Strange Times

A review of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union: A Novel by Lorraine Cuddeback

The Yiddish Policeman's Union: A Novel. Michael Chabon. HarperCollins, 2007. 432 pp., $26.95

“Strange times to be a Jew,” echoes Michael Chabon throughout his new novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. The book – part-noir, part-historical re-imagination, part-redemption – portrays times that are both familiar and alien to the reader, as Chabon creates an alternate world in Sitka, Alaska. Chabon has taken a historical footnote and created a deeply detailed “what-if” scenario: what if Congress didn’t vote down the proposal to create a “temporary” safe-haven in Sitka for Jews during World War II?

Sixty years later, in contemporary times, Chabon’s Yiddish Sitka is a densely populated place, dark and urban, and, up until now, left to fend for itself. However, Sitka’s Jews are not permanent residents of the United States: the terms on which the settlement was first created stated that Sitka would revert back to Alaskan (re: United States’) control after sixty years, and time is up. From the outset, this fills the novel with tension: tension between Sitka’s Jews and Americans, between Sitka’s Jews and the indigenous Tlingits, even between religious sects of Jews within Sitka. The central character, police detective Meyer Landsman, isn’t doing too well himself; he’s a self-medicating alcoholic who spends long nights dwelling on his father’s suicide and missing his ex-wife. On top of all that, down the hall from Landsman in his crummy hotel, some poor shmuck just got himself murdered, and Landsman has to investigate.

From the outset, Chabon paints this world with details that transcend the simply cinematic into the jaw-dropping. Sitka is a place filled with “the work crews of young Jewesses in their blue headscarves, singing Negro spirituals with Yiddish lyrics that paraphrased Lincoln and Marx.” Sitka’s greatest invention is a type of Chinese superdonut that Chabon lovingly describes with no less than a half-dozen adjectives. And Sitka’s policemen are shammes whose headquarters “long housed a thriving colony of spores that, at a point in the remote past, spontaneously evolved the form and appearance of a love seat.”
The focus of the novel, at first, is not on the greater socio-political forces at work. At its core, Yiddish Policeman’s Union is a noir crime story, filled with the personal doom-and-gloom that denotes the genre. Grey is perhaps the most frequently used word in Chabon’s descriptions of Alaska, and one can’t help but wonder if he’s slyly referencing black and white films of the same type.

Landsman is certainly noir’s typical flawed underdog-with-an-acerbic-wit, and the reader travels with him as he investigates one last murder case before the Yiddish policeforce is disbanded. Only, he’s going against his supervisor’s direct orders. Only, his supervisor is now his ex-wife, Bina Gelbfish. Only, it seems the stiff down the hall is actually Mendel Shpilman, a wealthy rabbi-cum-crime lord’s only son and a prodigy to boot. Sitka expands along with Landsman’s investigation, as the story behind Shpilman’s last days becomes more complex, reveals deep layers of conspiracy and strategy, and heightens the personal stakes for Landsman.

Though written in the third-person, the reader’s only conduit into this world is Landsman. Chabon drops us into his Yiddish world with little by way of a narrator’s exposition. Instead, we learn bits and pieces through Landsman’s nostalgic tangents. For example, a first glimpse of Landsman’s partner and cousin, Berko Shemets, leads the reader to a lengthy memory of half-Tlinglet, half-Jewish Berko as a young teen coming to live with the Landsman family. We see Berko standing “five feet nine inches in his mukluhs that afternoon, thirteen years old and only an inch shorter than Landsman at eighteen...Now the kid was going to be sleeping in a bedroom that had once served Meyer and Naomi’s father as Klein bottle for the infinite loop of his insomnia.” For the readers who love total immersion, you’ll love swimming through Landsman’s mind. For readers who need background, you’ll have to keep your eyes peeled for the history Chabon gives between the lines.

As a leading man, Landsman is hard to like: an alcoholic or workaholic, he keeps a tenuous grip on his life. He is either crass or pathetic in extremes, and at first, it’s hard to understand just why Landsman pursues the Shpilman case against the advice – and direct command – of so many other seemingly saner people. Yet, the deeper Landsman falls into the murder case before him, the gladder you are that he is so stubborn. You become as caught up with the history of Mendel Shpilman, and by extension, the Sitka Jews, as Landsman is.

It helps that Landsman is given such a stellar supporting cast of characters. Mendel Shpilman, though dead when the novel begins, features in a number of flashbacks, and in each one he is oddly compelling, strangely charismatic, and above all very humanely flawed. Berko, his partner, is the quintessential good cop to Landsman’s renegade, but one who is fiercely loyal (he pulls out a replica-Tligit hammer to fend off the Sitka equivalent of mafia thugs in one scene) and can keep up with Landsman’s banter. Then there is Bina Gelbfish, the ex-wife-slash-supervisor, a woman we meet posed “holding a black umbrella and wearing a bright orange parka with a blazing dyed-green ruff of synthetic fur. Her right arm is raised, index finger extended toward the trash bins, like a painting of the angel Michael casting Adam and Eve from the Garden.” A half-dozen other bit characters, from the master craftsman of the fried donut with a cross-dressing mistress, to the monstrous mountain of Rebbe Shpilman, Mendel’s father, to a pilot who swears he can fly upside down, all give life and body to Chabon’s Sitka. His characters are often pulled from noir’s store of stock characters, but Chabon still writes each one with care and precision, and a good dose of humor.

It would have been easy for Chabon to let the tragedy of the Jewish Diaspora weigh down the novel. Instead, he uses a sharp wit in both descriptions and dialogue to keep the novel afloat and digestible for the reader. Interrogation dialogue is tense; you could hear it spoken in an old black-and-white movie with curls of cigarette smoke around the speakers. Chabon also lets loose with sarcasm – a gesture frequently colored by an odd compassion. At one point, a worried Bina tracks down Landsman’s hotel room after he missed a meeting. Despite the care and concern in the act, on entering, Bina asks: “How do you say ‘shit heap’ in Esperanto?” Or when responding to a detective’s inquiries on how he slept during his night in jail, Landsman says “The sheets had a touch more lavender water than I care for...Other than that, I really have no complaints.”

The novel’s story unfolds at a brisk pace – and the conclusion which comes is frustratingly brisker. The denouement here is anything but gentle; it’s a rapid-fire burst of resolutions which first uncover an evil mastermind, restore Landsman’s honor, reignite his relationships, and then finally, reveal the hand that killed Mendel Shpilman. For a world so thoroughly thought-out and carefully crafted, the reader is left wanting more – more interactions, more explanation, more justice. What will Landsman’s life be like after the Reversion? How will the world be affected by the conspiracy Landsman has uncovered?

But perhaps that is why readers both love and hate Chabon’s novels. The ability to draw a reader so deeply into an unfamiliar world that he or she is unwilling to leave is an undeniable talent. Chabon’s last pages leave us with a poignant message about the true meaning of salvation and redemptions. We are left with the unsettling realization that there are no normal times to be a Jew, a Gentile, or a human; there is only the strange, unfamiliar present.

Lorraine Cuddeback is an Interdisciplinary Writing/Theology major and Theatre minor. Last summer, she compiled and edited Prometheus's Torch in collaboration with The Learning Bank in West Baltimore. The book was recently published through Loyola's Apprentice House. Lorraine is honored to be a member of Phi Beta Kappa, as well as Pi Epsilon Pi (the honors society for writing), and has been published in Warnings, The Garland, and The Forum. After graduating, she will be joining the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in San Francisco.