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The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel (P.S.)

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said the words out loud those who had assumed Yiddish was a language of the past only, suddenly felt it had been revived. . . . It seemed to be saying `khbin nisht vos ikh bin amol geven. I am not what I once was. Ober `khbin nisht geshtorbn. Ikh leb. But I did not die. I live." Irena Klepfisz.

Yiddish is certainly not dead in Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policemen's Union". In fact, the primary language of Jews throughout the "Pale of Settlement" (where Jews were allowed to live in Imperial Russia) suffuses this book with the rich aroma of a language whose every word can take on a paragraph or even chapter of meaning in the hands of the right speaker. Chabon is one such speaker (or writer) and "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" is a book that is rich in enjoyment.

"The Yiddish Policemen's Union" is an artful blend of genres, a blend of crime fiction and alternate history. I think of it as a blend of Dashiell Hammett's dark crime stories like "Red Harvest" and Philip Roth's alternate-history novel "The Plot Against America".

Chabon has created a world in which there is no Israel. Rather, Israel had been crushed in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Since that time the United States, partly as a result of guilt over the Holocaust has created a temporary homeland for displaced European Jews in and around Sitka, Alaska. Yiddish, not Hebrew, is the primary language. As the book opens, close to 60-years after the end of Israel, Sitka is due to revert back to U.S. control and the million or so inhabitants face the prospect of being stateless refugees. The hero, or protagonist, is Detective Meyer Landsman. Like one of Dashiell Hammett's characters he is a flawed, down-on-his luck cop with nothing much going for him except a strong sense of right and wrong and a personal integrity of the highest order. He is a drunk, he is divorced (and his ex-wife is his commanding office) and he lives in a flea-bag hotel. He is awakened out of something of a stupor and told a murder has been committed in the hotel.

It does not quite do Chabon's book justice to say that the story line is primarily that of Landsman's investigation into the murder of this stranger in his fleabag hotel. That is certainly how the book plays out. However, that is simply the structure of the book. As in Hammett, there is a murder in a town filled with greed and corruption and the path Landsman must walk is filled with hurdles and hidden minefields. As in Roth, the story of Landsman (which in itself is a Yiddish word that may be roughly translated as fellow countryman) is the story of a people set adrift and apart. It is a story of a people bobbing in a sea without an anchor, without a homeland. It is poignant but, ironically, it is poignancy without the schmaltz.

Chabon's writing, like Yiddish itself, is rich and thick with meaning. But more importantly, it is both funny and thoughtful. The barbs and insults and sarcasm with which the characters express their fondness for each other and their scorn and loathing is, in my opinion, dead-solid perfect. As I read "Yiddish Policemen's Union" I could envision the body language and sense the arched eyebrows or sneers on the lips of the characters as words come tumbling out of their mouths in a torrent.

Although I won't say anything to reveal the plot, I think Chabon shows excellent pace and timing in developing the plot. He neither rushes to expose too many details too soon nor leaves everything to a summary revelation at the book's climax. Chabon keeps the pot boiling and that kept me turning page after page after page long after I should have turned out the lights for the night.

One slight cautionary note: I grew up in a Queens, New York neighborhood at a time when Yiddish words and expressions were sprinkled liberally throughout every conversation both in my family's apartment and throughout my neighborhood. However, if you don't have any prior experience with Yiddish I suggest going on line and keeping a Yiddish-English web page handy if you find you have any difficulty with the odd word or phrase. Ultimately the pleasures of this book so far outweigh the minimal burden of pondering the occasional strange word. I mention it just so the potential reader is aware in advance that they might see a few words that may not be readily understood by every reader.

I got a great deal of pleasure from reading Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" and recommend it heartily. L. Fleisig

I've been reading Chabon since I first picked up "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh" over a decade-and-a-half ago, and it's been fun seeing his writing evolve with each new work. I believe that "Kavalier and Clay" is one of the best American novels of the past ten years, and that's not even because I'm such a comic book fan; it's just an extraordinary novel on many levels. When I heard of the concept of "Yiddish Policemen's Union," I was worried that it sounded a bit too high concept; then I considered that Chabon is such a great writer that I'll forgive him for anything - even his recent "Simpson's" voiceover where he and Jonathan Franzen got into a fistfight. Luckily, no forgiveness needs to be granted (like Chabon couldn't care less anyhow; who am I in the Kakutani-era of literary criticism?) Chabon's newest novel is just further confirmation of his skill.

