The Yiddish Policemen's Union

by Michael Chabon

published

May 1st 2007 by HarperCollins

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binding

Hardcover, 414 pages

literary awards

Nebula Award 2007, Hugo Award for Best Novel (2008)

isbn

0007149824 (isbn13: 9780007149827)

description

For sixty years, Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in ...more

[close] 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. [close]

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Kersplebedeb rated it:

06/20/08

Read in June, 2008

recommends it for: people interested in Jewish culture and speculative fiction.

Imagine a crazy world in which, following the Holocaust, Jewish survivors languished in DP camps in Europe, were often still barred or discouraged from immigrating to the various "democracies", and found themselves pushed into emigrating to the Middle East where, through a variety of historical coincidences, they founded a new society based on dispossessing the indigenous Arabs and acting as imperialism's pit bulls in the region.

That's the crazy world we do live in.
...more

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James rated it:

09/08/08

Read in September, 2008

Somewhere between Jonathan Safran Foer and Philip Roth is Michael Chabon. With Chaim Potok a great uncle to them all.

And that man in the middle, Michael Chabon, has written one hell of a fine story with The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. It most certainly deserves the shiny metal penis that it has won.

It won that shiny metal penis, an award for achievement in science fiction, because, as the jacket copy informs us, “For sixty years, Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in...more

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Emma rated it:

10/28/07

Read in October, 2007

recommends it for: fans of speculative fiction and/or Michael Chabon

Jews, Alaska, chess, and murder: usually these subjects don’t have much in common. That's until you read Michael Chabon’s new novel “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” where these elements come together to create the core of this quirky noir story.

Chabon’s novel is based on an interesting conceit: What if Jews had not been able to settle in Israel after World War II and, instead, were granted temporary residency on the Alaskan panhandle?

The original plan was set into motion arou...more Jews, Alaska, chess, and murder: usually these subjects don’t have much in common. That's until you read Michael Chabon’s new novel “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” where these elements come together to create the core of this quirky noir story.

Chabon’s novel is based on an interesting conceit: What if Jews had not been able to settle in Israel after World War II and, instead, were granted temporary residency on the Alaskan panhandle?

The original plan was set into motion around 1939 by Harold Ickes (Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior), in response to a plea from a Jewish community in the town of Neustadt. The settlement was proposed in the Alaska Territory as a way to work around the United States’ existing immigration quotas, but fell through due to a lack of political support and backlash from Alaskans who feared the prospect of foreign settlers for reasons ranging from racism to increased competition for jobs.

In the novel, Ickes was successful in bringing his plan to fruition and Jewish refugees were given the Federal District of Sitka as a temporary settlement. That was sixty years before the start of Chabon’s novel when Sitka is getting ready to revert to the United States leaving the fate of the Alaskan Jews largely unknown.

Amazingly, all of these events are just a backdrop for Chabon’s actual story: an edgy murder mystery.

When Meyer Landsman moved into a local flophouse nine months ago he wasn’t looking to do much more than spend some quality time with his bottle of slivovitz and “the shot glass that he is currently dating” until Sitka finally reverts. Landsman’s plans change abruptly when the body of a local chess prodigy turns up in the hotel.

For reasons that elude even him, Landsman feels obligated to investigate the murder despite pressure from his new boss/ex-wife and other higher ups to drop the case. As the investigation continues, Landsman and Berko Shemets, his half-Tlingit partner, find themselves sucked into the underworld of the black hat community of the Verbover Jews and their nefarious undertakings.

Chabon also throws in several conspiracies, a cover-up scheme, a pseudo-terrorist plot, and lots of Yiddish phrases just to keep things interesting. This last touch is because the novel has the unique characteristic of being a novel written in English about characters who do not speak English: they all speak Yiddish instead.

So “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union” does require a bit of energy to read. At first, nothing is going to make sense. But Chabon eventually pulls it all together. The Yiddish phrases slowly start to become comprehensible, as do the various subplots Chabon incorporates into this very unique story.

Chabon’s prose has a strange charm, which might be expected from an author who won the Pulitzer Prize for “The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” a novel whose plot largely centers around a comic book hero. The narration is hard-edged, often gritty, but always with a smile threatening to form. (Jews from south of Sitka are referred to as “Mexicans.”)
From the first line, this story will grab a reader’s attention. Written in the present tense, it has an immediacy fitting for a book that tries to recreate the style of Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled detective stories in a Jewish community.

