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By Terrence Rafferty

• May 13, 2007

“Don’t get wistful on me,” says a sly old man in Michael Chabon’s sly new novel, his first big serious one since the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning “Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” seven long years ago. “God knows I’ve had my fill of wistful Jews, starting with myself.” Chabon, starting with himself as writers should, seems determined in “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” to stave off wistfulness by any means, even if it requires him to turn the story of the endless, endemic disappointment of the Jews — their millenniums-old-and-counting wait for the Messiah — into a screwball, alternative-reality, hard-boiled mystery, set, for maximum incongruity, in Alaska. The impressively wacky premise is that after the Holocaust, large numbers of Jews were relocated to Sitka, where by statute they were allowed to make their home for the next 60 years, at the end of which the town would revert to the control of Alaska. Israel, it appears, didn’t work out: the Jewish settlers there were ejected “with savage finality” in 1948. “The Holy Land,” the novel tells us, “has never seemed more remote or unattainable than it does to a Jew of Sitka.” The godforsakenness of the place is something more than a figure of speech.

Stuck in just another temporary, cruelly provisional homeland, farther than ever from the one originally promised — yes, you could get a little wistful in a situation like that. But it soon becomes clear that Sitka’s very remoteness, its impossible distance from the dreamed-of site of redemption and fulfillment, suits both Chabon and Meyer Landsman, his alcoholic homicide-cop hero, right down to the frozen ground. This bustling Yiddish-speaking enclave in the far north is so improbable, so irredeemably absurd, that it functions as a kind of comfort zone for an irreligious Jew like Landsman, a daily confirmation of his unbelief: the chances of the Messiah turning up in Sitka look gratifyingly slim.

The District, as its residents call it, is a good place for Chabon because it’s a fictional nowhere he can populate as he pleases. And populate it he does, with delirious fecundity, filling the icy streets with an enormous cast of cops, thugs, schemers, rabbis, chess fanatics and obsessives of every description, all crowded together, as if they were elbowing for space in a densely drawn comic-book panel. It’s obvious that the creation of this strange, vibrant, unreal world is Chabon’s idea of heaven. He seems happy here, almost giddy, high on the imaginative freedom that has always been the most cherished value in his fiction.

He gives Landsman a half-Jewish, half-Tlingit partner, an observant hulk who goes by the name of Berko Shemets but is known to the tribesmen of his Indian mother as Johnny “the Jew” Bear. He blithely invents a Hasidic sect, the Verbovers, that operates as a sinister and rigorously disciplined criminal gang. He dreams up elaborate conspiracies, both mundane and cosmic. And he sprays metaphors like a drunk with an Uzi. “No matter how powerful,” Landsman muses sadly at one point, “every yid in the District is tethered by the leash of 1948.” And, as if that weren’t quite sufficient, he riffs on: “His kingdom is bound in its nutshell. His sky is a painted dome, his horizon an electrified fence. He has the flight and knows the freedom only of a balloon on a string.” I think it’s fair to say that the writing in “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” — of which that passage is fairly typical — is unencumbered by leashes or strings, unconfined by domes or fences. This nut is out of its shell.

It’s fortunate that the novel’s prose is so untrammeled, because murder-mystery plotting can be a confinement too, a dark locked room whose doors open only when the solution, Messiah-like, arrives at the end. The murder victim in this story is a junkie chess player who happens to have met his maker in the same miserable hotel where Landsman, divorced and depressed, has been hanging his battered hat. The dead man is registered as Emanuel Lasker, transparently an alias: the name, the detective knows, is that of a famous grand master of the early 20th century. There’s a chessboard in the room, showing a tricky endgame in progress. This is, of course, a metaphor for many things, including the imminent demise of the District itself, due for the mandated reversion in a couple of months — and also including, as it turns out, what some Christians call the end times. The board is set up in a dire position called a Zugzwang, in which the losing player is “forced to move,” Landsman explains, even “when you know that it’s only going to lead to you getting checkmated.” Which makes it, inescapably, a metaphor for the Diaspora.

