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Summary
Summary
Michael Chabon is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author with numerous New York Times best-sellers to his credit. Here he draws upon his considerable literary talents to craft a murder mystery based on the premise that a Jewish settlement was created in Alaska following World War II. In the small town of Sitka, Alyeska, Detective Meyer Landsman finds the body of a prominent town figure who has ties to organized crime. As Landsman digs deeper, he discovers that this is only the tip of the iceberg-and all signs point to a greater danger lurking in the shadows.
Author Notes
Michael Chabon was born in Washington, D.C. on May 24, 1963. He received a B.A. in English literature from the University of Pittsburgh in 1985 and a Master of Fine Arts degree in English writing at the University of California at Irvine in 1987.
Chabon found success at the age of 24, when William Morrow publishing house offered him $155,000, a near-record sum, for the rights to his first novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which was his thesis in graduate school. After The Mysteries of Pittsburgh became a national bestseller, he began writing a series of short stories about a little boy dealing with his parents' divorce. The stories, which in part appeared in The New Yorker and G.Q., were bound together in 1991 into a volume titled A Model World and Other Stories. His other works include Wonder Boys, The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man, Telegraph Avenue, and Pop: Fatherhood in Pieces. In 2001 he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. He and Ayelet Waldman are co-editors of, Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation..
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Guardian Review
They are known as the "frozen chosen" - the Jews whose parents settled in the temporary safe haven offered to them in the Federal District of Sitka, Alaska, after the collapse of the newly constituted Israeli state in 1948. It makes sense, really. If you don't know what to do with a wandering people, put them on ice. This is Michael Chabon's counterfactual notion in his almost ecstatically smart and sassy new novel. Philip Roth gave the Jews an alternative history in The Plot Against America by forging a German-American alliance under the boy's-own hero President Lindbergh. Chabon's twisted vision is no less grim, and somehow more credible: a Jewish settlement that might be the Lower East Side or Tel Aviv, but with glaciers and bears. The novel opens just before the Sitka agreement has come to an end, as the area prepares to return to Alaskan control. The Jews have no idea who will be able to stay and who will have to find another place to go. Some are heading for Madagascar. Mostly, though, they are waiting to see what will happen. Familiar and strange. This, you might think, is substantial enough material to sustain a novel, but Chabon is a ventriloquist of a writer, a genre-player, and he has wedded his upturned reality to a hard-boiled detective novel with the ghost of Philip Marlowe hovering over every page. Raymond Chandler's Marlowe, that great hero of American sentiment, may not have seemed very Jewish, but in Chabon's hands, his avatar, Meyer Landsman, has all the recognisable downbeat, hopeless qualities of the tarnished Californian knight: self- loathing, loneliness, dark wit, a drink problem, a secret honour code, and a covert longing for what is right. So, why not Walter Matthau as Philip Marlowe? The crime is murder but it is not a simple murder, just as no murder is simple murder in noir fiction. The clues add up to that ever-satisfying spiralling solution: the world-altering, government- sponsored conspiracy. At the centre of this tangled world lies Zimbalist - also known as the boundary maven - a spider at the centre of the Jewish web, who maintains the eruv , a network of poles and strings which stand for an enclosing wall of a vast notional interior so that religious Jews can sidestep the Sabbath rules. The dead body is that of the Tzaddik Ha-Dor, a man with the potential to be the messiah, who is born into every generation just in case the time is right. The time not being right, this son of ultra-orthodox Hasidic gangsters became instead a charismatic junkie who used his tefillin for a tourniquet and played masterly chess for the price of a fix. Meyer Landsman is the cop who lived down the hall and whose miserable existence can only be redeemed by attempting to solve the murder. His reasoning is the distilled essence of Marlowe, Lew Archer and Sam Spade: "Somebody came into this hotel, my hotel, and shot that man in the back of the head while he was off in dreamland. And that bothers me . . . All these hard-lucks paying rent on a pull-down bed and a sheet of steel bolted to the bathroom wall, for better or worse, they're my people now. I can't honestly say I like them very much . . . But I'll be damned if I'm going to let somebody walk in here and put a bullet in their heads." Before exposing the soft, utopian heart of the detective who understands (and makes us understand) that the worst that can happen to him as an individual is much less important than maintaining integrity, the worldwide conspiracy has to be revealed. And it's a lulu that brings the real world back with a bang, combining the messianic requirements of the Jews for the rebuilding of the Temple with the American religious right's passion for the end days of Revelation, tossed together, perhaps, with a drizzle of oil. We're talking about Jerusalem. And about a conspiracy of powerful forces of vested interests that