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

by Michael Chabon (Author)
Key Phrases: cot frame, pocket chess set, orange parka, Mendel Shpilman, Peril Strait, Alter Litvak (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
[Signature]Reviewed by Jess WalterThey are the "frozen Chosen," two million people living, dying and kvetching in Sitka, Alaska, the temporary homeland established for displaced World War II Jews in Chabon's ambitious and entertaining new novel. It is—deep breath now—a murder-mystery speculative-history Jewish-identity noir chess thriller, so perhaps it's no surprise that, in the back half of the book, the moving parts become unwieldy; Chabon is juggling narrative chainsaws here.The novel begins—the same way that Philip Roth launched The Plot Against America—with a fascinating historical footnote: what if, as Franklin Roosevelt proposed on the eve of World War II, a temporary Jewish settlement had been established on the Alaska panhandle? Roosevelt's plan went nowhere, but Chabon runs the idea into the present, back-loading his tale with a haunting history. Israel failed to get a foothold in the Middle East, and since the Sitka solution was only temporary, Alaskan Jews are about to lose their cold homeland. The book's timeless refrain: "It's a strange time to be a Jew."Into this world arrives Chabon's Chandler-ready hero, Meyer Landsman, a drunken rogue cop who wakes in a flophouse to find that one of his neighbors has been murdered. With his half-Tlingit, half-Jewish partner and his sexy-tough boss, who happens also to be his ex-wife, Landsman investigates a fascinating underworld of Orthodox black-hat gangs and crime-lord rabbis. Chabon's "Alyeska" is an act of fearless imagination, more evidence of the soaring talent of his previous genre-blender, the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.Eventually, however, Chabon's homage to noir feels heavy-handed, with too many scenes of snappy tough-guy banter and too much of the kind of elaborate thriller plotting that requires long explanations and offscreen conspiracies.Chabon can certainly write noir—or whatever else he wants; his recent Sherlock Holmes novel, The Final Solution, was lovely, even if the New York Times Book Review sniffed its surprise that the mystery novel would "appeal to the real writer." Should any other snobs mistake Chabon for anything less than a real writer, this book offers new evidence of his peerless storytelling and style. Characters have skin "as pale as a page of commentary" and rough voices "like an onion rolling in a bucket." It's a solid performance that would have been even better with a little more Yiddish and a little less police. (May)Jess Walter was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award for The Zero and the winner of the 2006 Edgar Award for best novel for Citizen Vince.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Elizabeth McCracken

What sort of writer is Michael Chabon? The question, especially considering his terrific new novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, is complicated. Of course he's literary, author of the Pulitzer-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and other marvelous books of fiction. His work is page-turning and poignant; he is one of the best writers of English prose alive. But Chabon has an avowed interest in forms considered perhaps less than literary. He's edited two anthologies of pulp-inspired stories for McSweeney's, written a "story of detection" featuring Sherlock Holmes, and he "presents" a comic book quarterly starring one of the superheroes of Kavalier & Clay. He's interested in busting the chains of everydayness that bind many so-called literary writers: He wants to move and thrill us both, and he does.

Reading The Yiddish Policemen's Union is like watching a gifted athlete invent a sport using elements of every other sport there is -- balls, bats, poles, wickets, javelins and saxophones. The book begins with the introduction of a hung-over detective to a gun-shot corpse in a fleabag hotel. Classic noir, except that the detective drinks slivovitz instead of bourbon: He's Jewish, a kind of Philip Marlovsky named Meyer Landsman, though Landsman is a cop -- a "noz" in the yiddisher slang of the book -- not a PI. The whole local police force is Jewish: The book is set in a present-day alternate reality in Sitka, Alaska, a safe haven set up for Jewish refugees after World War II and the collapse of Israel. Now, after nearly 60 years, the Federal District of Sitka is about to revert to American rule. There are elements of an international terrorist thriller, complicated by religious conspiracy and a band of end-of-the-world hopefuls, and yet the book has a dimly lit 1940s vibe. Maybe that's just because of what Jews and movie dicks have always had in common: felt hats and an affinity for bad weather.

The prose is Chandlerian, too -- lyrical, hard-boiled and funny all at once: "In the street the wind shakes rain from the flaps of its overcoat. Landsman tucks himself into the hotel doorway. Two men, one with a cello case strapped to his back, the other cradling a violin or viola, struggle against the weather toward the door of Pearl of Manila across the street. The symphony hall is ten blocks and a world away from this end of Max Nordau Street, but the craving of a Jew for pork, in particular when it has been deep-fried, is a force greater than night or distance or a cold blast off the Gulf of Alaska. Landsman himself is fighting the urge to return to room 505, and his bottle of slivovitz, and his World's Fair souvenir glass."

