The Yiddish Policemen's Union (review)

Like a number of other contemporary novels that grapple with the Shoah—including Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer and Ellen Feldman's The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank—The Yiddish Policemen's Union proposes an alternative history as a way to make sense of the post-Auschwitz world. Chabon constructs a parallel universe, which centers on the conceit that an "interim" Jewish state in Sitka, Alaska has become the unlikely Promised Land for more than three million Diaspora Jews. Following the destruction of the state of Israel in 1948, Jewish refugees were transported to a new Siberia, the Alaskan panhandle, where they learned to live alongside their Tlingit neighbors, a relationship as uneasy as Christian-Jewish interactions had been in Eastern Europe only a short time before.

The novel opens sixty years later, as this temporary Jewish territory is about to revert to American hands, leaving the so-called "frozen Chosen" homeless once again. Chabon's protagonist is Meyer Landsman, an "every Jew" with an unquenchable thirst for slivovitz. Landsman wears many hats; he is a homicide detective with nearly a dozen unsolved cases on his hands, a bad Jew living in a town populated with wiseguy religious fanatics, and a failed husband whose beloved ex-wife Bina Gelbfish has suddenly become his supervisor at work. Faced with the imminent Reversion of Sitka, Landsman concludes that only the resolution of his latest case offers the possibility of salvation or sobriety.

The mysterious murder of Mendel Shpilman, a heroin junky and chess genius once believed to be the next Tzaddik Ha-Dor (or potential Messiah), serves as the centerpiece of a rather byzantine story line. However, one does not read a Chabon novel to learn how the narrative will conclude. Chabon is one of the most accomplished prose stylists of his generation but, as previous novels have proven, plot is neither his highest priority nor his forte. Instead, Chabon's writing gathers momentum through the accumulation of specific concrete detail, precisely rendered scenes, and nuanced character development. The frisson lies in Chabon's playful handling of language, his ability to create an absolutely convincing landscape in which the displaced shtetl collides with Tlingit culture. A typical passage merges Dashiell Hammett's tough-guy swagger with Woody Allen's nebbishness: "Steam curls out of a waffle iron on the counter in cartoon-locomotive puffs. The drip-filter coffee maker hawks and spits like a decrepit Jewish policeman after ten flights of steps" (37). In the Sitka District, a cell phone is called a Shoyfer, a gun (both a piece and peace keeper) a shalom, and cigarettes papiros. The novelist's vision is rooted in two seemingly disparate literary traditions: the familiar tropes of noir fiction and the Jewish lexicon of exile and self-deprecation.

The great triumph of The Yiddish Policemen's Union is how fully Chabon realizes his Alaskan-Yiddish wilderness, an imagined geography that exemplifies the real-life religious and cultural diversity of the Jewish experience. Despite—or, perhaps, because of—its exoticism, Sitka seems utterly familiar, its inhabitants little different from their counterparts in this universe. The same tensions between the secular and religious, between the assimilated and the Orthodox, persist. Landsman's realization that Alaskan Jews "carry their patrimony in a tote bag, their world on the tip of the tongue" remains equally true for contemporary Jewish inhabitants of Baltimore, Chicago, or Los Angeles (411). Although Landsman speaks the mamaloshn fluently and does not occupy a world where Yiddish is viewed as a dead language, nonetheless he suffers the weight of the Shoah and the knowledge of near-extinction. Despite the novel's wit and humor, the book delivers a serious message; as characters repeat throughout the text, "These are strange times to be Jew." Strange times, indeed.

Clearly, The Yiddish Policemen's Union belongs to a larger project, one in which Chabon attempts to erase the distinction between high art and genre literatures. In his Sherlock Holmes-inspired novel, The Final Solution, Chabon replicated Arthur Conan...