has much to do with current events in the Middle East. Chabon is a spectacular writer. He does a witty turn reinventing Yiddish for the modern Alaskan Jews - of course the lingua franca of Jews without an Israel - just a little of which I, with only faintly remembered childhood Yiddish, could grasp. A mobile phone is a shoyfer (perhaps because, like the ram's horn, it calls you), a gun is a sholem (a Yiddish version of a Peacemaker?). Chabon is a language magician, turning everything into something else just for the delight of playing tricks with words. He takes the wry, underbelly vision of the ordinary that the best of noir fiction offers and ratchets it up to the limit. Nothing is allowed to be itself; all people and events are observed as an echo of something else. Voices are like "an onion rolling in a bucket", or rusty forks falling. An approaching motorcycle is "a heavy wrench clanging against a cold cement floor. The flatulence of a burst balloon streaking across the living room and knocking over a lamp." Chabon's ornate prose makes Chandler's fruity observations of the world look quite plain. Nothing is described as just the way it is. Nothing is let be. He writes like a dream and has you laughing out loud, applauding the fun he has with language and the way he takes the task of a writer and runs delighted rings around it. For the most part, Chabon's writing serves the knotted mystery that is being unravelled, but there is eventually a point where it begins to weary the mind, where the elaborations of things get in the way of the things themselves and the narrative gets sucked under by style. The compulsory paragraph of Byzantine physical description whenever another character arrives on the scene starts to seem an irritating interlude; another over-reaching cadenza. Though it seems churlish to complain about such a vivid talent, a little less would have been enough already. Jenny Diski's latest book, On Trying to Keep Still , is out in paperback published by Virago. To order The Yiddish Policemen's Union for pounds 16.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-diskichab.1 [Michael Chabon] is a spectacular writer. He does a witty turn reinventing Yiddish for the modern Alaskan Jews - of course the lingua franca of Jews without an Israel - just a little of which I, with only faintly remembered childhood Yiddish, could grasp. A mobile phone is a shoyfer (perhaps because, like the ram's horn, it calls you), a gun is a sholem (a Yiddish version of a Peacemaker?). Chabon is a language magician, turning everything into something else just for the delight of playing tricks with words. He takes the wry, underbelly vision of the ordinary that the best of noir fiction offers and ratchets it up to the limit. Nothing is allowed to be itself; all people and events are observed as an echo of something else. Voices are like "an onion rolling in a bucket", or rusty forks falling. An approaching motorcycle is "a heavy wrench clanging against a cold cement floor. The flatulence of a burst balloon streaking across the living room and knocking over a lamp." Chabon's ornate prose makes [Raymond Chandler]'s fruity observations of the world look quite plain. Nothing is described as just the way it is. Nothing is let be. He writes like a dream and has you laughing out loud, applauding the fun he has with language and the way he takes the task of a writer and runs delighted rings around it. - Jenny Diski.
New York Review of Books Review
"DON'T get wistful on me," says a sly old man in Michael Chabon's sly new novel, his first big serious one since the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning "Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," seven long years ago. "God knows I've had my fill of wistful Jews, starting with myself." Chabon, starting with himself as writers should, seems determined in "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" to stave off wistfulness by any means, even if it requires him to turn the story of the endless, endemic disappointment of the Jews - their millenniums-old-and-counting wait for the Messiah - into a screwball, alternative-reality, hard-boiled mystery, set, for maximum incongruity, in Alaska. The impressively wacky premise is that after the Holocaust, large numbers of Jews were relocated to Sitka, where by statute they were allowed to make their home for the next 60 years, at the end of which the town would revert to the control of Alaska. Israel, it appears, didn't work out: the Jewish settlers there were ejected "with savage finality" in 1948. "The Holy Land," the novel tells us, "has never seemed more remote or unattainable than it does to a Jew of Sitka." The godforsakenness of the place is something more than a figure of speech. Stuck in just another temporary, cruelly provisional homeland, farther than ever from the one originally promised - yes, you could get a little wistful in a situation like that. But it soon becomes clear that Sitka's very remoteness, its impossible distance from the dreamed-of site of redemption and fulfillment, suits both Chabon and Meyer Landsman, his alcoholic homicide-cop hero, right down to the frozen ground. This bustling Yiddish-speaking enclave in the far north is so improbable, so irredeemably absurd, that it functions as a kind of comfort zone for an irreligious Jew like Landsman, a daily confirmation of his unbelief: the chances of the Messiah turning up in Sitka look gratifyingly slim. The District, as its residents call it, is a good place for Chabon because it's a fictional nowhere he can populate as he pleases. And populate it he does, with delirious fecundity, filling the icy streets with an enormous cast