Chabon starts off strong with a vision that he vividly crafts on the page. This vision begins to falter in the second half of the novel as Chabon becomes wrapped up in the complicated conventions common to noir stories. The explanations for several conspiracies come off as convoluted, if not entirely out of nowhere. The novel’s ending, too, is not as strong as its opening.

Shortcomings aside, Chabon has done a great service to the genre of speculative (or “what if?”) fiction by showing that it is possible to write a serious S. F. novel....less

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Nick rated it:

09/12/07

bookshelves: desert-island-books

(Not really a review. Nor something I wrote. But funny!)

"Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it."— Ruth Franklin (Slate, 8 May 2007)

Something woke her in the night. Was it steps she heard, coming up the stairs — somebody in wet training shoes, climbing the stairs very slowly... but who? And why wet shoes? It hadn't rained. There, again, the hea...more (Not really a review. Nor something I wrote. But funny!)

"Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it."— Ruth Franklin (Slate, 8 May 2007)

Something woke her in the night. Was it steps she heard, coming up the stairs — somebody in wet training shoes, climbing the stairs very slowly... but who? And why wet shoes? It hadn't rained. There, again, the heavy, soggy sound. But it hadn't rained for weeks, it was only sultry, the air close, with a cloying hint of mildew or rot, sweet rot, like very old finiocchiona, or perhaps liverwurst gone green. There, again — the slow, squelching, sucking steps, and the foul smell was stronger. Something was climbing her stairs, coming closer to her door. As she heard the click of heel bones that had broken through rotting flesh, she knew what it was. But it was dead, dead! God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch, the horror of its blank, pustular face, the lifeless, meaningless glare of its decaying eyes! What did the fool think he was doing? Had he paid no attention at all to the endless rituals of the serious writers and their serious critics — the formal expulsion ceremonies, the repeated anathemata, the stakes driven over and over through the heart, the vitriolic sneers, the endless, solemn dances on the grave? Did he not want to preserve the virginity of Yaddo? Had he not even understand the importance of the distinction between sci fi and counterfactual fiction? Could he not see that Cormac McCarthy — although everything in his book (except the wonderfully blatant use of an egregiously obscure vocabulary) was remarkably similar to a great many earlier works of science fiction about men crossing the country after a holocaust — could never under any circumstances be said to be a sci fi writer, because Cormac McCarthy was a serious writer and so by definition incapable of lowering himself to commit genre? Could it be that that Chabon, just because some mad fools gave him a Pulitzer, had forgotten the sacred value of the word mainstream? No, she would not look at the thing that had squelched its way into her bedroom and stood over her, reeking of rocket fuel and kryptonite, creaking like an old mansion on the moors in a wuthering wind, its brain rotting like a pear from within, dripping little grey cells through its ears. But its call on her attention was, somehow, imperative, and as it stretched out its hand to her she saw on one of the half-putrefied fingers a fiery golden ring. She moaned. How could they have buried it in such a shallow grave and then just walked away, abandoning it? "Dig it deeper, dig it deeper!" she had screamed, but they hadn't listened to her, and now where were they, all the other serious writers and critics, when she needed them? Where was her copy of Ulysses? All she had on her bedside table was a Philip Roth novel she had been using to prop up the reading lamp. She pulled the slender volume free and raised it up between her and the ghastly golem — but it was not enough. Not even Roth could save her. The monster laid its squamous hand on her, and the ring branded her like a burning coal. Genre breathed its corpse-breath in her face, and she was lost. She was defiled. She might as well be dead. She would never, ever get invited to write for Granta now.

— Ursula K. LeGuin...less

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Michael rated it:

07/05/08

Read in June, 2008

Ready. Set. Readers: Lower Your Expectations

While my memory may be faulty, I don’t recall Chabon’s previous novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, quite as steeped in the Jewish mythos as his latest novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. And I think it may be time for Chabon to break for secular cover.

