The Yiddish Policemen's Union: A Novel (Hardcover)

Man plans, God laughs, and novelists, heaven help them, take notes. It’s not hard to imagine what someone like Michael Chabon-author of the wildly inventive Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay-would do on learning that, in 1940, one of FDR’s advisors proposed a homeland for Jews in Alaska. Chabon would take this hypothetical and run with it.
As a matter of fact, in his new novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Chabon runs amok. The result is a high concept mishmash: Raymond Chandler meets Isaac Bashevis Singer, with some Da Vinci Code and Fox’s 24 thrown into the mix. If it feels a little like Chabon is on a mission in this novel, that’s because he is. He’s out to redeem entertainment as a literary value.
Chabon has been on this soapbox for a while. Certainly, Kavalier and Clay, a tribute to comic book superheroes and the men who created them, was a shot across the bow to the most earnest literary types, the minimalists and prissier-than-thou New Yorker-style short story writers. Chabon stated his case even more directly as guest editor of The Best American Short Stories, 2005. In his introduction, he is steamed:

“Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people . . . learn to mistrust and even to revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights . . . Entertainment trades in cliché and product placement. It sells action figures and denture adhesive . . . Intelligent people must keep a certain distance from its productions . . . Entertainment, in short, means junk, and too much junk is bad for you-bad for your heart, your arteries, your mind, your soul.
But maybe these intelligent and serious people, my faithful straw men, are wrong. Maybe the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we have accepted-indeed, we have helped to articulate-such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment.”

Sounds good to me, although it’s one thing to be right, and another to be able to prove it on the page. The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is not just great fun to read-it feels like it was great fun to write. It’s the ripping yarn Chabon has been proselytising for, Exhibit A in the literature-as-a-hoot defense-a concerted and largely successful effort to give entertainment back its good name.

* * *

Chabon’s story begins, appropriately enough, with a murder mystery, and with Meyer Landsman, a police detective in the largely Jewish district of Sitka, Alaska (thanks, FDR). Landsman discovers that his neighbour, a heroin junkie, has been shot in the head, execution style. It’s one of those cases-full of red herrings and unusual suspects. His boss, also his ex-wife, the formidable Bina Gelbfish, warns him to steer clear of it. But, like any burnt-out, loose cannon gumshoe worth his deteriorating liver, he is not inclined to take advice, especially good advice.
Landsman has seen better days. He drinks too much; he has messed up his marriage; and he lives in a flophouse. But when he’s on a case he is transformed and suddenly has “the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker. When there is a crime to fight, Landsman tears around . . . like a man with his pant leg caught on a rocket.”
And the more he tears around on a case he’s supposed to drop, the more improbable twists he uncovers. It seems the victim was, among other things, a chess master, the son of the leader of a powerful and mysterious Hasidic sect, gay, gifted, and, quite possibly, the Messiah. He’s an unlikely Messiah, but as one of Chabon’s many philosophising characters puts it: “Every generation loses the messiah it has failed to deserve.”
Chabon’s plot can get a bit far-fetched. The good guys in the story easily extricate themselves from some pretty serious and preposterous jams while the bad guys are determined to make even the most sinister terrorists look reasonable. The novel probably could have gotten by with a little less than the future of the Jews and the fate of the world at stake, and while you have to give Chabon points for chutzpah, there are times when fans of Dan Brown or Austin Powers would feel a little too at home here.
Still, apocalyptic themes aside, Chabon sticks to the logic of the single what-if his story hinges on. Specifically, what would you have if the Jews had not managed to hold on to the Holy Land in 1948? What if, instead, they had “been tossed out of the joint . . . with savage finality?”
You’d have the world Chabon invents, where the U.S. government has loaned a chunk of Alaska to a displaced Jewish population. This is the aforementioned Sitka where Yiddish, not Hebrew, wins out as the official language; where a cell phone is called a shoyfer; where beat cops are latkes; where the first wave of refugees refer to themselves as “Polar Bears” and recent Jewish arrivals from the U.S. are nicknamed “Mexicans”. In other words, you’d have the land of “the frozen chosen.”
It seems novelists don’t just want to take notes, after all; they want to play God, too, and in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Chabon breathes life into a predicament of Biblical proportions in his kosher-style winter wonderland. Sitka is about to undergo “Reversion”, which is to say Alaska is about to be returned to the Alaskans after nearly 50 years. And the Jewish residents are going to find themselves in a familiar bind-scrambling for a place to go.
Chabon reconfigures the age-old Diaspora dilemma: where is home? “Some of them just got comfortable here,” he says of his characters. “They started to forget a little bit. They felt at home . . . That’s how it always goes . . . Egypt, Spain, Germany. They weakened. It’s human to weaken.”
A strength of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is its large and colourful cast. In keeping with the detective-novel genre, characters show up, advance the plot, and disappear. CIA operatives and chess masters, holy men and mad bombers all make cameo appearances.
Fortunately, the characters who hang around are just as interesting and offbeat. Like Meyer’s partner and cousin, Berko Shemets, who is half-Jewish and half-Tlingit Indian-a dignified, thoughtful, and club-wielding tough guy. A hybrid by birth, he has also become one by inclination. “He is,” Chabon explains, “a minotaur and the world of Jews is his labyrinth.” He’s also the kind of character every detective novel, conventional or not, needs: the faithful sidekick, a Yiddish-speaking Tonto.
Meyer’s ex, Bina, is a force of nature too. When she is told by a young Hasidic man that it is inappropriate for a woman to interrogate his rabbi, she flashes her badge and says, “See this, sweetness? I’m like a cash gift. I’m always appropriate.” This is, coincidentally, Chabon at his mishmashed best, part literary stylist, part standup comic-combining a carefully crafted bit of character-driven dialogue with a perfect punch line. It’s literature, like a martini, two parts profundity, one part fun-or maybe the other way around.

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Chabon is right: there are lots of things wrong with serious literature today; mainly, the fact that it takes itself too seriously. Popular art, especially the ubiquitous American brand, a category in which The Yiddish Policeman’s Union happily belongs, takes a beating in most high-minded circles and discussions. Why? Because, as Chabon has suggested, it has the nerve to be accessible, to test itself against the demands of a mainstream audience. And though it is at its best infrequently-junk is usually just junk-when popular art is popular and good what is always amazing is how much better it is than it has to be.
In everything, from music to movies, from Motown to the Gershwins, Casablanca to Preston Sturges’s entire oeuvre, from the funny papers to TV, Peanuts to The Simpsons, the only detectable sin is an irrepressible desire to entertain and to do it with intelligence but also with delight and abundance. Of that kind of sin, that kind of desire, Chabon’s very entertaining, very literary The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is abundantly, delightfully guilty. It’s Exhibit A for Chabon’s defense-his latest effort to give entertainment back its good name.
Joel Yanofsky (Books in Canada)
--This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

[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.
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