This book is unique as it's not a speculative novel masquerading as Jewish noir, nor is it noir with a glossy veneer: it's everything at once. The questions of Jewish identity and what will happen to the community once the Reversion happens never takes away from the main tale; it's so well tucked in with the main action that Chabon never goes off on a tangent. All the while, Chabon plows ahead with a mystery that will set off chuckles of recognition as he hits and bounces upon every noir convention like a pinball. Informers, grieving mothers, loyal partners, the obligatory moment when an unconnected crime enters the frame - it's all there, but with its overlay of the Jewish community in the north, it feels fresh.

A few reviewers have commented that they missed out on Jewish in-jokes. I'm a goy through and through but didn't feel I was missing anything by not picking up on them, so do not let that keep you from reading the novel. I want to read the book again just to get a feel of the words and unique narrative style that follows the grammatical phrasing of Yiddish. (Another exceptional touch.)

By setting the novel at the end of an era, Chabon has also been able to sidestep any possibilities of a franchise with "the continuing mysteries of ..." Actually, that doesn't sound like it would be such a bad idea but I'd rather Chabon take on a completely new subject.

Bravo, Mr. Chabon.

What can you say about a book like this? Not much without giving something away. It's audacious as can be believed. What's it about? Read the Publisher's Weekly blurb above. Or, better yet, don't.

Chabon is a genius and a madman, a wizard and a mensch. He's a wrecking crew, a culture-blender, and a rebbe packing heat. Who else would, or could, take Nick Charles and put him in Shalom Shachna's body? (Or maybe it's the other way around.) Equal parts Kabbalah and Ka-Bar, it's funny and gripping, and entertaining, and so heartbreaking, at times, it's hard to breathe.

In sum. I found it extraordinary - the concept, the language, the characters and the plot. It's not perfect, but it is simply one of the best novels I've read in a decade. Is that "helpful"? I doubt it. If I were you, I wouldn't want to know more. Spoilers are odious, irrelevant, and available elsewhere. If you love Chandler, Hammett, Roth, and I.B. Singer, I suspect you will love this.

Put some Manischewitz in a lowball and sit by the electric fire and crack this book open.

Welcome to Alaska, the temporary home of a large Jewish colony now on the edge of repatriation. Chabon has set his sights high, again, but this time there seem to be so many pieces to put in place, so many portraits to paint in his newly formed universe, that at times the book feels more like a heavy wade than a pleasure. Sure, we all know Chabon can write his contemporaries off the page, but I have the feeling this will be remembered as a novel that landed just wide of the target. If you're going to play with a genre like mystery, you take on not just machinations of plot, but also of pacing and that's my main gripe despite the gorgeous prose. After 150 pages of a mystery, you'd usually like to know more than that the story revolves around the body of a former chess player. It's hard to think of a writer with Chabon's skill doing anything that isn't deliberate, but just because he sets his new world in Alaska, did it have to move at such a glacial rate?

When did Michael Chabon become one of our finest living writers? I've been reading his novels for about two decades now, loving each successive work more. Suddenly I realize that he is one of those rare writers where you go out and buy the book full price on the day it's released. He's that good. And The Yiddish Policeman's Union lived up in all ways to my high expectations.

The novel grabbed me right from the opening pages. We meet Meyer Landsman, a somewhat down on his luck homicide detective. We meet the victim, a John Doe in the cheap hotel Landsman calls home. We meet Meyer's cousin/partner, his ex-wife/boss, and many, many other supporting characters, each more richly-drawn than the last.