I’d like to see what Chabon can pen, with a Pulitzer and mediocre (by comparison) follow-up under his belt, that moves beyond his take on the 20th-century Jewry. I th...more

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Alan rated it:

06/05/08

Read in June, 2008

On one level, this book is a standard detective story, with nods to noir film and at least one name-check for Raymond Chandler. The protagonist is a hard-drinking policeman who cracks wise and has trouble with dames (well, at least one dame), and takes an enormous amount of physical abuse in the course of performing his duties... duties which he often defines more broadly than his supervisors really expect. Sound familiar?

On another level, it's a science fiction novel, taking for its set...more

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Sandi rated it:

(review of isbn 0007149832)

09/03/08

bookshelves: 2008, 2008-hugo-nominees, cross-genre

Read in September, 2008

I picked up a copy of “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” by Michael Chabon purely out of curiosity. This novel was nominated for, and won, the prestigious Hugo Award. The Hugo Award is for outstanding science fiction and I have never seen “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” on the science fiction/fantasy bookshelves in any bookstore. It’s only been in the mainstream fiction section. Now that I’ve read it, I still don’t understand how it won the Hugo. True, it is an alternate hist...more I picked up a copy of “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” by Michael Chabon purely out of curiosity. This novel was nominated for, and won, the prestigious Hugo Award. The Hugo Award is for outstanding science fiction and I have never seen “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” on the science fiction/fantasy bookshelves in any bookstore. It’s only been in the mainstream fiction section. Now that I’ve read it, I still don’t understand how it won the Hugo. True, it is an alternate history; but it’s a socio-political alternate history rather than a technological one. Any differences in science and technology due to the events that veer off from real history aren’t covered in the course of this novel. In addition to it not being science fiction, I’m surprised it won the Hugo because it’s really not that good. I know that saying this book is not good, or is merely okay is heresy, but I’m saying it.

My problems with this book stem mainly from the semantics and the fragmented storytelling. I liked that Chabon implemented Yiddish into the telling of the story. I liked that he used sentence structure that mimicked Hebrew/Yiddish sentence structure. I thought the use of present tense was unusual and interesting. I know that in Hebrew, present tense is often used in storytelling to make it more immediate. What I disliked about the semantics of this novel was they way it went back and forth between present tense and past tense. I figured out that the present tense was used when the story was focusing on Landsman and what he was doing. The past tense was used for telling about things that were happening. That sounds pretty straightforward, but it isn’t. There were a few times when Chabon would be telling about something that happened to Landsman in past tense then pick up on the present and switch to present tense. The tense would change from one paragraph to the next.

Now, just the fact that I was analyzing verb tenses should tell you how tedious I found the story. It had so much potential. The murder mystery was a good one. Landsman had a lot of potential as a protagonist. The alternate history of millions of Jews being relocated to Alaska in 1948 because of the failure of the Jewish state in Israel was intriguing. The impending reversion of the Jewish territory to the United States and the uncertainty of what would happen to the Jews in Sitka added dramatic tension. However, none of the individual element gelled into a compelling narrative. It seemed like a lot of great ideas strung together with no real connection. The language had the potential to enhance the story, but ended up detracting from it. The characters seemed to be two-dimensional symbols rather than three-dimensional people. The author would go of on expository tangents that had nothing to do with the story. Towards the end, solutions to different aspects of the mystery came out of the blue. A heretofore-unseen character would show up and hand Landsman and the reader a huge piece of the puzzle, no deduction necessary.

For me, “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” was a book that had a heck of a lot of potential and a lot of great ideas. It just failed to put it all together in a way that was compelling and/or comprehensible.
...less

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Alex rated it:

03/06/08

bookshelves: books-read-in-2007

Read in April, 2007

THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION BY MICHAEL CHABON: Michael Chabon is a writer that many other writers are envious of: he’s young, he’s brilliant, and his books will undoubtedly survive long after his is gone. Pulitzer Prize for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay aside, Chabon’s writing seems almost effortless, but is pure craft and magic. Unlike John Irving, who plots out the complete story beforehand, and then meticulously crafts each sentence and paragraph to be perfect (whic...more THE YIDDISH POLICEMEN’S UNION BY MICHAEL CHABON: Michael Chabon is a writer that many other writers are envious of: he’s young, he’s brilliant, and his books will undoubtedly survive long after his is gone. Pulitzer Prize for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay aside, Chabon’s writing seems almost effortless, but is pure craft and magic. Unlike John Irving, who plots out the complete story beforehand, and then meticulously crafts each sentence and paragraph to be perfect (which is why he can take up to five years to finish a book), Chabon has both the story and ability from the start in creating his piece of art.

