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Moyshe Nadir, Mani Leyb, and I. L. Peretz as well as providing condensed fictionalizations of the lives of the world-famous painter Marc Chagall and the neglected Soviet symbolist writer Der Nister (“The Hidden One”). To squeeze all of this in, Horn’s imagination leaps through time and space, limning scenes on the outskirts of Moscow and in Vietnam as well as an otherworldly, fantastic place where people drink books like wine. The nub of this wildly expansive plot is the former child prodigy Ben Ziskind, who steals a painting by Chagall off the wall of the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, and it is in the course of explicating Ziskind’s family history and the painting’s provenance that Horn ranges so widely. Before she is done, she touches on terrorism in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and the situation of Russian Jewish immigrants as well as on Ben’s potential love life; and if not every strand of the story weaves seamlessly together, that is beside the point. The grand ambitions of The World to Come are themselves energizing. Horn has been honored with just about every Jewish writing prize in the United States; more impressive, she also made Granta’s prestigious Best of Young American Novelists list in 2007. As she was only 29 when her second novel appeared, and has all the credentials she’ll need to settle into a comfortable academic post (if she wants to), there is reason to hope that Horn will have a long and productive career. Even more encouraging, she has an enormous, mostly unknown archive of Yiddish and Hebrew modernist writing from which to draw inspiration. Further reading: Horn’s first novel, In the Image (2002), won many Jewish book prizes and was a hit on the Jewish book fair circuit. In The World to Come, Horn herself includes a bibliography, recommending Der Nister’s The Family Mashber, available in an English translation (1987), and other Yiddish favorites. Tamar Yellin’s The Genizah at the House of Sepher (2005) is another recent novel of vast textual erudition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123pThe Yiddish Policemen’s Union By Michael Chabon HARPERCOLLINS, 2007. 432 PAGES. In the late 1990s, Michael Chabon published an essay about the book Say It in Yiddish, which seemed to him a handy guide to a fantasy land that has never existed, where one needs to know how to say “What is the flight number?” and “I will call a policeman” in mameloshen. The piece occasioned much chatter and protest among Yiddishists who thought that it disrespected their language, but Chabon’s intentions were sweet and nostalgic, not destructive. Less than a decade later, Chabon proved this, applying his literary gifts to write a country into existence for which Say It in Yiddish would, indeed, be a useful guide. American Jewish Fiction 166 In less capable hands, such an exercise might lapse into pure, far-fetched silliness, but Chabon did the legwork to translate his “What if?” of a Yiddish territory—in Alaska, of all places!—into a coherent fiction. In Chabon’s version of history, the U.S. government designates a territory in Alaska as a temporary refuge for European Jews during World War II. (Such a proposal was actually considered, if quickly quashed, by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.) Fast-forward half a century, and the population of Sitka, Alaska, numbers 3.2 million—most of them Jews and all of them Yiddish speakers, including the Filipino maids and the tough-talking homicide detectives. The novel’s hero, Meyer Landsman, is one of the latter—he is “the most decorated shammes in the District”—and he is in a bad way. He is recently divorced, his sister has died, and in two months, when the district reverts to U.S. sovereignty, Landsman and all of the other Alaskan Jews will be out of not only their jobs but also a homeland. If that isn’t tsuris enough, a neighbor in the decrepit Esperanto-themed hotel where Landsman lives turns up with a bullet in the back of his head, execution-style. In short, as Chabon’s characters frequently say, “These are strange times to be a Jew.” A primary pleasure of the novel is the tour it offers through Yiddish Sitka, a vigorously imagined urban locale with streets named for Yiddish culture heroes including Sh. Ansky, Sholem Asch, and Yankev Glatshteyn. Chabon, meanwhile, manages to make his English-language book read, at times, like an overly literal translation from a Yiddish original...

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