I must confess summarizing plots is not my strong suit. However, unlike many "literary" novels--and it is as literary as they come--this is most definitely a plot-driven novel. It's a who-done-it, and perhaps more importantly it's a why-done-it. Because as Meyer and Berko investigate the execution-style murder of this young addict, the world they live in is revealed to us. And it's possible that this alternate universe is the most interesting thing about the novel. It's a world where the European Jews fled from Hitler to Alaska--a premise based on a historic trivia fact. They've populated Sitka and made it their own for the past 60 years, and in just a few weeks they need to get out. Alaska is "reverting" back to the Americans in much the way that Hong Kong recently reverted to the Chinese. The oft-repeated refrain of these characters is "Strange times to be a Jew." True enough.

And if nothing else, this sure is one Jewish murder mystery. It's chock full of Yiddish, a joy for me, but surely not for a majority of the novel's readers. A lot you can pick up in context, but Chabon's not going out of his way to help readers there. You'll learn about boundary mavens and Jewish prophesy. It's all very exotic, but so richly and realistically portrayed. Chabon brings this world that never was to life, and it's fascinating. And while the mystery surely kept me turning pages late into the night, it was my pleasure in the characters and the setting and the world created that made me truly, truly love this novel. Reading simply doesn't get any better than this.

As far as concept is concerned, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is pure gold, delving into an alternate reality where it took an extra year and an atomic bomb to defeat Nazi Germany, the settlement of Israel was a catastrophic failure, and the 3.2 million Jews who might have called it home have been deposited on a rocky stretch of Alaskan coast with nowhere to go once their lease expires. As far as humor is concerned, the book is also a success, as Chabon's wit (in particular his observations regarding the bizarre genetic caste system that governs the magical world of Disney) never fail to enliven his already excellent prose, which, incidentally, may well be the best part. Chabon conjures picture-perfect metaphors with the same amount of effort you or I might expend by eating a sandwich, and these glorious examples of figurative language lend a level of vibrancy and depth to the District of Sitka and its inhabitants one rarely has the good fortune to encounter. He excels again in creating a distinct feel for the setting, making an Alaskan exile city populated almost exclusively by Jews (with an inexplicable smattering of Filipinos) seem as real as if they were your noisy next-door neighbors. Even his characters are interesting, though it must be noted that A) Any character is interesting when you can write dialogue like Chabon can, and B) If you can make a Jewish Eskimo policeman boring you do not deserve to write. So, to recap: Concept? Huzzah! Characters? Wheeee! Writing? The crowd is ebullient! And thus it is that we come to the plot.
Now, it ought to be stated up front that the plot is not necessarily the most important facet of a book, especially if it is so superb in these other categories. Indeed, the plots of many great novels can be discerned by the time you reach the copyright information. Regrettably, TYPU is a detective novel, a genre which requires all the aforementioned values only as a sugary coating to make its colossal plot-pill go down easier. It is very nice when mystery novels have well-developed characters, and it is even nicer when they are well written, but in the end trying to write a mystery without a good plot is like trying to bake a birthday cake and omitting the cake batter: no matter how much icing, sprinkles, and candles you add, you still end up with a sticky pile of amorphous chocolate that, if not watched properly, will gleefully burn down your house.
Though the plot shows some initial promise, Chabon loses control swiftly and completely, and by the end it becomes clear that each character's importance to the book is inversely proportional to the time they spent in it. In other words, it's the ones you've only seen once before two hundred pages ago that you gotta watch. What is left of the rapidly atrophying story finally devolves into a series of progressively more ludicrous revelations, until at last the book has lost all credibility and you expect to learn at any time that Jews are only robotic decoys created by a loose confederation of particularly ingenious polar bears. Ultimately it is a diverting but hollow experience, and though Chabon's exquisite use of both the Yiddish and English languages makes it worthwhile, by the end you will be hard pressed to say exactly where it went.

Imagine for a moment the world today if, instead of victory in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the nation of Israel had suffered defeat. Those Jews who had established residence in Palestine were expelled from their homeland. They turned to the United States for assistance and were awarded a portion of land in the territory of Alaska in the Federal District of Sitka. Now, one-half century has passed and a policy has been enacted by the U.S. that will evict all Jews without recognized legal status from Sitka. Sovereignty over that land where Yiddish is the official language and power is exercised by Hasidic Jews will terminate on January 1, 2008.