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, like his other books, takes you to a place you never could’ve imagined. In this alternate reality, during the time of the Second World War, two million Jews are transported from Germany to Alaska, where they invented their own small civilization meshed in the bitterness of their treatment in Germany and their treatment in Alaska, a cold and distant place from the contiguous United States. The main city is known as Sitka, but there is little independence, and any whisperings of nationalization are immediately quashed. Yiddish is the primary language, with very little American spoken. Little happens in this people’s history from World War II to the present, other than a pathetic World’s Fair that now only retains the constant reminder of the reaching stone structure known as the Safety Pin. Sitka is not a happy place for anyone, as they dream of Zion and their return to their true home.

Landsman is our main character, a policeman who’s been in the service for many years but has little to show for it, apart from a trashed hotel room, a failed marriage, a dead sister, and his own depression over the state of his life. And it is then that he finds out about the dead body in the room nearby. A man has been murdered and the case begins. With his partner, Landsman travels around the area, picking up clues, and trying to piece the every-growingly complex case together. At the same time, his ex-wife returns to the precinct now as his boss, with the news that big changes are happening and all outstanding cases must be dealt with post haste. But as Landsmen digs deeper, he finds a larger plot taking place, involving more bodies, and more importantly the death of his sister. The pressure increases from important people in high places, as Landsman with the help of his partner and ex-wife, who he is growing close to again, gets closer and closer to the truth.

While my hope is that Chabon will return to this incredibly developed world in future stories, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is nevertheless a thrilling mystery; a Sherlock Holmes case with a Jewish twist, that keeps the reader hanging on until the end when the case is solved, and everyone seems happy. However, the state of Sitka and these many homeless Jews remains in jeopardy, to be resolved perhaps at a later date.

For more reviews, and writings, or to buy yourself a copy, please visit www.alexctelander.com....less

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Anne rated it:

06/03/07

Read in June, 2007

recommends it for: those who "weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifies, the infinite gangster weight of God"

"I don't care what is written," Meyer Landsman says. "I don't care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. I don't care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat. It's in my ex-wife's tote bag."

The Yiddish Policeman's Union is one of those rare, rare novels of ideas t...more "I don't care what is written," Meyer Landsman says. "I don't care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. I don't care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat. It's in my ex-wife's tote bag."

The Yiddish Policeman's Union is one of those rare, rare novels of ideas that is also character-driven, and the people of this book are warm-blooded and quirky; they do not stand for ideologies, and this is no morality play. Chabon manages to write a top-notch piece of mystery-detective-novel-noir that simulatenously parodies and celebrates the genre. The plot is a page-turning thrill, and his prose throughout is gorgeous -- suitably hard-boiled to give his nozzes clout, ripe with metaphors (pastiche or fresh), always delicious enough to taste Literary. This is speculative fiction that makes you feel, not just think: Will Meyer and Bina reunite? Will Meyer ever be OK? What did it feel like to be blessed by Mendel Shpliman, to play chess with him?

And of course Chabon's book makes you think. It's full of Big Questions... What would have happened if countries had -- however reluctantly -- opened their doors to European Jews during WWII, sparing 4 of the 6 million killed? If Zionists had botched things in Israel and instead found themselves in Alaska, disputing land with Native Americans, dreaming up terrorist plots to win back the holy land? Characters and readers alike must wonder, can a people who have been driven from place to place, who have been massacred and betrayed, who are desperate...can they make good moral choices? Can they choose to live by the book, "the book," or any book at all?