Chabon takes pains to supply an elegant, satisfying solution for his murder puzzle; he has too much respect for the genre not to. He has in recent years become a zealous proselytizer for a more genre-inflected and plot-friendly sort of literary fiction, a rabbi of the sect of Story. I think, though, that for him plot is, like chess, no more and no less than a beautiful game, something to be played as scrupulously and passionately as you can, but warily — with an eye to the danger that the game could start playing you. When that happens, and you find yourself in that forced-to-move trap, the sensible thing is to knock the board over. There’s a tremendous amount of plotting in “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” both on the writer’s part and (naturally) on the part of his characters, and the most forlorn people are those who haven’t realized they’ve become entangled in the plots they’ve spun, or who realize too late that they’re stuck in somebody else’s plot. “The story ... is telling us,” one devious character says, late in the book. “Just like it has done from the beginning.”

Not letting the story tell you — even if it’s one you’ve been hearing from the beginning, as Jews have heard the story of the Promised Land and the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem — is the cautionary ideal of this funny, humane, wised-up novel. Chabon has the chutzpah to actually conjure, like a stage illusionist pulling a rabbit from his hat, a Tzaddik Ha-Dor: the one man in each generation with the potential to be the Messiah. And he has the wit to portray this character as the saddest Sitka Jew of all, locked into a story so old the key has been thrown away. Or, as Chabon puts it (borrowing a still serviceable metaphor from “Kavalier and Clay”): “Once he had been fitted for the suit of the Tzaddik Ha-Dor and then decided that it was a straitjacket.”

That’s the trouble with stories, Chabon wants us to understand: they have to be believed, but not too much, not so devoutly that the real world starts to look illusory, drab, disappointing. In that direction, inevitably, lies wistfulness. The fanciful Sitka of “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” plays the delicate, infinitely complex game of fiction fairly: this place is so vividly imagined you practically need a parka and a prayer shawl to get from one page to the next, but it’s also blatantly impossible, and that’s its saving grace. It’s a welcoming homeland for imaginary people — which is all fiction is, anyway. But this novel slowly, movingly allows at least a couple of its imaginary denizens, Landsman and his tough ex-wife (the chief of Sitka’s homicide division), to become real to themselves, to find a story they can live in without feeling imprisoned or cosmically cheated. No nagging sense of promises unfulfilled, no stubborn yearning to be elsewhere, just a here-and-now faith in each other.

A simple message about the power of everyday love might seem a dismayingly small payoff for this whirling, intricate story, but the book is also about how the grandest fictions raise expectations unreasonably high, paralyze us with anticipation, doom us to the perpetual check of chronic dissatisfaction, unshakable as an Alaska chill. Nice novel. You were expecting maybe the Messiah?

Terrence Rafferty is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

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THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION

by Michael Chabon ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2007

A page-turning noir, with a twist of Yiddish, that satisfies on many levels.

Imagine a mutant strain of Dashiell Hammett crossed with Isaac Bashevis Singer, as one of the most imaginative contemporary novelists extends his fascination with classic pulp.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author ( The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay , 2000, etc.) returns with an alternate-history novel that succeeds as both a hardboiled detective story and a softhearted romance. In the aftermath of World War II, a Jewish homeland has been established in Alaska rather than Israel. Amid the mean streets of Sitka, the major city, Detective Meyer Landsman lives in a seedy flophouse, where alcohol has dulled his investigative instincts. His marriage to his beloved Bina couldn’t survive an aborted pregnancy, after tests showed the possibility of birth defects. He also hasn’t gotten over the death of his younger sister, a pilot whose plane crashed. He finds his sense of mission renewed when there’s a murder in the hotel where he lives. The deceased was a heroin-addicted chess player, his slaying seemingly without motive. There’s an urgency to Landsman’s investigation, because the Promised Land established by the Alaskan Settlement Act is only a 50-year rental, with Jews expected to go elsewhere when the “Reversion” takes place two months hence. Thus, Landsman must solve the case before he loses his job and his home, a challenge complicated by the reappearance of his ex-wife, appointed chief of police during this transition before the Reversion. In her attempts to leave a clean slate, will she help her former husband or thwart him? Adding to the intrigue are a cult of extremists led by a gangster rabbi, a possibility that the death of Landsman’s sister wasn’t an accident and a conspiracy led by the U.S. government. “These are strange times to be a Jew,” say various characters, like a Greek chorus, though the novel suggests that all times are strange times to be a Jew.

