Basking in the Brilliance of a Jewish Alaska

So here it is May 30 and still I haven't started reading a book, in spite of my solemn vow to do so each month from now on. Shopgirl has been laying on the floor by my bed, it's been in my bag when I've gone to the park, it's been in my hands -- but that's it. I'm still issues and issues behind in the New Yorker, issues and issues behind in the Economist, and forever playing catch-up with the Times and everything else online, since interesting sites and newsletters and RSS feeds are forever multiplying and demanding that I read them. I'm telling myself that it's not *quite* as bad, though, because I listened to the whole of one of the audiobooks I'm reviewing, Michael Chabon's new novel The Yiddish Policeman's Union, and enjoyed it thoroughly. I haven't read anything else by Chabon, having been turned off previously by his predilection for the graphic novel and sci-fi stories that are altogether too adolescent-boyish for me. But this book is excellent, and the reading (by Peter Riegert, who has an amazingly versatile voice) does it justice. The book is a sort of alternative history, taking as part of its premise the idea that after WWII, Jews were given land in Alaska rather than in Palestine (according to Chabon, in an interview that plays after the book ends, this was actually contemplated in the US, though probably not very seriously). Jewish culture and the Yiddish language have flourished there for decades, but now it is the time of Reversion, when the land is supposed to be returned to the Indians, to Alaska, to the US proper, and the Jews have to get US papers or leave. The main character, Meyer Landsman, is a top-notch detective but a major screw-up in life, having had to go through a divorce with his wife, ending up living in a fleabag hotel, and not obtaining the necessary papers (plus he's often on a bender). The story gets going right away when a Jew is killed in Landsman's hotel, but he can see no clues apart from a chess set, where it seems the Jew, whom Landsman didn't know, was playing a game by himself. The whole rest of the novel is Landsman trying to solve the murder in the face of extreme opposition from others in the police department, from the incoming Americans, and especially from a sinister sect of Jews, the Verbovers. As he goes, it turns out that his sister's murder is also tied up in the matter, as is the death of his partner's mother -- the story keeps getting knottier and knottier, and Landsman keeps digging himself in deeper and deeper trouble, until then Chabon starts unraveling it all bit by bit until the solution is revealed. The whole thing is a great deal of fun; Chabon writes extremely well, and if he uses metaphor after metaphor so what?

They're metaphors you've never heard and would never think of yourself, and they make you stop and laugh and look at things differently. He's imagined this counterfactual Jewish world so deeply that you could almost believe in spite of yourself that there is such a place -- down to the last down feather, the color of a toothbrush, the hotel elevator with signs in Esperanto, things so improbable they could be real. Though I didn't pay too much attention to the stories, my understanding from Gawker is that a story in the Post started the line of thinking that the novel is antisemitic. As most people have since protested, this is patently ridiculous. The book is almost a love letter to Jews (Chabon is Jewish), in a very backhanded-compliment way that is no less meaningful for the unconventional delivery. It's also, above all, a love letter to the Yiddish language; Chabon relates in the interview at the end of the audiobook that the novel's origins were in an essay he wrote once after seeing a pocket guide to Yiddish, and wondering where people might need such a guide, since Yiddish has been dying out and has never had a people with their own country. That essay brought him a lot of criticism from hypersensitive Yiddish scholars, so he decided to go at the subject full tilt and create a place where one would need a pocket guide of Yiddish. The book is filled with Yiddish, both real and convincingly created for the book's setting -- Chabon obviously studied up a lot before and during writing. And though I didn't quite end the audiobook sprinkling my conversation with Yiddishisms, as I started to do with Britishisims after listening to Persuasion awhile back, I have had various names and terms from the world dancing around in my head: Bina Gelbfish, Tzaddik Ha-Dor, shammes, macher, Shprintzel Rudashevsky, shoyfer...it's been interesting. Anyway, as I've said and been trying to elaborate on, the book is a lot of fun and really impressively constructed on both macro and micro levels. It also has just enough of a deeper meaning for me, with slight jabs at the current American government and American evangelicals' crazy support of a full Jewish conquest of the Holy Land so that Jesus can return and they can be raptured away. The evangelicals aren't dealt with too much, and a good thing -- they leave a bad taste in one's mouth. Most of the Jews are quite religious too and waiting for a Messiah but they seem less crass somehow, with a few exceptions. In any case, of course no one can be redeemed in the end as far as religious redemption goes, because the whole proposition is ridiculous -- but Landsman at least finds some small-scale personal salvation in his mind and personal life, and that, set against the craziness that the rest of Jewish Alaska devolves into by the end, makes for a perfectly sweet-salty ending to an endlessly inventive yet earthy book.