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Michael Chabon's new book is his first full-length novel for grown-ups since his Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, seven years ago. In the interim, he's published—among other things—a novel for kids (and their parents), Summerland (Alan Jacobs sings the praises of this book on Vol. 59 of the Mars Hill Audio Journal); and a superb novella, The Final Solution, featuring an aged Sherlock Holmes reluctantly drawn out of retirement.
The Yiddish Policemen's Union is the best new novel I've read so far this year, and I won't be surprised if it wins another Pulitzer or some comparable recognition. It is also a deeply frustrating book—at least I found it so, for reasons elaborated below. If you think you might read it, turn the page right now and come back to this column only after you've finished the book.
That disclaimer out of the way, on to business. In 1938, FDR's Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, proposed that Alaska might serve as a haven for European refugees, including Jews fleeing Hitler's Germany. The purpose was twofold: humanitarian, yes, but also to promote development in that region. The president was on board, but Ickes' proposal didn't fly.
Somehow or other that obscure historical datum caught Chabon's magpie eye. Did he know immediately that he had found an irresistible premise for a novel in the alternative history vein? Did he do a little dance of celebration? Did he foresee even then the giddy metaphysical wit of the cover-art? I don't know. But he did write a novel imagining that the fledging State of Israel died in 1948, only three months after its birth, when "the outnumbered Jews … were routed, massacred, and driven into the sea." Where did the survivors turn? Many looked to Alaska, where—thanks to Ickes and the Alaskan Settlement Act of 1940—some of their fellow Jews had already emigrated.
So many, in fact, that by 1948 there were already two million Jews in Sitka and its environs. (Only a small area in Alaska was open to them.) Congress wasn't disposed to write a blank check ("NO JEWLASKA, LAWMAKERS PROMISE"), and the Settlement was granted "interim status" for sixty years, at which point the Jews of Sitka would again become stateless, left to their own devices to find a new home. Chabon's novel is set late in 2007, with Reversion only a couple of months away.
Wait. There's more. Longtime Chabon readers know that he loves to play with genres, bending and crossbreeding their conventions. If The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a tour de force of "making strange," an alternative Jewish history, it is also a sustained homage to the hard-boiled detective novel.
That's a genre which has been curated, lampooned, retrofitted, and otherwise tinkered with by so many writers and filmmakers for so long, it may seem to be squeezed dry. But Chabon proves equal to the challenge. His protagonist is Meyer Landsman, a fortysomething homicide detective, "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 been made to stick."
In Sitka, as you may have guessed, Yiddish—not Modern Hebrew—is the lingua franca. (Shammes, a Yiddish word meaning "sexton," is cited by lexicographers as a possible source of "shamus," though the etymology is hazy. The novel includes a lot of such wordplay, some of which—I'm sure—sailed right past me.) Chabon tweaks the syntax of dialogue now and then, inserts bits of Yiddish, and generally keeps the linguistic pot boiling.
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