see patterns in clouds, but that doesn't make a low-pressure system an artist.