The Yiddish Policemen's Union

The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon (2008), 464pp.

As the title suggests, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a Jewish detective novel. It’s also a type of speculative fiction that takes its premise from an interesting and obscure footnote in American history: in 1938 Harold Ickes, FDR’s Secretary of the Interior, proposed a plan that would open up Alaska—still a territory at the time—to European Jews looking to escape Hitler’s path. This is actually true. It goes without saying that Ickes’s plan was never enacted, but TYPU speculates on what might have happened if it had been. Chabon’s story is set in the present day District of Sitka, a Jewish province on the verge of returning under the authority of the United States government in a process known as the “Great Reversion.” This prospect of the Reversion has unsettled the lives of Sitka’s Jewish residents, but none more than Meyer Landsman, a detective with the Sitka Police Department. And then adding to Landsman’s troubles—of course—is the dead body discovered in the hotel where he is living, with no clue to the victim’s or killer’s identities other than a half-played chess board on the side table.

A friend commented to me that he struggled with this book, his major complaint being that it was possibly “too Jewish.” While quickly adding that he did not intend this to be, shall we say, Anglo-centric, my friend hit on something important to understand about TYPU—this is a very Jewish book. The reader is given to understand that he or she must assume that all conversations are carried out in Yiddish, except in instances where characters are explicitly described as saying something “in American,” which in most cases is employed for the utilization of the a four letter word that rhymes with duck. Yiddish words are commonly used in the text, and the book comes replete with its own mini Yiddish dictionary in the back.

Even more than its vocabulary, the book is about the idea of home or a homeland—what, who, or where it might be and how it impacts individual and cultural identity. I heard a segment on NPR recently in which several Europeans discussed their perceptions of Americans. One comment that seems relevant here was the observation that Americans tend to be unaware of or disconnected from history, especially the historicity of their landscape. In TYPU, on the other hand, Jewish history—and geography as a way of documenting history—forms the backdrop for understanding how the characters might feel as they face the impending Reversion. The displacement of Chabon’s fictional Sitka Jews is just another movement in a diaspora that’s been ongoing for nearly three millennia.

I had previously expressed a difficulty getting started with TYPU (see here) that I now connect with the book’s tendency to start in the middle of things and work its way backward toward how they began. After a while I adjusted to and even enjoyed this technique; it added to the sense of events unraveling that the experience of reading detective fiction should be. While I did find the resolution of the mystery smart and satisfying, the end left me with perhaps the vague feeling that some minor details weren’t fully sorted out. On the whole, however, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union won me over with its earnest, likeably flawed characters, multi-layered plot, and skilled writing. I can say with candor it was all I could have hoped for from I book I bought for $2 because I thought it would look good in my bookcase. So while I might not recommend that anyone scratch off The Brothers Karamazov to put this book at the top of your list, I do think it was a fun read and one worth devoting the time to, if you have the inclination.