Review: The Yiddish Policemen's Union

Chabon, master of metaphor and the exuberant author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” now turns his multi-talented hand to the Jewish speculative alternate-history detective-noir novel.

Morose, keen-eyed, alcoholic Meyer Landsman is the best homicide detective in the temporary Jewish state of Sitka, Alaska. Divorced, he’s been marking time at a fleabag motel until Sitka reverts back to American control in two months time and the Jews are once again dispersed.

The US bestowed Sitka on the Jews after the shocking post-Holocaust failure of the infant Jewish state in 1948, but only as a 60-year reprieve. What happens next is anyone’s guess. The one thing that’s clear is that the Jews will not be invited to stay.

So there hardly seems much point in pursuing the murder of a solitary chess-playing heroin junkie. Indeed, Landsman’s new boss – his ex-wife Bina – tells him and his partner to drop it and concentrate on closing their outstanding cases or consigning them, along with the new case, to cabinet nine.

“Filing a case in cabinet nine saves less space but is otherwise the same as lighting it on fire and taking the ashes out for a walk in a gale-force wind.”

The mystery of the junkie’s death, though it turns out to carry considerable weight, at first seems a lot less compelling than the characters and setting.

Landsman comes with considerable baggage. His father, a fanatical, tormented chess player, came to Sitka a refugee from the German camps, his whole family wiped out. He committed suicide while Landsman was still a boy and his primary legacy to his son was a deep and abiding loathing of chess.

Landsman’s father had a friend, Hertz Shemets, who escaped Europe a little sooner and landed in Alaska, where he proceeded to put down roots and tentacles, running counterintelligence for the FBI and siring a Tlinglit son. His sister married Landsman Sr.

So Berko Shemets, Hertz’ Indian son, is Meyer Landsman’s cousin. After his mother’s death in a riot between Jews and Indians, Berko came to live with the Landsmans and grew to revere Meyer. He even became a cop because Meyer became a cop. And now they are partners and the scales have mostly fallen from Berko’s eyes.

Sitka itself is a place where it rains 200 days a year. “Fat streamers of fog twist along the streets, smearing headlights and neon, blotting out the harbor, leaving a track of oily silver beads on the lapels of coats and the crowns of hats.”

The Jews may have no homeland but the Indians they replaced in Sitka do – and they want it back.

Against this background of history, hostility, incongruity and uncertainty, Landsman tenaciously works at the murder of the junkie, who called himself by the name of a dead chess master and turns out to be carrying considerable baggage himself.

As Landsman and Berko work the case it takes them into every corner and angle of Sitka from the tough ex-Israeli commandos to the impenetrable “black-hat” sects who have recreated exact replicas of their European shtetls; from the history of modern Jewry to the promises of the ancients, from the core of prejudice to the accidents and consequences of history.

Chabon’s gift for description is a marvel; his visuals leap off the page. His language is brilliant, dazzling, breathtaking, but it never just flaunts itself for beauty’s sake. Every word advances the narrative.

Here’s a glimpse of his meeting with the boundary maven, the man whose complicated and essential service for the black-hat community will gain Landsman a toe-hold entry.

“The maven’s face is bony, mostly nose and chin, evolved for noticing, probing, cutting straight to gaps, breaches, and lapses. His full ashy beard flutters in the wind like bird fluff caught on a barbed-wire fence. In a hundred years of helplessness, this would be the last face that Landsman would ever turn to hoping for aid or information, but Berko knows more about black-hat life than Landsman ever will.”

A terrific, complex novel, with a hint of Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko in the protagonist and a story only Michael Chabon could write.

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Lynn Harnett

Book Review: The Yiddish Policemen's Union