The Yiddish Policeman's Union is about horrible things done to and by Jews, to and by people all over the world. It's about entitlement and destitution. In ways both obvious and subtle, it examines the Problem of Israel, the real one we face, and America's role in it -- the dangers of fundamentalism, of a "Jewish" state, of the lack of one, of the pain of believing in nothing and the stain of believing in anything. It cracks open the possibility that we do not and cannot understand everything around us. While the story is painful and the outlook for the characters often grim, Chabon helps us believe in miracles, blessings...even the crumbs of salvation. They taste, I think he'd tell us, like a shtekeleh.*

*an Alaskan-Jewish Filipino-style Chinese doughnut...less

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Cody rated it:

(review of isbn 0007149832)

07/29/08

bookshelves: general-fiction

Read in July, 2008

Half of the pleasure of any Chabon novel is found in his verbal dexterity. Like an enthusiastic magician, he occasionally produces a trick at the wrong time—poking his cigarette through a quarter during a sombre conversation—but he is the sort of writer who usually knows when to pick his moments. In addition to this certainty, which is practically a given, The Yiddish Policemen's Union also offers the dual joys of the splendor of authorial craftsmanship alongside the seemingly competi...more Half of the pleasure of any Chabon novel is found in his verbal dexterity. Like an enthusiastic magician, he occasionally produces a trick at the wrong time—poking his cigarette through a quarter during a sombre conversation—but he is the sort of writer who usually knows when to pick his moments. In addition to this certainty, which is practically a given, The Yiddish Policemen's Union also offers the dual joys of the splendor of authorial craftsmanship alongside the seemingly competing glee of raucous pulp.

Chabon has meticulously set up an alternate history, building a Jewish state that nearly was but wasn't—the Federal District of Sitka, Alaska—from the ground up, piecing together bric-a-brac from Jewish history and culture until he has made a little corner of the world unique unto itself. Then he blows in the fog, lights the halogen lamps, and waits for somebody to get murdered so his conflicted and afflicted shammes, Meyer Landsman, can knock a few heads together, sometimes his own. Such is the interesting binary of Chabon's newly reclaimed genre fiction. The story of the Sitka Jews, the only wholly Jewish group on the planet since Israel failed in the 1940s, is mournful and uncertain. They face the end of their temporary independence from the United States, meaning the end of their home and the beginning of more wanderings. With this knowledge blanketing everything like a cloud, Chabon plays out the smaller tragedy of a chess-playing heroin addict, liked by all, dead before his time. The principles enter shortly thereafter to ask whodunnit, or, more importantly, why.

Chabon is quite capable of molding characters with healthy dimensions—broad and deep—and he supplies some of his most memorable here. Detective Landsman takes center stage, a man in the last seconds of freefall before hitting rock bottom, prone to eloquent sarcasm, slivovitz, and a scruffy lovability. Landsman still allows ample room for Berko Shemets, his half-Tlingit-half-Jew partner, cousin, and best friend (who is also maybe the most likable and entertaining individual present). The core of the novel is rounded out by Bina Gelbfish, Landsman's ex-wife and current superior officer, whose wit is no less sharp and whose will may be even stronger. After the opening roll call, Chabon sets these characters spinning among the world of black hats (Hasidic Jews), sholems (pistols), and latkes (beat policemen). Yes, Chabon has created his own Yiddish equivalent of noirish slang.

This all awes and excites in equal portion. The human side of the story is more affecting that most would imagine from an alternate history detective novel, and Chabon's playful inventions whiz and whir pleasantly, from his turns of phrase to his creatively reimagined Sitka. The characters he has sketched with great detail and compassion—though a few of the villains, the winkingly named "black hats," come off a bit thin—and the genre he has bent according to his whims. The only hitch in the book's step is its plot. All of the pieces fit, but the aerodynamic glide of the first two acts turns choppy in the finale as several chunks clatter into place at the last minute, but by then Chabon has successfully wedged his characters into the reader's concerns—and built up such a hurtling momentum—that umbrage is out of the question. This is just to say, my brain gives this four stars, but my cockles give it five....less

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Sam rated it:

05/15/07

Read in May, 2007

recommends it for: Hebrew detectives; Alaskans

Michael Chabon's latest novel manages to be both painfully specific (add www.yiddishdictionaryonline.co... to your bookmarks list if you're going to read it) and generously engaging. Even with the chill of both murder and the Alaskan setting weighing down the proceedings, Chabon's hero Meyer Landsman gives off an unaccountable, wonderful warmth.

