Week 3, Book 3
The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel
By Michael Chabon
464 pages, 2007
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon, who wrote one of my favorite novels ever, the great story about writers called Wonder Boys, as well as the award-winning epic tome The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, released another major epic last year that is being released in paperback at the end of this month. And while The Yiddish Policemen's Union is not quite up to his previous efforts, this lengthy and detailed novel displays Chabon's wonderful flair for language and storytelling, in a fictional narrative about an alternate history of the aftermath of World War II, namely that the Jews settled in Alaska, not Israel. The story takes place in modern times, as the Jewish settlements in Alaska are about to be turned back over to the United States, and the Jews that have been living in squalid conditions there are being forced to leave. The story is told through the eyes of Meyer Landsman, a police detective tracking a murder that occurred in the slum-like hotel he was living in, and the results of his investigation - the last taking place at Sitka Central, the police department that polices their own - take Meyer through an intricate and exciting plot, full of twists and turns and interesting characters - all revolving around hard-core Jews who are feeding some end of the world vision about returning to take over their "homeland." It's a very complicated story, and it's not helped by the somewhat unnecessary inclusion of dozens of Yiddish words, phrases, and names, so it does take some careful reading. But once engrossed in the story, the reader will be delighted by how Chabon fits all the disparate pieces of the plot together, and a character so vividly drawn as Meyer Landsman makes it all worthwhile.
Landsman is a drunk, and a self-hating Jew, who has contemplated suicide in the cold, dark reaches of Alaska more times than he cares to remember. His partner is Berko Shemets, a large half-Jewish/half Tlingit Indian with a soft heart and what passes in this novel as a happy home life. Landsman's ex-wife, who runs the police department, plays an important role, as does his deceased sister, who died a year earlier in somewhat mysterious circumstances. The dead body in Landsman's building turns out to be the wayward son of the leader of a group of "Black Hats" on Verbover Island, a secretive cult of super-Jewish religious types who have wide-ranging aspirations about their place in the world, after the Jews lose their borrowed land. This society is well drawn by Chabon, and the relationships around Landsman are perfectly detailed. The setting plays a huge role, obviously, as does the history of these people -- their vast history of struggles -- and all of it is held together by Chabon's amazing gift for prose. The story lingers for too long, probably -- especially in the first hundred pages -- and the difficulty in reading such a dense story is made almost painfully worse if you don't happen to speak a lot of Yiddish (the names alone are terribly distracting), but all in all, it was a very satisfying read, and one that I recommend for all my readers, Jew and gentile alike.
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