of cops, thugs, schemers, rabbis, chess fanatics and obsessives of every description, all crowded together, as if they were elbowing for space in a densely drawn comic-book panel. It's obvious that the creation of this strange, vibrant, unreal world is Chabon's idea of heaven. He seems happy here, almost giddy, high on the imaginative freedom that has always been the most cherished value in his fiction. He gives Landsman a half-Jewish, half-Tlingit partner, an observant hulk who goes by the name of Berko Shemets but is known to the tribesmen of his Indian mother as Johnny "the Jew" Bear. He blithely invents a Hasidic sect, the Verbovers, that operates as a sinister and rigorously disciplined criminal gang. He dreams up elaborate conspiracies, both mundane and cosmic. And he sprays metaphors like a drunk with an Uzi. "No matter how powerful," Landsman muses sadly at one point, "every yid in the District is tethered by the leash of 1948." And, as if that weren't quite sufficient, he riffs on: "His kingdom is bound in its nutshell. His sky is a painted dome, his horizon an electrified fence. He has the flight and knows the freedom only of a balloon on a string." I think it's fair to say that the writing in "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" - of which that passage is fairly typical - is unencumbered by leashes or strings, unconfined by domes or fences. This nut is out of its shell. It's fortunate that the novel's prose is so untrammeled, because murder-mystery plotting can be a confinement too, a dark locked room whose doors open only when the solution, Messiah-like, arrives at the end. The murder victim in this story is a junkie chess player who happens to have met his maker in the same miserable hotel where Landsman, divorced and depressed, has been hanging his battered hat. The dead man is registered as Emanuel Lasker, transparently an alias: the name, the detective knows, is that of a famous grand master of the early 20th century. There's a chessboard in the room, showing a tricky endgame in progress. This is, of course, a metaphor for many things, including the imminent demise of the District itself, due for the mandated reversion in a couple of months and also including, as it turns out, what some Christians call the end times. The board is set up in a dire position called a Zugzwang, in which the losing player is "forced to move," Landsman explains, even "when you know that it's only going to lead to you getting checkmated." Which makes it, inescapably, a metaphor for the Diaspora. Chabon takes pains to supply an elegant, satisfying solution for his murder puzzle; he has too much respect for the genre not to. He has in recent years become a zealous proselytizer for a more genre-inflected and plot-friendly sort of literary fiction, a rabbi of the sect of Story. I think, though, that for him plot is, like chess, no more and no less than a beautiful game, something to be played as scrupulously and passionately as you can, but warily - with an eye to the danger that the game could start playing you. When that happens, and you find yourself in that forced-to-move trap, the sensible thing is to knock the board over. There's a tremendous amount of plotting in "The Yiddish Policemen's Union," both on the writer's part and (naturally) on the part of his characters, and the most forlorn people are those who haven't realized they've become entangled in the plots they've spun, or who realize too late that they're stuck in somebody else's plot. "The story ... is telling us," one devious character says, late in the book. "Just like it has done from the beginning." Not letting the story tell you - even if it's one you've been hearing from the beginning, as Jews have heard the story of the Promised Land and the restoration of the Temple in Jerusalem - is the cautionary ideal of this funny, humane, wised-up novel. Chabon has the chutzpah to actually conjure, like a stage illusionist pulling a rabbit from his hat, a Tzaddik Ha-Dor: the one man in each generation with the potential to be the Messiah. And he has the wit to portray this character as the saddest Sitka Jew of all, locked into a story so old the key has been thrown away. Or, as Chabon puts it (borrowing a still serviceable metaphor from "Kavalier and Clay"): "Once he had been fitted for the suit of the Tzaddik Ha-Dor and then decided that it was a straitjacket." That's the trouble with stories, Chabon wants us to understand: they have to be believed, but not too much, not so devoutly that the real world starts to look illusory, drab, disappointing. In that direction, inevitably, lies wistfulness. The fanciful Sitka of "The Yiddish Policemen's Union" plays the delicate, infinitely complex game of fiction fairly: this place is so vividly imagined you practically need a parka and a prayer shawl to get from one page to the next, but it's also blatantly impossible, and that's its saving grace. It's a welcoming homeland for imaginary people - which is all fiction is, anyway. But this novel slowly, movingly allows at least a couple of its imaginary denizens, Landsman and his tough ex-wife (the chief of Sitka's homicide division), to become real to themselves, to find a story they can live in without feeling imprisoned or cosmically cheated. No nagging sense of promises unfulfilled, no stubborn yearning to be elsewhere, just a here-and-now faith in each other. A simple message about the power of everyday love might seem a dismayingly small payoff for this whirling, intricate story, but the book is also about how the grandest fictions raise expectations unreasonably high, paralyze us with anticipation, doom us to the perpetual check of chronic dissatisfaction, unshakable as an Alaska chill. Nice novel. You were expecting maybe the Messiah? 