It doesn't hurt, either, that the writer's prose gets better and better with eac...more Michael Chabon's latest novel manages to be both painfully specific (add www.yiddishdictionaryonline.co... to your bookmarks list if you're going to read it) and generously engaging. Even with the chill of both murder and the Alaskan setting weighing down the proceedings, Chabon's hero Meyer Landsman gives off an unaccountable, wonderful warmth.

It doesn't hurt, either, that the writer's prose gets better and better with each successive novel. Chabon has championed genre fiction in interviews and with a couple of recent anthologies, but he has never made a more convincing argument than The Yiddish Policemen's Union, a grab-bag of alternate-history sci-fi ideas mixed into a classically structured detective novel. It's nearly impossible to be modest about high-concept writing this extreme, but Chabon manages just that: he'd rather you were busy with an extended metaphor or a bit of slapstick than oohing and aahing over his historical gymnastics.

And those gymnastics are considerable. The Jewish refugees from Hitler's Western Europe, it seems, are holed up in Alaska, having failed in their attempt to take back the Holy Land by the Arabs some 60 years ago. Sitka, a little town near the coast, is the seat of Jewish authority, a place where Yiddish is spoken almost exclusively (the residents do take time to swear in English) and Hebrew is a foriegn language.

This is the backdrop for a good, old-fashioned homicide - a guy in a hotel room is killed, leaving a clue-free scene and a corpse who had been living there under onion-skin aliases, each of which peels away to reveal a little more of his character.

As happens occasionally in the higher class of detective novels, "Emmanuel Lasker" (the dead guy) becomes one of the book's most interesting characters. Who was he? Why was he killed? Does his life parallel Landsman's life? Why?

Chabon makes a point of answering all the logistical questions by the end of the book, which comes out of a strange place, frankly. The final supervillain team-up between fanatical evangelical Christians and fanatical Zionist Jews is a distant connection at which Chabon works perhaps a little too hard. There's also a series of eerie and frankly horrible 9-11 parallels in the final chapters about which I still don't know what to think. Still, his solution to the whodunit is deeply satisfying, and rooted thoroughly in both the rich characters and in the clues we've already seen Meyer uncover. It's a satisfying book, though it's less like the Pulitzer-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay than his Sherlock Holmes pastiche The Final Solution. He may name-check Nabokov with the best of the current crop, but Chabon's heart lies in old-fashioned narrative, and that marriage between the highbrow and the lowbrow is what ultimately makes his work worth reading....less

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Damian rated it:

02/24/08

Read in February, 2008

I usually bias my ratings to a 2 or a 4. A 3 just says "average" which isn't much help to folks looking for a good book to read. In the case of the Yiddish Policemen's Union I was so torn that I ended up sitting on the fence. I loved the concept: After the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel, the Jewish people are given a "temporary" safe haven in Alaska. I was annoyed by the lack of an understandable plot. I mean there's a plot of...more I usually bias my ratings to a 2 or a 4. A 3 just says "average" which isn't much help to folks looking for a good book to read. In the case of the Yiddish Policemen's Union I was so torn that I ended up sitting on the fence. I loved the concept: After the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel, the Jewish people are given a "temporary" safe haven in Alaska. I was annoyed by the lack of an understandable plot. I mean there's a plot of course but it just seems like an afterthought. Maybe 1940's noir doesn't require a plot and it's more about the development of the characters. The characters are delightful and I found myself laughing aloud every 8-10 pages when a particular passage tickled my fancy. My favorite bit out of the whole novel involves sharing a bed with a toddler. Those of you who've never had this experience probably won't understand but trust me, you're not really missing anything.

