Somehow I only managed to be the third person on this blog to review Michael Chabon’s new book, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. However, I will be the first to provide a goy perspective. Please see our previous reviews (eyn and tsvey).
I’m a big Chabon fan, and I loved this book. It sent me scrambling to WikiPedia several times, usually in the middle of the night. When I found myself with only 100 pages left after reading through lunch at work, I seriously considered taking the rest of the day off. The upshot of this enthusiasm is that you’re stuck with a long post to read. You may want to get a snack before reading on.
Quick recap: The book presents a crime story that takes place in a counter-factual historical setting. European Jews have been relocated prior to World War II to a small corner of Alaska (Sitka). The Jews of Sitka, over two million, are nearing the end of the terms of their allotment to the land, which will revert to American control later in the year that the novel takes place. The dread of the displacement and upheaval that the “reversion” is inflicting upon the Sitka Jews is palpable.
Years ago, Chabon reportedly stumbled across a Yiddish phrase book for tourists that was published after World War II. That discovery was one of the inspirations for the novel. Chabon imagined a world where someone might actually need a Yiddish phrase book in order to communicate while traveling. Along the way, he came across a real proposal by the U.S. government to relocate Jews to Alaska before World War II. Fittingly, the bureaucrat who is credited with squashing the idea (not Dick Cheney) is run over by a bus in Chabon’s novel before he can kill the deal. Thus, Chabon’s Yiddish-speaking land was born.
The novel is stocked with memorable characters. Meyer Landsman is a hard-boiled detective with the Sitka P.D. Slowly drinking himself to death in a flop house. His partner is Berko Shemets (aka Johnny “The Jew” Bear), half-Jewish/half-Native American. Meyer and Berko are also cousins that were raised together as teenagers. The role of the hard-nosed, by-the-book boss back at the station house, Bina, is Meyer’s ex-wife. Each is a well-developed classic.
Previous reviewers here felt that the book, which they otherwise loved, got off to a slow start. I was hooked from the get go. Check out this opening:
Nine months Landsman’s been flopping at the Hotel Zamenhof without any of his fellow residents managing to get themselves murdered. Now somebody has put a bullet in the brain of the occupant of 208, a yid who was calling himself Emanuel Lasker.
It is true that Chabon does digress in the middle of a conversation to fill in back story of characters, places, etc. In the end, I felt that the exposition rounded out the people, the settings, and the plot. Plus, most of the expository backfill is brilliant. A few examples from the first five pages:
- He picks up a shot glass that he is currently dating, a souvenir of the World’s Fair of 1977.
- It’s like there’s a film score playing behind him, heavy on the castanets.
- He was like one of those sticks you snap, it light up. You know? For a few hours. And you can hear broken glass rattling around inside of it.
One of the questions that came out of an earlier review was whether a non-Jewish reader would be interested in or appreciate the Yiddish that is sprinkled throughout the book – or would they find it “frustrating or annoying.” I didn’t grow up hearing Yiddish, and Chabon’s use of the language was not frustrating/annoying to me at all. Counter intuitively, I think one reason the Yiddish works is because Chabon doesn’t tell the reader what the words mean.
I cooked up a theory about the use of foreign language in novels when I was reading Consumption, a novel set among the Inuit in Canada. In that novel, I felt that untranslated Inuit phrases served to distance the reader from the Inuit characters, effectively reinforcing the idea that the reader is an outsider. I thought the approach in that case really worked to advance the novel (contrasted with The Kite Runner, which annoyed me to no end when Arabic phrases were translated in a heavy-handed way that felt gratuitous – made up example, “He said hello to his sadik, his friend.”)
Along those lines, I think that Chabon’s use of Yiddish can serve two roles. It reinforces that outsider status among those of us who grew up without hearing Yiddish. Simultaneously, the language draws in the Jewish readers who grew up hearing Yiddish phrases here and there from their grandparents and asks them to imagine a world where it was the spoken language – a world that they might have been a part of had things turned out a little differently.