Pub Date: May 1, 2007

ISBN: 0-00-714982-4

Page Count: 432

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007

LITERARY FICTION

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edited by Michael Chabon & Ayelet Waldman

by Michael Chabon

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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NORMAL PEOPLE

by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!

Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends , in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.

Pub Date: April 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

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The Frozen People

If you should ever have the good fortune to match wits with me in a game of chess—and if so, let me congratulate you here in advance on what will surely be one of the more confidence-boosting episodes of your life—you’ll find that, as soon as we’ve exchanged our rooks and bishops and knights, and our queens have committed mutual regicide, and we’re left with a handful of pawns and kings scattered over the board like loose change, something curious will happen: My life force— the potent concoction of vim, vigor, piss, vinegar, and other vital fluids that I’ve been spritzing your way all game in an effort to distract you from my blunders—will drain out of me and soak into the carpet, and I’ll get sullen, and refuse to move, and then make long enthusiastic speeches in sign language in an attempt to knock over the board, and after a while, if the game keeps going, I’ll consciously slow my heart rate until I slip into a vegetative state. Your best course of action, when this happens, is just to tip my king over and tell me the next day that I did it myself, and then to help yourself to the contents of my wallet. I’ll pay you the rest in a couple of months.

I offer this unsolicited tutorial for a couple of reasons. First, because Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union —an excellent, hyperliterate, genre-pantsing detective novel that deserves every inch of its impending blockbuster superfame—is largely about chess, in particular the game’s knack for snagging people in its cold little gears and grinding all the spirit out of them. But I also mention it because this peculiar deficiency—my toxic allergy to the tedium of endgames—applies equally to detective stories: I enjoy the setup exactly as much as I hate the ending. Every detective story begins, like every chess game, with an unbroken vista of bounteous promise that soon turns into a big satisfying mess: a hash of clues, hunches, suspects, red herrings, threats, alibis. This builds through the middle stages until, about three-fifths of the way in, you reach an ecstatic moment of maximum complexity. And then the endgame arrives: Imagination is shanked by cold-blooded calculation, the magnificent bloom is reduced and pruned, loose ends are double- and triple-knotted, and All Is Revealed. You start to read out of a sense of duty. It’s depressing.

Chabon, unfortunately, is not exempt from this letdown. Although he cranks away with all kinds of fresh energy, he’s still limited by the detective story’s familiar machinery: When trails go cold, chance encounters heat them back up; imminent death is reliably thwarted by coincidental nearby hubbubs; guilty parties give helpful expository speeches.

I only mention this disappointment up front because it happens to be my single real reservation about The Yiddish Policemen’s Union —and technically it’s not even Chabon’s fault, just my own distaste for an unavoidable feature of the genre. Also, I wanted to establish at least the illusion of some kind of critical credibility before I started gushing.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is set in an ingeniously rich alternate reality: the makeshift holy land of Sitka, Alaska, during what everyone in the book agrees are “strange times to be a Jew.” In this world, the millions of Jewish refugees displaced by World War II have all come to America and settled along a thin strip of Alaskan wilderness, where they squabble with the native Tlingit Indians and suffer “six months of intensive acclimatization by a crack team of fifteen billion mosquitoes working under contract with the U.S. Interior Department.” In 1948, when the destruction of Israel brings a second wave of immigrants, Congress declares the land a federal district, and a thriving Jewish society plants its roots. Now, in the waning months of 2007, their 60-year term is about to expire, and the land is set to revert to plain old goyim Alaska—its current residents are “like goldfish in a bag, about to be dumped back into the big black lake of Diaspora.” Everyone is scheming to get permanent-residence permits or preparing to flee to places like Madagascar. Chabon sculpts this alternate history down to a miraculous degree of detail—pious Jewish gangsters, abandoned strip malls with touchingly defunct Yiddish signage—so it feels natural and immersive and (despite being so clearly a gimmick) never gimmicky. In many ways, this Jewish Alaska is the greatest character in the book.

