The Yiddish Policemen’s Union / Michael Chabon

For the second year in a row I started a Michael Chabon novel shortly after Thanksgiving. I think I might make this a tradition, as again the book was quite enjoyable. The novel won the Sidewise Award, the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and was in serious contention for an Edgar as well. All well deserved.

The science fiction premise is that the U.S. government adopted a proposal by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes to resettle Jewish refugees in Alaska in 1941. Subsequent failure of the State of Israel in 1948 brought even more to the Jewish enclave in the far north. Sixty years later, much like Hong Kong in 1997, reverts from it’s special status and the resident Jews must find new places to reside. Meyer Landsman is a down-on-his-luck homicide detective in a department that will disappear in two months time when Reversion takes place. And he’s got a murder case to solve before that event.

The murder is that of Mendel Shpilman, the son of the Verbover rebbe, leader of the Verbover Hasidic Jewish sect. A group that, although highly religious, is also highly involved in organized crime. Mendel is also a heroin addict, disowned by his own father years ago.

The story and characters are wide-ranging. And get ever more spread out as the story progresses. Chabon kept all the bowling pins and balls and knives in the air without injuring any of the jugglers. But toward the end it was difficult for this spectator to follow all of them.

As in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the descriptive language is amazing without being too high-brow. One of my favorites is the following passage describing Meyer Landsman’s experience of getting knocked about the head:

In the dreamy seconds that precede his loss of consciousness, the guttural language that Landsman heard Roboy speaking plays like a recording in his ear, and he makes a dazzling leap into impossible understanding, like the sudden consciousness in a dream of one’s having invented a great theory or written a fine poem that in the morning turns out to be gobbledygook. They are talking, those Jews on the other side of the door, about roses and frankincense. Landsman is there, in flowing robes that keep out the biblical sun, speaking Hebrew, ad they are all friends and brothers together, and the mountains skip like rams, and the hills like little lambs.

Chabon also tied his science fiction aspects together very well. Often, alternative history novels go the route of trying to explain everything about the history as the participants would have learned it in civics class. But in real life we all have a shared history that we need incorporate into our conversation by references. Someone spying on our adventures wouldn’t get the full story. Chabon more or less sticks to the perspective of his characters. But neither is the history we see too sparse. It’s mostly fleshed out by the results we see in standoffish and sometimes tense relations between the Jews and the surrounding Tlingit Indian tribe. Or in tunnels built by the Jews in Sitka because they do not trust the United States’ intentions.

My reading over the next year will defy the laws of physics if it drops The Yiddish Policemen’s Union low enough to not make next year’s best read list. I can almost guarantee this book will appear.

A few other blog reviews:

• In the Shadow of Mt. TBR
• Mysteries in Paradise
• The Bimillennial Man

Title: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
Author: Michael Chabon
Cover creator: Will Staehle
Imprint / publisher: Harper Perennial / HarperCollins
Format: Paperback
Length: 411 p.
Publication date: 2007
ISBN-13: 978-0-00-714983-4
Subject: Jews — Fiction
Subject: Murder — Investigation — Fiction
Subject: Alaska — Fiction
LC classification: PS3553.H15 Y54 2007