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The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Michael Chabon
414 pp.
In Brief
For sixty years, Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of revelations of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. Proud, grateful, and longing to be American, the Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant, gritty, soulful, and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. For sixty years they have been left alone, neglected and half-forgotten in a backwater of history. Now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end: once again the tides of history threaten to sweep them up and carry them off into the unknown.
But homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. He and his half-Tlingit partner, Berko Shemets, can't catch a break in any of their outstanding cases. Landsman's new supervisor is the love of his life—and also his worst nightmare. And in the cheap hotel where he has washed up, someone has just committed a murder—right under Landsman's nose. Out of habit, obligation, and a mysterious sense that it somehow offers him a shot at redeeming himself, Landsman begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy. But when word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, Landsman soon finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, hopefulness, evil, and salvation that are his heritage—and with the unfinished business of his marriage to Bina Gelbfish, the one person who understands his darkest fears.
At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, an homage to 1940s noir, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written. (From the publisher.)
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About the Author
• Birth—May 24, 1963
• Where—Washington, D.C.
• Education—B.A., University of Pittsburgh; M.F.A., University
of California at Irvine
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize, 2001 (for Kavalier and Clay)
• Currently—Berkeley, California
Michael Chabon's latest book is Yiddish Policemen's Union. He is also the author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which Entertainment Weekly included on its list of the best books of 2000. This book, Wonder Boys, won universal critical acclaim and was made into a feature film in 2000 starring Michael Douglas. He received his B.A. from The University of Pittsburgh and his M.F.A. from the University of California at Irvine. He lives with his wife and two children in California.
More
In 1987, at 24, Michael Chabon was living a graduate student's dream. His masters thesis for the writing program at UC Irvine, a novel called The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, was not only published -- it was published to the tune of a $155,000 advance, a six-figure first printing, a movie deal, and a place on the bestseller lists. Mysteries, a coming-of-age story about a man caught between romances with a man on one side, a woman on the other, and the shadow of his gangster father over it all, drew readers with its elegant prose and an irresistibly cool character, Art Bechstein, racing through a long, hot summer.
Following this auspicious debut, Chabon penned a follow-up short story collection, then hit a serious snag. After five years of fits and starts, he abandoned a troublesome work in progress and began work on another novel, a wry, smart book about, natch, an author hoplessly stuck writing his endless, shapeless novel! With 1995's Wonder Boys and its successful film adaptation by Curtis Hanson, Chabon found both critical praise and a wider audience.
In the year 2000, Chabon rose to the challenge of attempting something on a more epic scale. That something was The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the story of two young, Jewish comic book artists in the 1940s. Like Chabon's other books, it explored a relationship between two men and dealt with their maturation. But unlike his other books, the novel was grander in scope and theme, blending the world of comic books, the impact of World War II, and the lives of his characters. It won a Pulitzer, and secured Chabon's place as an American talent unafraid to paint broad landscapes with minute detail and aching emotion.
Chabon's ability to capture modern angst in funny, intelligently plotted stories has earned him comparisons to everyone from Fitzgerald to DeLillo, but he has fearlessly wandered outside the conventions of the novel to write screenplays, children's books, comics, and pulp adventures. Clearly, Michael Chabon views his highly praised talent as a story that hasn't yet reached its climax.
Extras
Chabon usuallywrites from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m.
He has a side interest in television writing, having written a pilot for CBS (House of Gold) that did not get picked up, and a second one for TNT.Chabon also has an interest in screenwriting; he was attached to X-Men but dropped from the project when director Bryan Singer signed on. Now he is adapting The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay for the big screen.
After slaving for five years on a book called Fountain City (parts of which can be read on his web site), Chabon finally decided it was not going to jell and abandoned it. At a low point, he switched gears and began Wonder Boys, the story (of course) of an author hopelessly stuck writing his endless, shapeless novel.
A Feature Interview
(With Book Magazine, Sept./Oct. 2002)
Michael Chabon is watching as his youngest daughter, Ida-Rose, scrambles across the floor of his home in Berkeley, California. At the same time, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and Wonder Boys is on the phone, discussing the ways he simplified the language for his latest novel, a children's book called Summerland. "I try to opt for the more familiar word, instead of the more complicated, less familiar word," he is explaining, when he suddenly shifts gears from author to father. "Oh, my God," he exclaims. "My daughter just tried to crawl here!"
