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Summary
Summary
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 the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. The Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. But now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end.
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. And in the cheap hotel where Landsman has washed up, someone has just committed a murder--right under his nose. When he begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy, word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, and Landsman finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, evil and salvation that are his heritage.
At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written.
Author Notes
Michael Chabon was born in Washington, D.C. on May 24, 1963. He received a B.A. in English literature from the University of Pittsburgh in 1985 and a Master of Fine Arts degree in English writing at the University of California at Irvine in 1987.
Chabon found success at the age of 24, when William Morrow publishing house offered him $155,000, a near-record sum, for the rights to his first novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which was his thesis in graduate school. After The Mysteries of Pittsburgh became a national bestseller, he began writing a series of short stories about a little boy dealing with his parents' divorce. The stories, which in part appeared in The New Yorker and G.Q., were bound together in 1991 into a volume titled A Model World and Other Stories. His other works include Wonder Boys, The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man, Telegraph Avenue, and Pop: Fatherhood in Pieces. In 2001 he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. He and Ayelet Waldman are co-editors of, Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation..
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Starred Review. Chabon's storytelling, in this alternate history of a world where Jews were settled in Alaska after World War II, is vivid enough, with inventive metaphors packed in like tapestry threads, but Peter Riegert's versatile voice makes the invented society even more tangible. Told through the eyes of Meyer Landsman, a police detective investigating a murder, the novel occurs in a strange time to be a Jew, as several characters ruefully put it: the special Jewish district will soon be controlled by Alaska again. In a bonus interview on the last disc, Chabon relates his desire to write about a place where Yiddish was an official language. The book is shot through with Yiddish phrases and names, which melodically roll off Riegert's tongue. He gives Landsman and his tough but warmhearted partner Berko similar yet distinct gruff voices that contrast well with the effeminate-sounding sect leader and the Southern-accented Americans who come to start the land reversion process. Riegert's pacing increases the enjoyment of this expertly spun mystery. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
"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? 'I've had my fill of wistful Jews,' says Chabons homicide-cop hero. 'Starting with myself.' Terrence Rafferty is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.