The Shammes Is a Patzer, but no Shlemiel

The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon.  Harper Perennial.  411 pp. $16.99 *****

I must admit that I was slightly discouraged when I discovered that this famous novel by Michael Chabon, which I’ve anticipated reading for years, concerns an imaginary reality in which the Jews were expelled from Israel in 1948, and relocated to a section of Alaska (apparently this was an obscure plan proposed by Harold Ickes in the early forties).  As the novel opens, in roughly the present day, the Jewish community is just weeks from a policy called Reversion, in which they will need to relocate to another country where they actually know someone.  They will in any case be kicked out of Alaska.  Furthermore, within this imaginary world, Chabon has written a detective story, in which a down and out police detective, separated from his wife and seriously alcoholic, discovers that a man has actually been murdered in the fleabag hotel that he’s been forced to occupy.  It’s almost an insult.  The crime took place right under his nose.

Why, I often wonder, when a writer is so adept at a basically realistic novel, does he feel compelled to create an imaginary world, and an entirely contrived situation?  What will that tell us about our own world that we need to know?

Not to worry.  The Yiddish Policeman’s Union is an absolutely brilliant novel, which sweeps you immediately into this imaginary situation and is never less than captivating.  And all these imaginary details are related.  The corpse is related to the political situation.  Also to this poor beleaguered cop—who soon becomes quite lovable—and his whole family, and the Jewish community in general.  The novel is all of a piece.  Details that seem incidental and arbitrary are vitally important.  It’s an amazing piece of work.

The corpse had been assassinated, shot in the back of the head with a gun that had been fired into a pillow, to work as a silencer.  He had registered in the Zamerhof Hotel under the name of a famous chess master, Emanuel Lasker, and left a half played chess game on a table beside his bed.  As it turns out the detective’s father, along with his uncle, had been avid and notable chess players, and had tried to get the detective—Meyer Landsman—interested in the game when he was young.  But he couldn’t stand the constant criticism from his father.  He couldn’t stand being corrected.  So he basically hates the game of chess, but has a feeling that the chess problem that the man left behind is a key to his death.  It is, but not in the way we might initially have thought.

Landsman’s sidekick in police work, Berko Shemets, is also a distant relative.  Hertz Shemets, Meyer’s uncle, sired Berko with a native woman, one of the Tlingits,  Native Americans who inhabit this part of Alaska, and eventually wound up bringing the child to live with his sister’s family, once her husband had passed on.  In other words, Berko moved in with Meyer’s family.  He is not only—in stark contrast to Meyer—happily married, he is an observant Jew, even though his father wasn’t terribly religious and the family he lived with wasn’t either.  Confronted with his dual identity, he identified with his Jewish aide.  He’s a big guy, also rather stable as compared to Meyer’s reckless alcoholic behavior.  He’s the steady one who holds his partner back.

Just to complicate matters, Meyer’s wife, Bina Gelbfish, who is also a cop, eventually comes back to the area, and is made the supervisor not only of Berko, but of her ex-husband.  She’s as vivid and memorable a character as either of them.  As a strong woman, she’s a marvel.

If all this sounds complicated in the set-up, it isn’t as you read the book.  There are lots of characters, but only a handful are vital, and each of them is so memorable that they’re easy to keep track of.  They’re also, in their own way, quite lovable.  They have their flaws and shortcomings, but you like every one of them, even when they don’t like each other.

And the writing!  The beauty of the language, and the skill with which it’s used.  I can’t remember another recent novel where the sheer skill of the use of language was so much a part of the pleasure, including a number of Yiddish words for which Chabon supplies a glossary.  I hate it when writing calls attention to itself, or tries to get fancy.  Chabon, despite the fact that he obviously labors over his prose, never does that.  Almost any paragraph would serve as an example.

“Landsman is tripping on the memory of those old chess-playing yids, hunched at the back of the Café Einstein, as he drives out to pick up Berko.  It is six-fifteen in the morning, by his watch.  By the sky, the empty boulevard, and the stone of dread lying in his belly, it is the dead of night.  Sunrise, this close to the arctic circle and the winter solstice, is still at least two hours off.”

This novel was a pure joy to read every time I picked it up.  And lest it sound like a whimsical story, it eventually comments on international politics, varieties of faith (including Jewish faith), marital problems, Native Americans, the political situation of Jews and their relationship to Palestinians, integrity in one’s life and work.  It takes place in an imaginary world  that is every bit as rich and difficult as ours.

I had some problems with Moonglow, but not with this book.  It was a pleasure from start to finish.