The book is also written in the “hard-boiled” detective style. Some of the Yiddish words serve the conventions of that genre. Meyer uses Yiddish words for his gun, his cigarettes, his booze, policemen, and various kinds of low-lifes. Yiddish “cop slang” adds to the gritty realism to the story.
In the story, the ultra-Orthodox Verbover sect is an insular and mysterious group that appears to control the organized crime in Sitka. Detective Meyer Landsman calls the group “Black Hats” for the distinctive hats that they wear. That description sent me off to WikiPedia to look up the real-life Lubavitch sect. I came across the Lubavitchers occasionally when I lived in Miami Beach. The most memorable time was on a golf course at 8:00 in the morning on a Saturday. The temperature was at least 94 degrees F, and a group of Lubavitchers in black wool suits and black hats were walking across a fairway (can’t drive on the Sabbath). The suits/hats are a powerful visual indicator of who is a member of that community and who is not.
Another interesting WikiPedia sidenote on the Lubavitch is that a recent spiritual leader of the group, Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson is believed by some to have been the Messiah. “Menachem Mendel” is also the full proper name of an important character in the novel. I can’t say much more about the strange convergence of that without giving away huge plot points. I’ll just say it’s very interesting.
Meyer and Berko visit the Verbover sect early in their investigation to talk to the “boundary maven,” Zimbalist. Zimbalist is in charge of maintaining the eruv for the Verbovers. Don’t know what an eruv is? Meyer Landsman is a little foggy on it as well:
Landsman has put a lot of work into the avoidance of having to understand concepts like that of the eruv, but he knows it’s a typical Jewish ritual dodge, a scam run on God, that controlling [strong expletive]. It has something to do with pretending that telephone poles are door posts, and that wires are lintels. You can tie off an area using poles and strings and call it an eruv, then pretend on the Sabbath that this eruv that you’ve drawn…is your house. That way you can get around the Sabbath ban on carrying in a public place, and walk to shul with a couple of Alka Seltzers in your pocket, and it isn’t a sin. Given enough string and enough poles…you could tie a circle around pretty much anyplace and call it an eruv.
That passage sent me racing back to WikiPedia for a more learned definition of eruv. It reminded me of my Miami Beach days when there was a visible string on PVC poles that encircled a large part of South Beach. I read an article once in the local weekly about what that string was all about. Later, I would point it out to people and try to explain its significance. Almost no one noticed it unless it was pointed out to him/her. Nobody believed my half-remembered explanation either. (Check out a map of the North Miami Beach eruv here.)
I’m prattling on about it now, because I think the boundary maven’s efforts in the book are an important metaphor in the novel. Ideas about belonging, outsiders vs. community, boundaries that keep people in as well as out, faith and hypocrisy, religious fanaticism, are central themes of the novel.
Like the Verbover Island eruv, Sitka itself is a line on a map that denotes an area that the Alaskan Jews can walk around in with some semblance of belonging and peace of mind. The Sitka boundary line is poorly defined in some areas, leading to boundary disputes with the Alaskan tribes. (Alaska is not a State in the novel – no statehood for “Jewlaska” is the catchphrase in Congress.) The Sitka line is about to be withdrawn from the map in a matter of weeks as Sitka reverts back to American control, casting doubt on the future of millions of potentially soon-to-be nation-less Jews.
The phrase “strange times to be a Jew” is repeated throughout the book, and it is applied to just about any time period that is mentioned. An especially poignant expression of that sentiment occurs near the end of the novel:
He had been born, like every Jew, into the wrong world, the wrong country, at the wrong time…
Like Philip Roth’s alternate history, The Plot Against America, Chabon seems to be telling American Jews not to get too comfortable (or to not take their comfort of place for granted). A twist of history here of there, and their collective history could easily repeat itself and/or their current situation could have been very radically different.
I loved this book. Fortunately for you, I’m limited in how far I can go in writing about it by not wanting to give away giant chunks of plot. It is a detective novel after all. The end of the book is especially thought provoking given the themes that I tossed out above. I can not recommend this book highly enough. Sprint to your local bookseller if you don’t have The Yiddish Policemen’s Union high atop your “to be read” stack.
Books | Tim | 
July 16, 2007 1:00 pm | 
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