Anyone looking for a precise political allegory hidden in this backwoods American Diaspora won’t have an easy time. Chabon seems more interested in his alternate world as a novelistic challenge—how to bring something so outlandish to life?—than as some kind of subtly coded analysis of contemporary Middle Eastern politics. While the book revels in Jewish culture, it also rejects fundamentalism in all its forms. The only real grotesques are the True Believers—the crazed, power-hungry Americans and a Jewish sect called the Verbovers—who disguise sinister and selfish agendas as true faith.

Our hero is Detective Meyer Landsman, a classic hard-boiled loose cannon supercop with “the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker. When there is a crime to fight, Landsman tears around Sitka like a man with his pant leg caught on a rocket.” True to the hard-boiled formula, he enters the novel thoroughly spent: a 44-year-old workaholic and alcoholic, wrecked by the memory of his chess-addicted father’s suicide, his sister’s mysterious death, a heartbreaking abortion and a divorce—all of which has left him a cynic in a world of true believers: “To Landsman, heaven is kitsch, God a word, and the soul, at most, the charge on your battery.”

Landsman stumbles onto a murder that taps into the molten core of international Jewish politics, and he’s helped and opposed by a colorful cast of characters: his ex-wife, Bina, a by-the-book ball-breaker; his partner, Berko, the human embodiment of Indian-Jewish conflict; Inspector Willie Dick, an anti-Semitic Tlingit midget on a ¾-size motorcycle (“Jews mean bullshit,” he says. “A thousand laminated layers of politics and lies buffed to a high sheen”); Zimbalist, the ancient “boundary maven” in charge of tying and maintaining the District’s sacred eruv s (his pants are “stained with egg yolk, acid, tar, epoxy fixative, sealing wax, green paint, mastodon blood”). And Mendel Shpilman, chess genius and alleged messiah.

The novel’s central mystery hinges on a chess problem that was designed, Chabon tells us in the acknowledgments, by Vladimir Nabokov—and like the Russian puzzlemaster, Chabon seems to be trying, entertainingly, to push vivid prose to its natural limit. His sentences are clean and cocky and loaded and at least as entertaining as the mystery itself. He lavishes incredible, almost impractical care on each little unit of description—characters who are barely even characters get identifying characteristics (a totally inconsequential limo driver is “a jockey-shaped Filipino with a scar on his chin like a second smile”). Chabon can be lyrical (“The wind jerks the snowflakes back and forth on its hundred hooks”), understated (“Half an hour out of Yakovy, Landsman decided to spice up their journey with a judicious application of vomit”), and aphoristic (“Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve”). He’s totally, blissfully addicted to metaphor: Landsman’s ex-wife “accepts a compliment as if it’s a can of soda that she suspects him of having shaken.” A pretentious, overly formal journalist speaks Yiddish “like a sausage recipe with footnotes.” An awkward father-son hug “looked like the side chair was embracing the couch.” A female bodyguard speaks “in a voice like an onion rolling in a bucket.” (Her laugh sounds like “someone jumping up and down on a leather valise.”) In a crowded apartment, two babies are “stashed away on the balcony like disused skis.” Rain is “tossed in vandalistic handfuls at the windshield.” A salmon is an “aquatic Zionist, forever dreaming of its fatal home.” “A woodpecker rattles its cup of dice.” I’m struggling not to quote half the book. There is, of course, much to be said for writing that doesn’t work so hard to be vivid—that ignores entertainment value in favor of hard truth, or, like Beckett, radically expands our notions of what might count as entertainment. But there’s also much to be said for this kind of writing, and you can’t do it much better than Chabon has here.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union By Michael Chabon. HarperCollins. 432 Pages. $26.95.

