Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #441 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-01
• Released on: 2008-04-29
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Chabon's storytelling, in this alternate history of a world where Jews were settled in Alaska after World War II, is vivid enough, with inventive metaphors packed in like tapestry threads, but Peter Riegert's versatile voice makes the invented society even more tangible. Told through the eyes of Meyer Landsman, a police detective investigating a murder, the novel occurs in a strange time to be a Jew, as several characters ruefully put it: the special Jewish district will soon be controlled by Alaska again. In a bonus interview on the last disc, Chabon relates his desire to write about a place where Yiddish was an official language. The book is shot through with Yiddish phrases and names, which melodically roll off Riegert's tongue. He gives Landsman and his tough but warmhearted partner Berko similar yet distinct gruff voices that contrast well with the effeminate-sounding sect leader and the Southern-accented Americans who come to start the land reversion process. Riegert's pacing increases the enjoyment of this expertly spun mystery.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Elizabeth McCracken

What sort of writer is Michael Chabon? The question, especially considering his terrific new novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, is complicated. Of course he's literary, author of the Pulitzer-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and other marvelous books of fiction. His work is page-turning and poignant; he is one of the best writers of English prose alive. But Chabon has an avowed interest in forms considered perhaps less than literary. He's edited two anthologies of pulp-inspired stories for McSweeney's, written a "story of detection" featuring Sherlock Holmes, and he "presents" a comic book quarterly starring one of the superheroes of Kavalier & Clay. He's interested in busting the chains of everydayness that bind many so-called literary writers: He wants to move and thrill us both, and he does.

Reading The Yiddish Policemen's Union is like watching a gifted athlete invent a sport using elements of every other sport there is -- balls, bats, poles, wickets, javelins and saxophones. The book begins with the introduction of a hung-over detective to a gun-shot corpse in a fleabag hotel. Classic noir, except that the detective drinks slivovitz instead of bourbon: He's Jewish, a kind of Philip Marlovsky named Meyer Landsman, though Landsman is a cop -- a "noz" in the yiddisher slang of the book -- not a PI. The whole local police force is Jewish: The book is set in a present-day alternate reality in Sitka, Alaska, a safe haven set up for Jewish refugees after World War II and the collapse of Israel. Now, after nearly 60 years, the Federal District of Sitka is about to revert to American rule. There are elements of an international terrorist thriller, complicated by religious conspiracy and a band of end-of-the-world hopefuls, and yet the book has a dimly lit 1940s vibe. Maybe that's just because of what Jews and movie dicks have always had in common: felt hats and an affinity for bad weather.

The prose is Chandlerian, too -- lyrical, hard-boiled and funny all at once: "In the street the wind shakes rain from the flaps of its overcoat. Landsman tucks himself into the hotel doorway. Two men, one with a cello case strapped to his back, the other cradling a violin or viola, struggle against the weather toward the door of Pearl of Manila across the street. The symphony hall is ten blocks and a world away from this end of Max Nordau Street, but the craving of a Jew for pork, in particular when it has been deep-fried, is a force greater than night or distance or a cold blast off the Gulf of Alaska. Landsman himself is fighting the urge to return to room 505, and his bottle of slivovitz, and his World's Fair souvenir glass."

Landsman, macerated in brandy and sadness, becomes interested in the hotel corpse, though he has enough dead bodies in his own past to keep him busy: a never-born child, a possibly murdered sister and a father who committed suicide, not to mention the ghost of his marriage to a Sitka policewoman. Landsman calls up his partner and cousin, Berko Shemets, a half-Jewish half-Tlingit big man with a soft heart and what passes in this novel for a happy home life. The corpse turns out to be a chess prodigy and heroin addict, the wayward son of a powerful head of a Jewish sect called the Verbovers, and possibly the key to the essential mysteries of both his own death and the future of the Jews. Landsman and Shemets are on the case, even though any number of people try to throw them off. There are plenty of twists, and the detective finds himself knocked unconscious at the end of more than one chapter and muzzy-headed at the start of the next, which is what it means to be the hero of novels that aren't strictly literary.

The book calls to mind another recent bad-for-the-Jews speculative novel by a major writer, The Plot Against America. But while Philip Roth's alternate history asks, "What if?" Chabon's is an explosion that simply says, "Look here!" He sets about imagining the whole strange world of Aleyska, American-flavored but not American.

