Review by New York Times 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.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Like Haruki Murakami in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1991), Chabon plays with the conventions of the Chandlerian private-eye novel, but that's only one ingredient in an epic-scale alternate-history saga of Jewish life since World War II. The premise draws on an obscure historical fact: FDR once proposed that Alaska, not Israel, become the homeland for Jews after the war. In Chabon's telling, that's exactly what happened, except, inevitably, it hasn't gone as planned: the U.S. government now has enacted a policy that will evict all Jews without proper papers from Sitka, the center of Jewish Alaska. In the midst of this nightmare, browbeaten police detective Meyer Landsman investigates the murder of a heroin-addicted chess prodigy who happens to be the disgraced son of Sitka's most powerful rabbi. No one wants this case solved, from Landsman's boss (his ex-wife, Bina) to the FBI, but our Yiddish Marlowe keeps digging, uncovering apocalypse in the making. Chabon manipulates his bulging plot masterfully, but what makes the novel soar is its humor and humanity. Even without grasping all the Yiddish wordplay that seasons the delectable prose, readers will fall headlong into the alternate universe of Chabon's Sitka, where black humor is a kind of antifreeze necessary to support life. And when Meyer, in the end, must weigh the fates of the Jews, of the Arabs, of the whole unblessed and homeless planet against a promise made to a grieving mother, it's clear that this parallel world smells a lot like home. Chabon's Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay ran the book-award table in 2000, and this one just may be its equal. --Bill Ott Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
They are the "frozen Chosen," two million people living, dying and kvetching in Sitka, Alaska, the temporary homeland established for displaced World War II Jews in Chabon's ambitious and entertaining new novel. It is-deep breath now-a murder-mystery speculative-history Jewish-identity noir chess thriller, so perhaps it's no surprise that, in the back half of the book, the moving parts become unwieldy; Chabon is juggling narrative chainsaws here. The novel begins-the same way that Philip Roth launched The Plot Against America-with a fascinating historical footnote: what if, as Franklin Roosevelt proposed on the eve of World War II, a temporary Jewish settlement had been established on the Alaska panhandle? Roosevelt's plan went nowhere, but Chabon runs the idea into the present, back-loading his tale with a haunting history. Israel failed to get a foothold in the Middle East, and since the Sitka solution was only temporary, Alaskan Jews are about to lose their cold homeland. The book's timeless refrain: "It's a strange time to be a Jew." Into this world arrives Chabon's Chandler-ready hero, Meyer Landsman, a drunken rogue cop who wakes in a flophouse to find that one of his neighbors has been murdered. With his half-Tlingit, half-Jewish partner and his sexy-tough boss, who happens also to be his ex-wife, Landsman investigates a fascinating underworld of Orthodox black-hat gangs and crime-lord rabbis. Chabon's "Alyeska" is an act of fearless imagination, more evidence of the soaring talent of his previous genre-blender, the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Eventually, however, Chabon's homage to noir feels heavy-handed, with too many scenes of snappy tough-guy banter and too much of the kind of elaborate thriller plotting that requires long explanations and offscreen conspiracies. Chabon can certainly write noir-or whatever else he wants; his recent Sherlock Holmes novel, The Final Solution, was lovely, even if the New York Times Book Review sniffed its surprise that the mystery novel would "appeal to the real writer." Should any other snobs mistake Chabon for anything less than a real writer, this book offers new evidence of his peerless storytelling and style. Characters have skin "as pale as a page of commentary" and rough voices "like an onion rolling in a bucket." It's a solid performance that would have been even better with a little more Yiddish and a little less police. (May) Jess Walter was a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award for The Zero and the winner of the 2006 Edgar Award for best novel for Citizen Vince. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Already announced (see Prepub Alert, LJ 12/05), Chabon's tale of murder and mayhem in an Alaskan homeland for the Jews post-World War II gets a one-day laydown. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 led by 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. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