Landsman, macerated in brandy and sadness, becomes interested in the hotel corpse, though he has enough dead bodies in his own past to keep him busy: a never-born child, a possibly murdered sister and a father who committed suicide, not to mention the ghost of his marriage to a Sitka policewoman. Landsman calls up his partner and cousin, Berko Shemets, a half-Jewish half-Tlingit big man with a soft heart and what passes in this novel for a happy home life. The corpse turns out to be a chess prodigy and heroin addict, the wayward son of a powerful head of a Jewish sect called the Verbovers, and possibly the key to the essential mysteries of both his own death and the future of the Jews. Landsman and Shemets are on the case, even though any number of people try to throw them off. There are plenty of twists, and the detective finds himself knocked unconscious at the end of more than one chapter and muzzy-headed at the start of the next, which is what it means to be the hero of novels that aren't strictly literary.

The book calls to mind another recent bad-for-the-Jews speculative novel by a major writer, The Plot Against America. But while Philip Roth's alternate history asks, "What if?" Chabon's is an explosion that simply says, "Look here!" He sets about imagining the whole strange world of Aleyska, American-flavored but not American.

The pure reach and music and weight of Chabon's imagination are extraordinary, born of brilliant ambition you don't even notice because it is so deeply entertaining. He invents every corner of this strange world -- the slang of the "Sitkaniks," their history, discount houses, divey bars, pie shops. Despite the complications of the plot, the details of the world are every bit as enthralling. You read so that you can keep following Landsman through doors and down alleys as he pieces together the corpse's past and worries about his own. You can't wait to see what kind of compelling oddball steps out of the next wedge of shadow: the pie man's sad daughter, the 4-foot-7 Tlingit police inspector named Willie Dick. (It's possible that Chabon has too much fun with his names at times.)

Toward the end, the book falters a bit. It's not exactly a cartoon gone off a cliff -- a loss of "the foolish coyote faith that could keep you flying as long as you kept kidding yourself you could fly." Still, it's as though Chabon the virtuosic athlete looked down at his legs and got confused as to what kind of sport he was actually playing. The solution to the murder mystery feels like the last piece of a puzzle snapped into place instead of a startling revelation; the international thriller ticks away offstage; some of the banter is too Howard-Hawks-perfect; and what happens to Meyer Landsman seems like what the book and its conventions -- as distinct from fate -- require of him.

Still, what goes before is beautiful and breakneck; Chabon is a master of such contradictions. "Something wistful tugs at his memory," he writes of his hero, "a whiff of some brand of aftershave that nobody wears anymore, the jangling chorus of a song that was moderately popular one August twenty-five summers ago."

That is part of Chabon's project as well, to conjure up the music, smells, architecture, fashions -- the soul, in other words -- of worlds utterly imaginary, and yet palpably lost, and make us nostalgic for them. The moving, shopworn whiz-bang of historical visions of the future -- world's fairs, Esperanto, a belief that the Jews of the world will stop wandering and find a peaceful home somewhere on the planet -- Chabon loves, buries and mourns these visions as beautiful but too fragile to live. The future will always be a fata morgana. In this strange and breathtaking novel, the wise, unhappy man settles for closer comforts. As Landsman says, toward the end of the book, "My homeland is in my hat."

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (April 29, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0007149832
• ISBN-13: 978-0007149834
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (328 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,162 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

74 of 79 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Strange Time to Be a Jew, May 11, 2007

By	Edward Aycock (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

137 of 155 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "[W]hen I have formed the sounds, May 7, 2007

By	Leonard Fleisig "Len" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel (Hardcover)

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

34 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hard boiled historical fiction in the frozen north! (say that 3 times fast)., May 3, 2007

By	Joe Grundig "Analyst" (USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel (Hardcover)

One of my greatest pleasures in reading is discover new authors with new stories to tell. This time I have to thank my wife, she brought this book home on Tuesday and By last night I had finished it! It is not my typical read, but I do have a love for the out doors and Alaska in particular, so I decided to give it a try. I soon found out it is not an outdoors kind of book, but that did not matter, it has great writing, fully fleshed characters, along with a tightly plotted story. I have not had this much fun discovering a new author and his story since Brownsfield and his excellent "Across the High Lonesome."

With the "Yiddish Policeman's Union" Chabon takes a little known side note to history and turns it into a wonderful "what if" piece of historical fiction. This little know historical footnote is that FDR once proposed That Alaska become a homeland for the Jewish people. Things do not go as planned though and the US government now wants them out and is in the process of evicting all immigrants without proper documentation. In the middle of all this Meyer Landsman a cynical, down on his luck police detective who is investigating the murder of a drug addict chess phoneme who is also the son of a powerful rabbi. It's the classic hard-boiled case that no one wants solved except our anti hero cop; who can't stop digging even though he know it would be best to leave things be. This book could easily gotten out of control but the author does an amazing job of managing what could have become an over blown plot. There authenticity here mixed with real humor, that made this alternate universe jump to life! I am not Jewish, so some of the Yiddish sprinkled throughout did go over my head, but this is no way took away from my enjoyment of the book, and in fact only added to the books authenticity. I can't recommend this novel highly enough.