If it's clear that Chabon is as much a dedicated dad as he is a gifted writer, it's also apparent that he's trying to bridge the gap between those two parts of his life. Summerland, a departure for him in that it was written for a younger audience, is in fact a direct result of the time Chabon has spent as a father who loves reading children's books. One of the great things about having kids, he points out, is being able to read them the stories you once loved yourself. Summerland, an American baseball fantasy, is the kind of book that appeals to kids and parents alike, and Chabon, 38, is one of a burgeoning number of respected, big-name adult authors who have addressed younger audiences in recent novels. Last spring, Joyce Carol Oates published a story for teens that evokes the Columbine tragedy. And Isabel Allende, Carl Hiaasen, Neil Gaiman and Clive Barker will all have debuted young adult books by October. Each tends to carry over the qualities that work in his or her adult fiction: Allende's City of the Beasts is infused with magical realism; Hiaasen has written Hoot, a quirky tale about an eccentric kid in Florida; Gaiman has taken a stab at a horror story; and Barker has concocted a weird fantasy. Francine Prose expects to publish a melancholy science fiction tale for kids next spring, and Toni Morrison is working with her son on an updated fable.
"I promised my grandchildren that I would write a story with all the elements they love: adventure, humor, strong characters, nature, animals, friendship and courage," says Allende, whose previous novels, such as The House of the Spirits and Eva Luna, have evoked mystical themes. City of the Beasts, which is due out in October, is about two children who discover a legendary beast of the Amazon -- a fairy tale that should please the Allende grandkids.
Hiaasen says he just wanted to write a book his 11-year-old stepson could read -- one that wasn't full of the "language, casual dismemberment and gymnastic sex" that tend to mark his darkly hilarious adult depictions of the Sunshine State. However, the idea to write a page-turner for kids actually germinated when Hiaasen was still a young reader himself: "I never forgot the feeling of burning [through] the entire Hardy Boys series when I was in fourth grade -- not being able to stop turning the pages and thinking what a great gig this would be, to be able to write like this."
Writing these books sounds like it was, above all, a lot of fun for the authors. "I found it incredibly liberating because it was like pure narrative, just pure storytelling," says Prose, whose Blue Angel was a National Book Award finalist in 2000. "It's so much fun without the worries." Chabon agrees, saying he struggled through writing parts of Kavalier & Clay but had a blast during his Summer vacation. "It was intensely pleasurable to write this," he says. "I would just long for Summerland. I'd be pining for it."
For the most part, the books have resulted in great fun for readers as well -- Hoot and Summerland are particularly creative stories. And for Chabon, the most important critic is pleased. He says he had a lot of trepidation about presenting the book to Sophie, his seven-year-old daughter. "I was really dreading what would happen if she didn't like it," he says. "There was one sentence I read to her, and [a second later] Sophie said, 'Niiice.' That was the most gratifying piece of criticism I've ever gotten."
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Critics Say. . .
Mr. Chabon’s latest novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, builds upon the achievement of Kavalier & Clay, creating a completely fictional world that is as persuasively detailed as his re-creation of 1940s New York in that earlier book, even as it gives the reader a gripping murder mystery and one of the most appealing detective heroes to come along since Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
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."
Elizabeth McCracken - Washington Post
Chabon's storytelling, in this alternate history of a world where Jews were settled in Alaska after World War II, is vivid enough, with inventive metaphors packed in like tapestry threads, but Peter Riegert's versatile voice makes the invented society even more tangible. Told through the eyes of Meyer Landsman, a police detective investigating a murder, the novel occurs in a "strange time to be a Jew," as several characters ruefully put it: the special Jewish district will soon be controlled by Alaska again. In a bonus interview on the last disc, Chabon relates his desire to write about a place where Yiddish was an official language. The book is shot through with Yiddish phrases and names, which melodically roll off Riegert's tongue. He gives Landsman and his tough but warmhearted partner Berko similar yet distinct gruff voices that contrast well with the effeminate-sounding sect leader and the Southern-accented Americans who come to start the land reversion process. Riegert's pacing increases the enjoyment of this expertly spun mystery.