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BookBrowse Reviews The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

Summary  |  Excerpt  |  Reading Guide  |  Reviews  |  Beyond the book  |  Read-Alikes  |  Genres & Themes  |  Author Bio

The Yiddish Policemen's Union

by Michael Chabon

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• Alaska & Other Polar/Sub Polar Regions
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At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, an homage to 1940s noir, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption

In 1938 a proposal was put to Roosevelt that part of Alaska should be offered as a safe haven to Jews fleeing the Nazis, but the proposal was quashed (see sidebar). Chabon's genre-melding alternate history-police procedural is set in a present in which the Alaskan proposal was resurrected in 1948 following the collapse of the fledgling State of Israel. Sixty years later, the Federal District of Sitka is a thriving community of more than 2 million Jews living on the Alaskan panhandle ( map ), but they're about to find themselves homeless again, as the land was only leased as a temporary safe haven, and when the lease ends in two months the land will revert back to Alaska. Meyer Landsman is a weary, hard-drinking homicide detective working for the Federal District of Sitka. His marriage has collapsed, he's living in a seedy hotel and, to add insult to injury, his former wife is his new supervisor. When a drug-addict named Lasker washes up dead in the hotel, Meyer sees an opportunity to redeem himself, but he and his half-Tlingit partner and childhood friend, Berko, soon discover that there's more to the death than first meets the eye.  For starters, Lasker isn't Lasker, he's Mendel Shpilman, a former child prodigy who some thought was the Messiah, until he disappeared two decades ago on his wedding day. How did this genius son of a Rabbi with connections to the criminal underworld end up a drug addict in a cheap hotel, and why was he murdered? These are the questions that Landsman is determined to answer, and he has only two months in which to do so before Sitka reverts to Alaskan authority and he loses his job and home. Just as Landsman starts to make progress, he is warned off the case and, when he refuses to drop it, stripped of his rank (requiring him to flash the only other piece of ID he possesses, his membership card for the Yiddish Policemen's Union).  Like many of the best fictional detectives before him, being outranked and ordered to stand down just makes him more determined to solve the crime - and so he does, but what he uncovers encompass a much wider territory than the chilly region of Sitka, requiring Meyer to weigh the fate of nations against a promise made to a grieving mother. Chabon effortlessly leaps themes and genres in a tightly written novel in which gangsters, extremists and conspiracies jostle for space. The Yiddish Policemen's Union can be read as a well written noir-thriller, or as a powerful piece of political writing with themes and world events mirroring those of our own timeline, or both!

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The Yiddish Policemen's Union

By michael chabon.

B ecause it plays out among three million Jews living in Sitka, Alaska after the 1948 war to establish Israel ended badly, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union qualifies as alternative history. And because the author is Michael Chabon, creator of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay , every sentence swings, and every page delights. But this is not only a detective story, it’s one folded over on itself. Homicide investigator Meyer Landsman’s inquiry into the murder of a fellow resident of his own fleabag hotel unfolds with the clockwork intricacy and hardboiled style of Raymond Chandler. (The fog and sodium-vapor light of a Sitka night, Chabon writes, “has the translucence of onions cooked in chicken fat.”) Along the way, the novel, published in 2007, also slyly explores the confining power of story. Winner of the Hugo Award for best science fiction novel of 2008, the genre-melding mystery was also shortlisted for an Edgar Award. — Karl Vick

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The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

March 5, 2021 by Jake Leave a Comment

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union  is fairly easy to describe: an alternate history mystery tale set in a Jewish colony in Alaska that’s about to be handed over to the United States. But it’s so much more. This book pays homage to the great hardboiled traditions of the past but has a big beating heart in the middle. And it also functions as a hilarious and sad commentary on Jewish life post-World War II.