This historical underpinning for THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION is but one of countless ironies that saturate the novel. Jews in Alaska find themselves being treated in a fashion similar to Palestinians in the contemporary Middle East. This is the universe that Michael Chabon has created, the existence of which raises countless provocative questions for Jews and Gentiles alike.

Lest readers believe that an Alaskan Jewish homeland is the groundwork for a political novel, THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION is actually a detective saga in the 1940s style of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Chabon's sleuth is Meyer Landsman, a down-on-his-luck Sitka homicide cop called upon to investigate the murder of a drug addict who resided in the same rundown hotel as Landsman. The investigation takes the detective into a strange world of Lubavitch Orthodox gangs and crime-boss rabbis.

The dead man who used the leather straps of his tefillin (Jewish prayer artifacts) to tie off his arms prior to injecting heroin into his veins was also the son of a powerful rabbi in Sitka. Like any detective caught in an investigation where powerful people have a vested interest in the outcome, Landsman and his partner, Berko Shemets, must be full-time investigators and part-time diplomats. Throughout the investigation Chabon reminds us of his constant refrain, "It's a strange time to be a Jew."

Reading THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION one cannot help but notice the irony and complexity of Chabon's writing. The Jews of Sitka are in many respects the Palestinians of the 21st century. They owe their existence to the largess of others and know not what the future portends. By focusing his novel on a Jewish character toiling as a police detective, Chabon is seeking to establish for readers that the true nation of Israel is a nation like all other nations, where people toil in all professions seeking nothing more than to be left alone in their daily endeavors. It cannot go unnoticed that the protagonist of this novel is named Landsman, the Yiddish word for a fellow countryman. Sitka, Alaska, the erstwhile home of the Jewish nation, is where we all come from.

THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN'S UNION is one of those rare books that many will think is remarkable, while some will find it intolerable. It will offer different interpretations for different readers, and you may have to read it more than once. There is no doubt, however, that this book will be widely discussed in the coming months and even years. In the future, Michael Chabon may be mentioned in the same sentence with Phillip Roth, Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud for this work of enormous ambition and insight.

--- Reviewed by Stuart Shiffman

This is a very unusual book! I opened this book with the author's Pulitzer-Prize winning book (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) in mind, and immediately started to bog down. This book isn't much like that one (points to the author for wanting to break new ground with his fiction), and I had the sinking feeling that I'd be in for a lot of boring descriptions of chess. (Thank God that didn't turn out to be the case.)

Plus, there's more un-italicized Yiddish words peppering every page than you can shake a stick at, and there's no glossary. So unless you're a 80 year-old European rabbi, you'll probably have to cruise along, absorbing the gist of each Yiddish word from its context. Fortunately, Chabon is such a fine writer that you can adjust to this easily enough.

Our hero Landsman is a washed-up detective who lives in a crummy hotel. His marriage broke up a few years back, his sister died while piloting her small plane, and he may soon have no home. In this alternate-history world, Alaska rather than Israel became the temporary safe haven for the world's Jews after the Holocaust. Now Alaska is set to revert back to American control, and for reasons I never quite understood, the Jews of Alaska may be homeless once more.

Landsman has a more immediate problem to worry about: when he's called to a crime scene in the very hotel where he lives, he realizes that someone murdered a fellow resident. He takes this personally though he didn't know the man. His ex-wife, now his supervisor, warns him off the case. The police precinct in general is supposed to dump unsolvable cases and tidy up before everyone bails out of Alaska. But Landsman launches a secret investigation with his long-suffering partner. This leads him to the mysterious closed society of the "black hats" (Hasidic Jews who, in this alternate reality, personify organized crime). The murder victim turns out to be more important than they initially thought.

Problems I had with this book: (1) the relative slowness of the beginning (unavoidable given the complex world-building that Chabon has to convey). By the time you meet the black-hats, the story starts cranking along at a good pace. (2) the abrupt and somewhat unhinged way that the ending came together. You may get there as I did and get fed the explanation that Landsman receives, and think, "All this was a plan to do WHAT?" It's a little unbelievable.

