A Yiddish translation of Chandler
May 9, 2007 | Comments Off
Maximus Clarke, otherwise known as Mr. Maud, appropriated Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union when it arrived in the mail, and has been raving about it since. He praises the book — a copy of which is available to the 10th person who emails me at maud [at] maudnewton dot com goes to Liz of Brooklyn — below.
The new book from Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, is a compelling hybrid: part hard-boiled noir, part alt-history SF, and part literary novel. For the most part, it succeeds on all three fronts — and also stakes a credible claim (alongside The Plot Against America, another what-if story) to being the great Jewish-American novel of the decade.
As a devotee of sci-fi and genre fiction, I found Chabon’s premise as intriguing as anything spun by Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle) and Robert Harris (Fatherland). In the world of this book, there is no state of Israel; instead, the U.S. granted European Jews a special refuge in Alaska (an idea actually considered by FDR). However, the political exigencies of the 1940s dictated that the Settlement Act had a time limit. After sixty years, the Sitka District would revert to full American control, and its residents, never naturalized as U.S. citizens, would be left to fend for themselves in the world.
Now the day of Reversion is only months away, and with no clear plan for the future, most of Sitka’s Jewish inhabitants — including its protagonist, police detective Meyer Landsman — live and work under a growing shadow of doom. Landsman, as befits a noir (anti-)hero, has other problems: a tendency to bend the rules to the breaking point, an ex-wife who’s just become his boss, and a family legacy of crippling depression. The gloom is cut, without being dispelled, by the constant stream of brilliantly acerbic insults traded by all the main characters.
The combination of over-the-top existential darkness and Yiddish schtick is so dense that, for the first couple of chapters, the reader may feel trapped in an episode of Northern Exposure scripted by Woody Allen and Raymond Chandler. But Chabon’s assured prose and solid crime-novel plotting keep the narrative flowing, and soon the other elements assume their rightful place as atmosphere.
In classic noir fashion, the crime that incites the story also exposes hidden social strata. Here, it’s the apparent suicide of a heroin-addicted chess player. The death provides the irreligious Landsman and his half-Jewish, half-Alaskan-native partner an opening into the secretive, pious, and criminally inclined subculture of Sitka’s Verbover Hasidim.
And this fantastic yarn provides Chabon with a unique way to examine controversial realities: the insular and factional elements of Orthodox Judaism, the messianic movement that wants to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, and the strange alliance between extremist Jewish and evangelical Christian groups that plays an ongoing role in American and Middle Eastern politics.
In fact, the book’s alternate universe, in which the Zionist movement’s attempt to create a viable state failed in the 1940s, implicitly asks us to consider to what degree that state’s actual emergence was inevitable — even prophetically ordained, as some religious believers maintain — and to what degree it was a product of the sometimes haphazard, cynical, and violent workings of earthly politics.
Such a provocative tale was bound to raise some hackles; Chabon has already drawn accusations of being an anti-Semite. But his love for his heritage is apparent on every page. The clipped, tart quality of Yiddish diction saturates the writing. And amidst individual and collective depravity, the dead chess master — perhaps the tzaddik ha-dor, the “righteous man of his generation” — radiates a sense of true holiness.
After a dramatic turn of events late in the story, the last forty pages of the book feel somewhat anticlimactic. But in the end, it’s still hard to leave the wondrously bleak world of Chabon’s Sitka District — a place that feels at least as real as the mid-20th-century New York City of Kavalier and Clay.
For a different reaction, see Sarah Weinman’s “Chabon says it in Yiddish.” And Nextbook’s Sara Ivry talks with the author about the “many sources that fed his imagination as he worked on the novel, from a 1958 Yiddish phrase book to the writings of Isaac Babel.”