I’m aware of how acclaimed Michael Chabon is but I’ve not had much success with his books. He’s the lit-type writer that I always seem to appreciate more than enjoy. But this one was enjoyable, in large part because I loved the lead character despite himself and also because I loved the world Chabon created, one so adjacent to our own but also unique in its own way.

The mystery itself is interesting too, a kind of  Chinatown  tale involving Jewish folks gathered in an unlikely corner of the world. I enjoyed unspooling the story with Chabon; he writes with such beautiful prose. Every word and phrase is carefully considered, yet the hardboiled style helps to rein him in from pretentiousness. He cares about his characters and these people and it shows in the story.

If the book has one shortcoming, it’s that Chabon can get a little too carried away with what he’s created at the expense of storytelling. There are a few places where the book falls shy of greatness. But it’s still a very good read that’s both hilarious and sad.

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The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Michael Chabon | 3.86 | 63,295 ratings and reviews

Ranked #13 in Jewish , Ranked #14 in Alaska — see more rankings .

Rankings by Category

The Yiddish Policemen's Union is ranked in the following categories:

• #17 in Alternate History
• #51 in Hugo Award
• #34 in Judaism

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Book Review: The Yiddish Policemen's Union

In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union , Michael Chabon weaves together individual lives with the broader realities of their ethnicity, nation and family. This well-told tale can be enjoyed for both its plot and its more “literary” elements. Though set in a fictional, exotic world, the novel deals with the realities of broken people in broken relationships, and hints briefly at the possibility of redemption.

As one of America’s top young novelists, Chabon has achieved both critical and commercial success. His first two novels, Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonderboys (made into a 2000 movie starring Michael Douglas and Tobey Maguire), established him as one of the rising stars of the literary establishment. In 2001, Chabon won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay , the story of two Jewish comic book creators during the Golden Age of comics. He followed up Kavalier & Clay with Summerland , a 600-page young adult novel about baseball as played by elves and giants, and The Final Solution , a short mystery novel featuring an ancient Sherlock Holmes during World War II. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union marks Chabon’s highly-anticipated return to “serious” fiction.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is set in present-day America, but an America which never existed. In the novel’s alternate history, Israel was a failed experiment in 1948 and never became a nation. Instead, the United States granted Jews a temporary homeland in Sitka, Alaska. In the world of the novel, Sitka is now a 2.5 million person metropolis where Yiddish is the dominant language, sects of ultra-Orthodox Jews share control of the city, and ethnic tensions between Jewish settlers and Tlingit Indians periodically erupt into violence. In just a few months, Sitka faces “Reversion,” when control of the land reverts to Alaska, and millions of Jews have to find new homes somewhere else in the world.

Our guide to this world is Meyer Landsman, an alcoholic, burnt-out police detective living in a fleabag residential hotel. Landsman awakens one morning to find that, just a few floors down, a young heroin addict and former Orthodox Jew calling himself “Emmanuel Lasker” (the name of a famous chess champion) has been shot to death, execution-style, in front of a chess board. Landsman brings the case to his police partner and cousin, a half-Jewish, half-Tlingit, all-Orthodox family man named Berko “Johnny Bear” Shemets. Before they can even get started, though, Landsman’s policewoman ex-wife, Bina, becomes their superior officer and orders them to ignore the Lasker murder and start closing their mile-high stack of open cases by any means necessary. Landsman, of course, ignores her orders and soon finds himself knee-deep in a tangled web of Orthodox gangsters, chess grandmasters, U.S. government agents, and, in an unflattering cameo, even evangelical Christians.

This quick summary may sound like pulp fiction or a Yiddish version of Lethal Weapon. Chabon, however, uses the conventions and outrageous plots of dime-store paperbacks to examine deeper issues, like the nature of ethnic identity and the fallout from broken family relationships. Chabon’s fictional Sitka is a fully realized universe in which his characters struggle to understand their personal identities in the wider contexts of family, nation, and religion. Landsman and Shemets each attempt to come to terms with their broken pasts, and Chabon illustrates the ways in which family, religion and work can alternately help and hinder the search for meaning.