Publishers Weekly
What's washed-up cop Meyer Landsman to do when a heroin-addicted, chess-crazed denizen of the dump where he lives gets plugged in the head? He's going to find the killer, and to that end he calls in his partner (and cousin) Berko Shemets, a bear of a man who's also half-Tlingit because, you see, this is…Alaska? In this wildly inventive blackest of black comedies, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) imagines that after World War II Roosevelt decreed the yet-to-be-50th state the homeland of the Jews. Years have passed, and the Jews have settled in very nicely, thank you, re-creating the aura of the Mitteleuropa they've lost—though the black-hatted, ultra-orthodox Bobovers turn out to be real thugs. The meddling of our two boys leads them straight to powerful and dangerous Bobover leader Rebbe Gold and eventually to a plot aimed at the reclamation of Israel. It also leads them into plenty of hot water with the top brass, including their new boss—Meyer's ex-wife, Bina. Raucous, acidulous, decidedly impolite, yet stylistically arresting, this book is bloody brilliant—and if it's way over the top, that's what makes Chabon such a great writer. Highly recommended.
Barbara Hoffert - Library Journal
Imagine a mutant strain of Dashiell Hammett crossed with Isaac Bashevis Singer, as one of the most imaginative contemporary novelists extends his fascination with classic pulp. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, 2000, etc.) returns with an alternate-history novel that succeeds as both a hardboiled detective story and a softhearted romance. In the aftermath of World War II, a Jewish homeland has been established in Alaska rather than Israel. Amid the mean streets of Sitka, the major city, Detective Meyer Landsman lives in a seedy flophouse, where alcohol has dulled his investigative instincts. His marriage to his beloved Bina couldn't survive an aborted pregnancy, after tests showed the possibility of birth defects. He also hasn't gotten over the death of his younger sister, a pilot whose plane crashed. He finds his sense of mission renewed when there's a murder in the hotel where he lives. The deceased was a heroin-addicted chess player, his slaying seemingly without motive. There's an urgency to Landsman's investigation, because the Promised Land established by the Alaskan Settlement Act is only a 50-year rental, with Jews expected to go elsewhere when the "Reversion" takes place two months hence. Thus, Landsman must solve the case before he loses his job and his home, a challenge complicated by the reappearance of his ex-wife, appointed chief of police during this transition before the Reversion. In her attempts to leave a clean slate, will she help her former husband or thwart him? Adding to the intrigue are a cult of extremists led by a gangster rabbi, a possibility that the death of Landsman's sister wasn't an accident and a conspiracy ledby the U.S. government. "These are strange times to be a Jew," say various characters, like a Greek chorus, though the novel suggests that all times are strange times to be a Jew. A page-turning noir, with a twist of Yiddish, that satisfies on many levels
Kirkus Reviews
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Book Club Discussion Questions
1. Why does Meyer Landsman feel a special kinship with the murder victim in Rm. 208 of the Hotel Zamenhof, and how is that affinity responsible for his career's decline?
2. To what extent is Bina Gelbfish sympathetic to Meyer's professional situation? How does their current involvement as police department colleagues reflect the complicated nature of their history with one another?
3. Why does the prospect of Reversion compromise Meyer and Berko's ability to solve their outstanding cases, and what does that possibility mean to both of them?
4. How would you characterize the nature of the interaction of native peoples and Jewish immigrants in Sitka, Alaska, and its environs?
5. How surprising is the coincidence of the deaths of Naomi Landsman and Mendel Shpilman, given the small-world sense of "Jewish geography" in Sitka and the Alaskan panhandle?
6. Why does Willy Dick agree to help Meyer and Berko in their efforts to uncover the truth behind the Peril Strait, and what does his doing so reveal about his allegiances?
7. How does the author explore variations on the theme of fathers and sons in the relationships between Meyer and his father, Meyer and Django, Berko and Hertz, and Mendel and Rebbe Shpilman in this novel?
8. How does the author's use of copious historical facts throughout the novel impact your reading of The Yiddish Policemen's Union as a work of fiction? To what extent does the Jewish settlement in Sitka, Alaska, seem like an actual community?
9. Why do Meyer, Berko, and Bina agree to suppress their knowledge of a vast conspiracy, and what does that decision reveal about their own sense of the balance between justice and self-preservation?
10. Of the many eccentric and unforgettable characters in The Yiddish Policemen's Union, which were the most memorable to you, and why?
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