The Yiddish policemen's union [a novel]

"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.

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.