"Sometime in the middle of the night, Goldy (a 4 year old) careers into the room. His tread is heavy and lumbering, a baby monster's. He doesn't just climb into the bed, he roils the blankets the way a wire whisk roils a batter. Its like he's fleeing something, panicked, but when Landsman (the main character) speaks, asks him what's wrong, the boy doesn't answer. His eyes are closed, and his heart beats steadily and low. What ever he was running from, he found shelter from it in his parents' bed. The kid is sound asleep. He smells like a piece of cut apple that's starting to turn. He digs his toes into the small of Landsman's back with care and without mercy. He grinds his teeth. The sound of it is like dull shears on a sheet of tin.
After an hour of this kind of treatment, around four-thirty, the baby starts to scream, way out on his balcony. Landsman can hear Ester-Malke trying to comfort him. Ordinarily, she would bring him into her bed, but that's not an option tonight, and it takes her a long time to settle the little grandfather down. By the time Ester-Malke wanders into the bedroom with the baby in her arms, he's snuffling and quieter and almost asleep. Ester-Malke dumps Pinky between his brother and Landsman and walks out.
Reunited in their parents' bed, the Shemets boys set up a whistling and rumbling and a blatting of inner valves that would shame the grand pipe organ of Temple Emanu-El. The boys execute a series of maneuvers, a kung fu of slumber, that drives Landsman to the very limit of the bed. They chop at Landsman, stab him with their toes, grunt and mutter. They masticate the fiber of their dreams. Around dawn, something very bad happens in the baby's diaper. It's the worst night that Landsman has ever spent on a mattress, and that is saying a good deal."

I guess I'd only recommend this book to folks who like the idea of Jews in 1940's America Noir or people who love the author. Otherwise I'd say you're pretty safe missing it....less

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Meredith rated it:

06/17/08

Read in June, 2008

I picked up the Yiddish Policemen's Union afer reading and obsessively enjoying Chabon's the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. While I would still recommend the latter over the former for new Chabon readers, I still thought this book was great and don't really understand the divisive reviews. After my friend (who urged me to read Kavalier and Clay) warned me that many considered this "too Jew-ey" and after reading Goodreads reviews denouncing the heavy use of Yiddish slang throu...more I picked up the Yiddish Policemen's Union afer reading and obsessively enjoying Chabon's the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. While I would still recommend the latter over the former for new Chabon readers, I still thought this book was great and don't really understand the divisive reviews. After my friend (who urged me to read Kavalier and Clay) warned me that many considered this "too Jew-ey" and after reading Goodreads reviews denouncing the heavy use of Yiddish slang throughout, I began the book nervous about how much I would comprehend, but figuring that if I could manage A Clockwork Orange, I could handle some Yiddish. And I must say, get a grip, people. While a lot of Yiddish is used, Chabon relies on a core of about 5-10 words repeatedly, and the back of the book comes with a glossary (which could have been helpful if I'd realized it was there before page 150 or so)! Definitely manageable.

Okay, so the good things. Just like K&C, Chabon cleary did his homework for the book. For K&C it was 1940s New York and the emergence of the comic book, and for YPU it was the noir writing style and Jewish history/lore. The great thing is how Chabon incorporates so much detail without letting it overshadow the plot (like a Chuck Palahniuk novel). His characters are also well-developed, flawed yet immensely likeable and sympathetic. And finally, Chabon is able to end a novel without patly tying all the pieces together, but without leaving you feeling hanging or abruptly caught up. He does not do the complexity of his plot lines a disservice by ending them simplistically.

Now onto the criticism. While historical detail does not overwhelm the plot, it seemed to me (and I feel crazy saying it) that the descriptive detail did. I never thought I would call a fiction novel too detailed, but there it is. I am not one to analyze the literary devices of an author. I like to just go with the flow of the book, so if I notice literary devices, it's usually because they're either ridiculously prolific or stilted. Chabon's similes and metaphors definitely fit the former category. I am all for imagining every detail of a scene, but do I really need to know that, while in the sauna, the rebbe's nipples were like red lentils? Hmmm. I also think that the level of description will make the upcoming Coen brothers movie adaptation difficult to live up to fans' expectations (especially the casting). Take a skinny kid, dye his hair black, and give him some broken round glasses, and you've got a convincing Harry Potter. But who will be Landsman? Bina? Berko?

My last criticism is something over which I'm not sure Chabon has control: the packaging. The news article about the book/Chabon included as part of the extra features seemed a little self-indulgent, and combined with the cover/spine of the book (to the effect of: "I don't know if you knew this, but MICHAEL CHABON wrote this book. Did you know he's a PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING author? Oh, andit'scalledtheyiddishpolicemen'sunion.) gave off a weird vibe.

I'm not good at tying up these book reviews, so I'm not going to try: THE END....less

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Stephen rated it: