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 the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. The Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. But now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end.
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. And in the cheap hotel where Landsman has washed up, someone has just committed a murder—right under his nose. When he begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy, word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, and Landsman finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, evil, and salvation that are his heritage.
At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written.
In his wildest dreams, Dr. Joel Fleischman — the culturally dislocated Jewish doctor in the lox-out-of-water dramedy Northern Exposure — couldn't have imagined the Alaskan wonders conjured by Michael Chabon in his marvelous reverie The Yiddish Policemen's Union. But Isaac Bashevis Singer would feel right at home.
In Chabon's virtuoso imagining — an ample meditation on the contradictions of Jewishness, disguised as an outlandish detective novel — Israel as we know it never got off the ground in 1948. Instead, the destination of choice for Jews who survived the fires of World War II was a stretch of Alaska set aside by Franklin Roosevelt as a temporary catchment for those dispossessed millions, with Sitka as its teeming, slushy center. The Frozen Chosen, Chabon calls the parade of saints — criminals, cops, dreamers, losers, and schemers who people his raucous pages. And in the society they create, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay charts nothing less than a psychic world map of his own peeps. The alternate universe he plays in is jokier and cartoon-broader than usual, but Chabon the serious artist means business.
At its heart is a hard-boiled mystery. A guy — evidently a chess pro, a heroin addict, and a former ''black hat,'' or ultra-Orthodox Hasid — turns up dead in a fleabag hotel, and Det. Meyer Landsman is left to figure out who, how, and why. Landsman's got a drinking problem, an ex-wife who's now his boss, and a cop partner who's half Jewish, half Tlingit. He's also got to race a ticking clock since the northern Promised Land was promised for only 60 years. After that, a Reversion will go into effect, stymieing police procedure and forcing the Frozen Chosen to roam the chessboard of statelessness once again. ''These are strange times to be a Jew,'' one tribal philosopher observes.
With each unruly fool Chabon introduces, further intriguing strangeness is revealed. Also exposed: charlatan rabbis, radical plans to restore the holy temple in Jerusalem, American Jewish funding of terrorist Hasidic activities, and a thwarted messianic candidate. No sect is spared, no viewpoint is sacred — and no remedial tutoring is offered to any reader who doesn't know his Yiddish.
In Chabon's pulpy world, gray bureaucrats sparkle as ''men with the variegated surnames of doomed crewmen in a submarine movie,'' and one chess player's ''mother is calling him on the ultrasonic frequency reserved by the government for Jewish mothers in the event of lunch.'' By the end, the plot bulges like a fatty pastrami sandwich. But in such an unholy land, what's not to love?
Hard to believe I put it down with only 75 pages left, but I did. Chabon is much too taken with his own gifted writing in this book. My expectations were so high after the superb Wonder Boys and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay that perhaps I'm overly negative. Maybe if I were Jewish I would have appreciated this book more, but I'm not and I didn't.