'I've had my fill of wistful Jews,' says Chabons homicide-cop hero. 'Starting with myself.' Terrence Rafferty is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Yiddish Policemen's Union LP Chapter One 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. "He didn't answer the phone, he wouldn't open his door," says Tenenboym the night manager when he comes to roust Landsman. Landsman lives in 505, with a view of the neon sign on the hotel across Max Nordau Street. That one is called the Blackpool, a word that figures in Landsman's nightmares. "I had to let myself into his room." The night manager is a former U.S. Marine who kicked a heroin habit of his own back in the sixties, after coming home from the shambles of the Cuban war. He takes a motherly interest in the user population of the Zamenhof. He extends credit to them and sees that they are left alone when that is what they need. "Did you touch anything in the room?" Landsman says. Tenenboym says, "Only the cash and jewelry." Landsman puts on his trousers and shoes and hitches up his suspenders. Then he and Tenenboym turn to look at the doorknob, where a necktie hangs, red with a fat maroon stripe, already knotted to save time. Landsman has eight hours to go until his next shift. Eight rat hours, sucking at his bottle, in his glass tank lined with wood shavings. Landsman sighs and goes for the tie. He slides it over his head and pushes up the knot to his collar. He puts on his jacket, feels for the wallet and shield in the breast pocket, pats the sholem he wears in a holster under his arm, a chopped Smith & Wesson Model 39. "I hate to wake you, Detective," Tenenboym says. "Only I noticed that you don't really sleep." "I sleep," Landsman says. He picks up the shot glass that he is currently dating, a souvenir of the World's Fair of 1977. "It's just I do it in my underpants and shirt." He lifts the glass and toasts the thirty years gone since the Sitka World's Fair. A pinnacle of Jewish civilization in the north, people say, and who is he to argue? Meyer Landsman was fourteen that summer, and just discovering the glories of Jewish women, for whom 1977 must have been some kind of a pinnacle. "Sitting up in a chair." He drains the glass. "Wearing a sholem." According to doctors, therapists, and his ex-wife, Landsman drinks to medicate himself, tuning the tubes and crystals of his moods with a crude hammer of hundred-proof plum brandy. But the truth is that Landsman has only two moods: working and dead. Meyer Landsman is the most decorated shammes in the District of Sitka, the man who solved the murder of the beautiful Froma Lefkowitz by her furrier husband, and caught Podolsky the Hospital Killer. His testimony sent Hyman Tsharny to federal prison for life, the first and last time that criminal charges against a Verbover wiseguy have ever been made to stick. He has the memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a housebreaker. When there is crime to fight, Landsman tears around Sitka like a man with his pant leg caught on a rocket. It's like there's a film score playing behind him, heavy on the castanets. The problem comes in the hours when he isn't working, when his thoughts start blowing out the open window of his brain like pages from a blotter. Sometimes it takes a heavy paperweight to pin them down. "I hate to make more work for you," Tenenboym says. During his days working Narcotics, Landsman arrested Tenenboym five times. That is all the basis for what passes for friendship between them. It is almost enough. "It's not work, Tenenboym," Landsman says. "I do it for love." "It's the same for me," the night manager says. "With being a night manager of a crap-ass hotel." Landsman puts his hand on Tenenboym's shoulder, and they go down to take stock of the deceased, squeezing into the Zamenhof's lone elevator, or elevatoro, as a small brass plate over the door would have it. When the hotel was built fifty years ago, all of its directional signs, labels, notices, and warnings were printed on brass plates in Esperanto. Most of them are long gone, victims of neglect, vandalism, or the fire code. The door and door frame of 208 do not exhibit signs of forced entry. Landsman covers the knob with his handkerchief and nudges the door open with the toe of his loafer. "I got this funny feeling," Tenenboym says as he follows Landsman into the room. "First time I ever saw the guy. You know the expression 'a broken man'?" Landsman allows that the phrase rings a bell. "Most of the people it gets applied to don't really deserve it," Tenenboym says. "Most men, in my opinion, they have nothing there to break in the first place. But this Lasker. He was like one of those sticks you snap, it lights up. You know? For a few hours. And you can hear broken glass rattling inside of it. I don't know, forget it. It was just a funny feeling." "Everybody has a funny feeling these days," Landsman says, making a few notes in his little black pad about the situation of the room, even though such notes are superfluous, because he rarely forgets a detail of physical description. Landsman has been told, by the same loose confederacy of physicians, psychologists, and his former spouse, that alcohol will kill his gift for recollection, but so far, to his regret, this claim has proved false. His vision of the past remains unimpaired. "We had to open a separate phone line just to handle the calls." "These are strange times to be a Jew," Tenenboym agrees. "No doubt about it." The Yiddish Policemen's Union LP . Copyright © by Michael Chabon. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