Without giving too much away, the novel ultimately suggests a truth beyond ourselves, which Landsman only begins to understand at the novel’s end. Hope, for Christians at least, is located in God’s coming redemption of our broken world and our broken lives, in the return of Messiah and the consummation of the New Heaven and Earth. Chabon’s novel does not go quite that far, but it does leave us with the hope that Landsman will find redemption within his broken past, in that handful of elements that will remain after his world, as he knows it, breaks apart forever. For those of us back in the real world, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union will challenge us to consider the hope that connects the past with our future.

—Micheal Hickerson

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Chandler with chutzpah

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon

Fourth Estate £17.99, pp414

Michael Chabon's new novel is a brilliantly written fantasy with a not-quite-fatal flaw at its heart. The tone is world-weary in the manner of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett (with a minor character being named Spade, perhaps in honour of Hammett's detective): 'Those eyes of hers drown him in a jar of ether. They stick him with pins to a corkboard.' Everyone is fluent in deadpan repartee, so that the hero's ex-wife, when he apologises for spoiling her Saturday night, replies that her Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. It's hardly possible to ruin something that was so bad to begin with.

The genre cliches are out in force. The book's hero, Meyer Landsman, is a washed-up alcoholic policeman, tough but tender, who takes on one last case, almost on a whim, and then finds that it connects up with the fates of his nearest and dearest. There's an undercurrent of sentiment in the writers Chabon has taken as his models, however gruff or steely, but it's nearer the surface here, though the dialogue never loses its salty snap.

As a glance at the list of ingredients will tell you, there's almost as much sugar in a jar of pickles as there is vinegar and sometimes the sweet overwhelms the sour. In particular, it's clear that Landsman and his ex-wife are still meant for each other and not only because there is no other remotely suitable female in the world of the book. She understands the stresses of his job, being a policeman herself, his partner for a period in the past. Currently, she's his boss.

Landsman's last case is the murder of a man living in the same dingy hotel, a heroin addict who is found shot in a way that suggests professional killing. One strange thing is that his tourniquet of choice for the ritual of shooting up was the leather thong of his tefillin (that's 'phylactery' in gentile). This would be even stranger in another book, but almost everyone in The Yiddish Policemen's Union is Jewish. The policemen are Jewish and gangsters can be Hasidic rabbis ('rebbe' the preferred form of the word here).

The dialogue is all supposed to be in Yiddish, presumably the reason for awkwardnesses such as 'foot-fingers', except when 'American' is specifically mentioned, usually for swearing. It's like a remake of Witness with the Amish promoted from exotic enclave to status quo.

The book's real genre is parallel-world fantasy. In this reality, Israel lasted three months in 1948 before being wiped out, and the Jews of Europe found a refuge of sorts in the Sitka District of Alaska. This was a makeshift solution, the idea being that Europe would in due course take them back, but now the District itself is about to revert to America. In one of a thousand memorable phrases, the Jews of Alaska are no more than 'goldfish in a bag, about to be dumped back into the big black lake of Diaspora'.

Meyer Landsman is no mystic, 'a disbeliever by trade and inclination'. He thinks that 'heaven is kitsch, God a word, and the soul, at most, the charge on your battery'. For him, Judaism isn't a matter of belief but belonging, belonging with those who don't belong. This is even clearer in the case of his work partner Berko, half-Tlingit Indian and brought up in those tribal traditions, who has chosen (although Jewishness is matrilineal) to identify himself with his father's faith.

There's a mystical strain in the plot, all the same, when it turns out that the dead man was a has-been Messiah, able even in his decline to give blessings, change lives, work miracles. He's somewhere between a holy man and a mutant with superpowers.

