Book review: The Yiddish Policemen's Union

I've had The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon, sitting on my desk since viiber waiting for me to review it; since by now I'll be lucky if I can remember anything about it, I'm going to cheat and quote the blurb verbatim:

For sixty years, Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of revelations of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. Proud, grateful, and longing to be American, the Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant, gritty, soulful, and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. For sixty years they have been left alone, neglected and half-forgotten in a backwater of history. Now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end: once again the tides of history threaten to sweep them up and carry them off into the unknown.

But homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. He and his half-Tlingit partner, Berko Shemets, can't catch a break in any of their outstanding cases. Landsman's new supervisor is the love of his life—and also his worst nightmare. And in the cheap hotel where he has washed up, someone has just committed a murder—right under Landsman's nose. Out of habit, obligation, and a mysterious sense that it somehow offers him a shot at redeeming himself, Landsman begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy. But when word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, Landsman soon finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, hopefulness, evil, and salvation that are his heritage—and with the unfinished business of his marriage to Bina Gelbfish, the one person who understands his darkest fears.

At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, an homage to 1940s noir, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written.

And if that doesn't make you want to rush off and read it^*, I don't know what will. Maybe Amazon's description of it as "a murder-mystery speculative-history Jewish-identity noir chess thriller"? Maybe the lure of chareidi gangsters (all too easy to believe in given the instances in recent history of charedim failing to buy into דִינָא דְמַלְכוּתָא דִינָא)?

* Actually, I can't remember what made me want to read it. This is pretty much unprecedented; an embarrassing hole in my record-keeping.

I found the book loads of fun to read; indeed I got so engrossed in it that whenever I emerged from it, it took me a little while to reorient myself in this world, in which it's the Ashkenazi pronunciation of Hebrew that's all bar died, not the Israeli; and when I went off to Google maps to have a look at the satellite imagery of Sitka, I was shocked to see all the urbanisation of the novel missing!

Of course, alternate history, like science fiction, enables one to look at things differently from how one would in the real world. In our world, we've got deep-ingrained prejudices about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict; we can't look at the issue dispassionately. By setting the story in the Alaskan panhandle (it's between Dundee and Aberdeen, latitude-wise), and replacing Palestinians with Tlingits, the story takes away our ingrained prejudices... and replaces them with another set, it's true; but it still makes you see things differently.

Two slight quibbles: When translating a foreign language, it's best not to go for dropping lots of words in that language into your text, but, though he does use a variety of Yiddish words for slang ("latke" for "cop", "sholem" for "gun"), I think the author was wrong to translate Hebrew loan-words: It comes across as odd to read, for example, "It's about Messiah"; odd in a way that "It's about Moshiach" would not. "It's about the Messiah" would not either, but that comes across subtly different to me, due to the Christian connotations that have accreted around that phraseology. Though Christians and the Christian outlook get almost no look-in in this novel; just in one chapter, that's almost like a bucket of water in the face waking you from out your Yiddish-culture coccoon.

And the second slight quibble? The book's title. The Yiddish Policemen's Union gets hardly a look-in. TBH, the only reason for choosing that as the title I can see is to grab the book-browser's attention.