The pure reach and music and weight of Chabon's imagination are extraordinary, born of brilliant ambition you don't even notice because it is so deeply entertaining. He invents every corner of this strange world -- the slang of the "Sitkaniks," their history, discount houses, divey bars, pie shops. Despite the complications of the plot, the details of the world are every bit as enthralling. You read so that you can keep following Landsman through doors and down alleys as he pieces together the corpse's past and worries about his own. You can't wait to see what kind of compelling oddball steps out of the next wedge of shadow: the pie man's sad daughter, the 4-foot-7 Tlingit police inspector named Willie Dick. (It's possible that Chabon has too much fun with his names at times.)

Toward the end, the book falters a bit. It's not exactly a cartoon gone off a cliff -- a loss of "the foolish coyote faith that could keep you flying as long as you kept kidding yourself you could fly." Still, it's as though Chabon the virtuosic athlete looked down at his legs and got confused as to what kind of sport he was actually playing. The solution to the murder mystery feels like the last piece of a puzzle snapped into place instead of a startling revelation; the international thriller ticks away offstage; some of the banter is too Howard-Hawks-perfect; and what happens to Meyer Landsman seems like what the book and its conventions -- as distinct from fate -- require of him.

Still, what goes before is beautiful and breakneck; Chabon is a master of such contradictions. "Something wistful tugs at his memory," he writes of his hero, "a whiff of some brand of aftershave that nobody wears anymore, the jangling chorus of a song that was moderately popular one August twenty-five summers ago."

That is part of Chabon's project as well, to conjure up the music, smells, architecture, fashions -- the soul, in other words -- of worlds utterly imaginary, and yet palpably lost, and make us nostalgic for them. The moving, shopworn whiz-bang of historical visions of the future -- world's fairs, Esperanto, a belief that the Jews of the world will stop wandering and find a peaceful home somewhere on the planet -- Chabon loves, buries and mourns these visions as beautiful but too fragile to live. The future will always be a fata morgana. In this strange and breathtaking novel, the wise, unhappy man settles for closer comforts. As Landsman says, toward the end of the book, "My homeland is in my hat."

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Does The Yiddish Policemen's Union live up to Michael Chabon's formidable reputation? There is no consensus: some critics called the novel the spiritual heir to the Pulitzer Prize?winning Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000); others thought it a disappointing aberration. As in Kavalier & Clay, Chabon explores issues of identity, assimilation, and mass culture, but he also pays homage to the noir detective novel—with mixed results. The New York Times called Landsman "one of the most appealing detective heroes to come along since Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe," while the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette felt that the work "came nowhere close to making the cut of a Raymond Chandler novel." Critics similarly disagreed about the writing, the convoluted plot, the symbolism of the Jewish-Native American conflict, and the controversial use of Yiddish slurs and caricatures. If not a glowing success, The Yiddish Policemen's Union nonetheless illustrates the rare talents and creativity of its author.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Great idea, but gets bogged down by its complexity


Hard-boiled homicide detective Landsman, has to deal with a murder in his flophouse apartment building. Landsman, a alcoholic mess after a personal tragedy, is one of those great detective inventions; the tough smart cop, who is just a bit overwhelmed by the circumstances he finds himself in, but keeps fighting for the truth regardless of his personal well-being. Assisted by a giant Native Alaskan Jew, Berko, who is as much brother as he is partner, and his ex-wife, now boss, Landsman delves into a case that deal with organized crime, Orthodox beliefs, and a murder victim who is a messianic figure in the community and maybe more than that. All this as the time limit for the Jewish settlement in Alaska, where in this alternate Earth the Jews have now settled instead of Israel, is reaching an end, threatening to leave the Jewish people homeless again. I wish I could say Chabon pulls it off without a hitch. There is so much right here, the dialogue, the descriptions and even the fantastic setting all add up to a novel well worth your time, but it gets bogged down in needless complexity, a labyrinth of twists and turns that end up confusing the narrative and creates a novel that reaches too far for its humble origins. Maybe Chabon was using Hammet's DAIN CURSE as a model, another book where the exciting journey reaches a conclusion that leaves the reader wondering exactly what the point was. Despite this I liked the book, but finished thinking it should have stayed true to its pulp roots instead of reaching for an ambitious finish that is not quite achieved satisfactorily.

Nu
Chabon's prose is the star in this book. I just love the way he turns a sentence. That said, the plot was a bit flaky. It just didn't seem to stand up to Mr. Chabon's beautiful writing-kind of like putting a mink coat on a hog.......

Must Read
"The Yiddish Policeman's Union" raises the literary bar, vaulting into the top tier of fiction and establishing a new standard for the detective/murder/noir genre. Literary, fun, tragicomic, profound and light all at the same time; a masterful and daring act of luminosity. Chabon shines.