Where to start with this one? Oi, you should have a problem like this.
Forgive me for channeling Jackie Mason, but I've just spent two weeks enjoying Michael Chabon's new novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union.
I'm there with the yids in Alaska, tracking down a murder, facing the imminent demise of Aleyska, the temporary Jewish homeland. Perhaps I should explain.
In the alternative reality of this novel, Jews lost the war for Palestine in 1948. In an act of mixed kindness and cruelty, America took in many thousands of Jewish refugees, allowing them to establish a territory in Sitka, Alaska. However, the new homeland came with a lease, set to expire in 2007.
Once again Jews will be compelled to wander the world in search of a permanent home, in Jerusalem, God willing, or elsewhere. That is just one theme underlying this provocative and highly absorbing novel.
The Yiddish Policemen's Union reads in places like a hard-boiled noir murder mystery of the most mid-20th Century kind. The ghost of Dashiell Hammett hunkers over Meyer Landsman, a homicide detective on the down and out, alcoholic, divorced, depressed, dogged.
When another down-and-outer is murdered in Landsman's dead-end hotel, the detective takes on the hopeless case against all common sense, and against the wishes of his boss, who (of course) also is his ex-wife.
Against this background of despair, heroism is found in acts as simple as going to work, or in attempts to salvage something lasting from the impending loss of yet another homeland.
Plot points in this novel are as closely woven as threads in a Bar Mitzvah tallith shawl.
Then there is the language of this novel, gloriously rich and varied. The characters speak Yiddish (breaking into "American" when they want to swear or talk to outsiders). The book therefore is a kind of translation: into and out of Yiddish, into and out of the world of the Jews.
The pages of The Yiddish Policemen's Union are laden with metaphor and detail.
"Like most policemen, Landsman sails double-hulled against tragedy, stabilized against heave and storm. It's the shallows he has to worry about, the hairline fissures, the little freaks of torque."
At another moment: "Landsman sinks onto a sofa whose bruise-colored cushions give off a strong Sitka odor of mildew, cigarettes, a complicated saltiness that is part stormy sea, part sweat on the lining of a wool fedora."
A quiet room and a cup of tea: "A vein of rust twists in the water like the ribbon in a glass marble."
A suspect: "Hertz Shemets comes to the door, the shave on his jowls as fresh as two droplets of blood."
The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a generous book, entertaining and eery at the same time, and one of the most worthwhile I've come across.