Chabon is masterly at evoking reality through smells and rises to the challenge of differentiating his 'black hat' (Orthodox) characters with precise descriptions of beards. The humour in the book is surprisingly lumpy, though, even if there is the odd splendid joke, such as the American nickname for the Jews of Alaska - 'The Frozen Chosen'. Chabon's style has its ponderous moments: 'It would require the brain strength of the 18 greatest sages in history to reason through the arguments against and in favour of classifying the rebbe's massive bottom as either a creature of the deep, a manmade structure or an unavoidable act of God.'

Loving insider caricature has its risks, in ropositions like 'the craving of a Jew for pork, particularly when it has been deep-fried, is a force greater than night or distance or a cold blast off the Gulf of Alaska'. In general terms, the parallel-world device asks how it would feel to be Jewish in a different cosmos, but the comedy element ('the ultrasonic frequency reserved by the government for Jewish mothers in the event of lunch') keeps telling us we know what Jews are like.

The real problem with the book is the piecemeal way Chabon introduces his alternate reality. It's an unwritten rule of the genre (well, it's written now) that you should be able to define the difference between the parallel world and ours in a single sentence. Armada triumphs, Elizabeth assassinated (Keith Roberts's Pavane). Axis powers defeat the Allies (Dick's The Man in the High Castle). Lindbergh becomes President (Roth's The Plot Against America). No such establishment of a baseline is possible with The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Two million European Jews were slaughtered in the 1940s, rather than six, and there's no reference to Hitler or any other political figure (the current American President is referred to only in those vague terms). No doubt Chabon has compiled a little dossier or chart of his world, but there are readers who would like a peek, too.

You can't participate in the game if you don't know the rules. The only (partial) exception would have to be Nabokov's Ada, which takes place on Antiterra, a planet that keeps pace with our own on the other side of the sun. Nabokov plays freely with familiar elements and discontinuities, but his book doesn't have a thriller plot - to put it mildly - and requires reading in a state of exasperated rapture. Chabon acknowledges Nabokov (given the honorific title 'Reb'), but only for a borrowed chess problem, and his refusal of a baseline is more perverse than the grand master's. There are still historical shocks being delivered a third of the way through the book (atomic bomb dropped on Berlin, 1946). Readers can't hope to be absorbed into the delicious texture of the writing if they're subconsciously waiting for another counterfactual shoe to drop.

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The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel Hardcover – Deckle Edge, May 1, 2007

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For sixty years, Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of revelations of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. Proud, grateful, and longing to be American, the Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant, gritty, soulful, and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. For sixty years they have been left alone, neglected and half-forgotten in a backwater of history. Now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end: once again the tides of history threaten to sweep them up and carry them off into the unknown.

But homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. He and his half-Tlingit partner, Berko Shemets, can't catch a break in any of their outstanding cases. Landsman's new supervisor is the love of his life—and also his worst nightmare. And in the cheap hotel where he has washed up, someone has just committed a murder—right under Landsman's nose. Out of habit, obligation, and a mysterious sense that it somehow offers him a shot at redeeming himself, Landsman begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy. But when word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, Landsman soon finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, hopefulness, evil, and salvation that are his heritage—and with the unfinished business of his marriage to Bina Gelbfish, the one person who understands his darkest fears.

At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, an homage to 1940s noir, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written.

• Print length 432 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Harper
• Publication date May 1, 2007
• Dimensions 6.12 x 1.33 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 9780007149827
• ISBN-13 978-0007149827
• See all details

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Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

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From the back cover, about the author.

Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Moonglow and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, among many others. He lives in Berkeley, California with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their children.

From The Washington Post

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0007149824
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper; 1st edition (May 1, 2007)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 432 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780007149827
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0007149827
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.49 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.12 x 1.33 x 9 inches
• #1,446 in Alternate History Science Fiction (Books)
• #2,030 in Hard Science Fiction (Books)
• #23,083 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Michael chabon.

Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of seven novels – including The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen's Union – two collections of short stories, and one other work of non-fiction. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and children.

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