Things I liked about the book:

(1) the world-building. This version of Alaska is very poignant when you consider the fact that Yiddish, known to be a tremendously flexible and expressive language that was preferred by countless scholars and literary luminaries including Isaac Bashevis Singer, is hovering on the brink of extinction these days. In Chabon's Alaska, which is wet and cold and gloomy, the culture is European and the main language is Yiddish. There is no Israel and there is precious little Hebrew outside of the synagogue. If, like me, you know almost nothing about Jewish culture, you're going get absolutely fascinated as you read.

(2) the characters. Landsman is cranky, wry, self-deprecating, and dogged. The friendships between him and his partner, and him and his ex-wife, are complex and funny and a delight to read. As a reader, I wouldn't hesitate to follow these characters through a story way more far-fetched than this one.

As mysteries go, this story is much slower moving than fans of the genre will be used to (because it's so top-heavy with all that world-building). But I definitely recommend The Yiddish Policeman's Union, especially for those reader who want something that they've never seen before! Chabon fans should be pleased.

When I read this book I was stunned by its imaginative premise--that the State of Israel failed in 1948 and the U.S. offered part of Alaska (the Sitka District) for settlement by Jews from around the world. I learned later that this idea was actually floated by FDR, but never acted on. With the support of then-U.S. President Harry Truman and the resilience of its people, Israel survived and thrives almost 60 years later. Still, while no longer amazed, I'm still very impressed at how completely Chabon imagines and describes this cold world of the Jews, inhabiting Sitka on a 60-year lease from the U.S.

While operating at the same high level of imagination as in his triumph, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Chabon writes a much different book here. The scope of time is something less than a week rather than 50 years; the action is all "confined" to the Sitka District, large but still smaller than Kavalier's world that stretched from Prague to Antarctica to New York City. Kavalier was historical fiction at its best. Yiddish is a whodunit wrapped up in a made-up history. The closest parallel I can think of Philip Roth's The Plot Against America in which the U.S. elects isolationist Charles Lindbergh as President while war rages in Europe, with the kidnapping of Lindbergh's baby acting as the whodunit.

All this is not to say that the reader is somehow shortchanged by "Yiddish". Into the murder mystery, Chabon works in world class chess, Hasidism (which at some level resembles the Mafia), bush pilots, the Judeo-Eskimo community (there's one he probably had few live experts to consult with), espionage, Judeo-Arab tensions, protagonist Meyer Landsman's challenge of doing police work for his now supervisor ex-wife, along with a whole host of Yiddish cultural references that can't be enumerated without better understanding of that culture and more space. Lurking in the background is the "reality" that the 60-year lease with the U.S. is about to expire and only a small number of Jews with "useful" jobs will be allowed to remain. Now that I write all this, my evalution of the breadth of Chabon's imagination is working its way back toward amazing.

I'm not sure how the reading public will handle "Yiddish". Chabon fans will enjoy it, but will be making the impossible comparison to "Kavalier." Detective story fans make me disoriented by the imaginary setting and all its unfamiliar cultural references. Someone looking for historical fiction might be put off by both the made-up history and the seemingly simple-minded detective story about a murdered chess player.

"The Yiddish Policemen's Union" is not quite a 5-star book, but at 4.5 I'll round up for Chabon's amazing imagination. I recommend the book to all Chabon fans and to the adventurous among readers of current American fiction. A work by such a special talent has to be given a chance. I don't think you'll be disappointed. Well-read teenagers might enjoy it too--there's nothing in here that's particularly offensive, but it's a long step from typical young adult novels to "Yiddish".

Peel away all the Yiddish jargon and what I found left was your average cozy mystery. I understand a lot of Yiddish and I still found myself having trouble following the dialogue. It was confusing keeping all the names straight. "Yid" this and "Yid" that - everywhere like too much salt on the meat. OY. And please, with all the Yiddish jargon to make us feet right at home in fantasy-land Jewish Alaska, and then he writes about "noodle pudding"? What?!?! Why not just say kugel? For goodness sakes. I found this book tedious to read and get through. Ultimately a somewhat satisfying mystery. But I don't get all the hype unless it's just for the sake of uniqueness. Sorry.